Page 2 of
3 Death Street: A prelude to
madness By Michael
Schwartz
Americans finally left
without securing the neighborhood, probably
because the troops were needed for a new
Baghdad-wide offensive that began at about that
time.
Soon after, the guerrillas
resurfaced and expelled the Iraqi army, thus
putting an end to all military patrols, home
invasions, arrests and detentions as well as the
sporadic fighting they had generated. Haifa Street
once again became a quiescent enemy
enclave, and - with the rise
of sectarian violence - was suspected of
"harboring terrorists" of an anti-Shi'ite variety.
As New York Times reporter Marc Santora put it:
For the past two years, [Haifa
Street] has been relatively quiet, but in recent
months, as the sectarian fighting has
intensified, Iraqi and American military
officials suspected it was being used as a base
of operations for insurgents concentrating on
the Shi'ite civilian population and American
forces.
The Americans re-enter
Haifa Street's calm was sustained even
while ferocious sectarian violence erupted
elsewhere in the capital. Ethnic cleansing, so
prevalent in other parts of the city, had not yet
invaded the neighborhood, and most of the Shi'ite
members of the community remained in their homes.
When adjoining Shi'ite neighborhoods also
calmed down, an uneasy but genuine peace settled
over the area. The foundation of this truce was no
mystery: Haifa Street militia members, freed from
defensive fights against the US military and
strengthened by their victory over the Iraqi
military, were mobilized to protect and defend the
community against Shi'ite death squads.
In
fact, all around Baghdad militias have become a
critical protection for Sunnis. As Asia Times
Online commentator Mahan Abedin put it, "The
residents widely welcome the presence of the
guerrillas as vital protection against Shi'ite
paramilitaries (often operating as Iraqi security
forces)" (The surge: Don't hold your
breath, January 30).
The work
of the local mujahideen was complemented by the
work of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army in
neighboring Shi'ite communities. Since al-Qaeda in
Mesopotamia began its car-bombing campaign against
Shi'ite civilians in late 2004, the Mehdis had
been patrolling the vast Shi'ite slum of Sadr
city, and - for the most part - successfully
preventing such suicide bombings. As the violence
spread in Baghdad, the Mehdis also spread, and
their arrival in the Shi'ite neighborhoods around
Haifa Street insured mutual deterrence on both
sides of the sectarian divide.
Until the
Americans arrived.
In early January, as
part of Bush's new strategy of attacking Shi'ite
militias, US troops entered a border area near
Haifa Street and arrested a "senior member" of the
Mehdi Army, apparently the local commander in that
part of the city. This attack seems to have
disrupted the Mehdis' protective patrols and left
Shi'ite communities in the area increasingly
vulnerable to terrorist attack. Quoting a US
military official, New York Times journalist
Santora reported:
The arrest, the official said,
created an opening for Sunni insurgents, and
they began aggressively singling out Shi'ites
who had relocated south from the neighborhood of
Kadhimiya, the official said.
These
attacks may or may not have originated in the
Haifa Street neighborhood, but when 27 Shi'ite
bodies were dumped there on January 6, this became
the occasion for the first offensive in Bush's
not-quite-yet-announced "surge". As US military
spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Scott Bleichwehl
explained, "It's an area that needed to be brought
back under Iraqi security control."
Ali
al-Dabaggh, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister
Nuri al-Maliki, was blunter: "This area must be
cleansed," he said.
Haifa Street residents
believed Dabaggh, particularly after the US
commanders mentioned the 2005 battle of Tal Afar
as the exemplar of their new strategy. In Tal
Afar, a city of about 300,000 near the Syrian
border, the entire population was moved out as
part of the pacification process.
Iraqi
military forces were sent in to Haifa Street
first, but within a couple of days, they had been
repulsed. This battle, and the growing sectarian
violence in bordering areas, shattered the fragile
foundation of sectarian peace within Haifa Street,
and Shi'ite residents soon began receiving threats
that they would be killed "if they did not leave
immediately".
Before dawn on January 9,
the Americans and Iraqis attacked in force, backed
by helicopters and jets. Washington Post reporters
Sudarsan Raghavan and Joshua Partlow offered this
description of the battle, quoting Major Jesse
Pearson and Sergeant Israel Schaeffer:
In the pre-dawn darkness, the joint
forces took control of the buildings surrounding
Tallil Square, a key target of the operation.
"We showed up in their living room for
breakfast," Pearson said.
About 7am, the
trouble began. "As soon as the sun came up, the
insurgents began shooting," he said.
"We
started taking it from all sides," Schaeffer
recalled.
From rooftops and doorways,
the gunmen fired AK-47 assault rifles and
machine-guns. Snipers also were targeting the US
and Iraqi soldiers. US soldiers started firing
back with 50-caliber machine-guns mounted on
their Stryker armored vehicles. They used TOW
missiles and Mark-19 grenade launchers. The F-15
fighter jets strafed rooftops with cannons,
while the Apache helicopters fired Hellfire
missiles.
After 11 hours of death and
devastation, the Americans prevailed and 1,000 US
and Iraqi troops began house-to-house searches,
arresting and killing suspected insurgents.
The denouement One week later,
McClatchy News reporters Nancy Youssef and Zaineb
Obeid visited Haifa Street to survey the results
of the first
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