Page 1 of
2 The fateful Battle of
Baghdad By Michael Schwartz
In early April, General David Petraeus,
the flavor of the year in American military
officers, will return to Washington to report to
President George W Bush and the Democratic
Congress on the state of post-"surge" Iraq. His
report will be upbeat, with cautious notes thrown
in, and the reception will be warm. The
Republicans will congratulate the president,
hoping that Americans will stop complaining and
finally learn to tolerate, if not love, his war;
the Democrats will be quietly unhappy because they
would like Iraq to remain a major election issue.
In the meantime, the Iraqis will continue
to endure the results of the "surge", yet another
brutal chapter in the endless war that once
promised them liberation.
Over the course
of five years, Baghdad, the capital city of Iraq,
has been transformed from a metropolis into an
urban desert of
half-destroyed buildings
and next to no public services, dotted by
partially deserted, mutually hostile mini-ghettos
that used to be neighborhoods, surrounded by
cement barriers reminiscent of Medieval
fortifications. The most prominent of these
ghettos is the heavily fortified
city-inside-a-city dubbed the Green Zone, where
Iraq's most fearsome militia, the United States
military, is headquartered. It is governed by the
Americans and by the American-sponsored Iraqi
government, headed by Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki.
The remaining ghettos, large
and small, are governed by local militias, most of
them sworn enemies of the United States and the
Maliki regime. In the expanding Shi'ite areas of
the capital, the local guardians are often members
of the Mahdi Army, the militia of cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr that has opposed the American presence
since the occupation began. In the shrinking
Sunni-controlled parts of the city, the local
guardians are usually members of the Sahwa forces
(the "Awakening" or, in US military jargon,
"Concerned Local Citizens"). The Americans have
ceded to them control of their cement-enclosed
domains as long as they discontinue insurgent
attacks elsewhere.
As Baghdad citizens
continue to flee the threat of violence, ethnic
cleansing, and economic destitution, the city
waits - whether for a definitive military
confrontation or some less violent change that
will bring its long ordeal to an end.
How
did this all come to be?
Ethnic
cleansing arrives in Baghdad When the
American occupation of Baghdad began in April
2003, about half of the city's neighborhoods had
no particular ethnic character. In late 2004,
however, thousands of Sunnis, driven out of
Fallujah and other insurgent strongholds by
American offensives, began arriving in Baghdad. In
increasingly crowded neighborhoods, ethnic
friction rose, as did Sunni anger at a
Shi'ite-dominated government that sent its troops
into battle beside American ones.
Sunni
militias, originally organized to deal with local
crime (after the Americans dismantled the Iraqi
police force) began to turn on Shi'ite residents
in some of the capital's 200 mixed neighborhoods.
Eventually, scattered acts of harassment were
transformed into systematic campaigns of
expulsion, justified by the housing needs of a
rapidly growing multitude of Sunni refugees, and
as retaliation for government-supported assaults
on Sunni cities. During 2005, the first stream of
displaced Shi'ite began arriving in Baghdad's
vast, already overcrowded Shi'ite slum of Sadr
City and in the Shi'ite cities of southern Iraq.
In January 2006, the bombing of the
revered Shi'ite shrine, the Golden Dome mosque in
Samarra, triggered sweeping Shi'ite reprisals
against Sunni communities. In the capital, a
struggle for the dominance of mixed neighborhoods
began. Deadly battles between Shi'ite and Sunni
militias featured all weapons and methods of
slaughter available, including car bombs and death
squads. Whichever side expelled the other,
minority groups including Christians, Kurds and
Palestinians found themselves unwelcome and began
to flee (or die). Ethnic cleansing now lay at the
center of the spiraling violence in Baghdad.
The Americans enter the battle
In May 2006, American forces first joined
"the battle for Baghdad" in a significant way.
With the initiation of Operation Together Forward,
the US military began transferring combat brigades
to the capital in an attempt to take control of
Sunni and Shi'ite militia strongholds.
This strategy, however, quickly proved
itself ineffective. In August 2006, the New York
Times reported that sectarian violence was
"spiraling out of control". By autumn, the number
of insurgents attacks in Baghdad had increased by
26%, and violent deaths reported at the city
morgue had quadrupled. The seeming paradox of an
American pacification campaign generating more
violence can be explained by looking at the
mechanics of the offensive.
Despite their
involvement in ethnic violence, the Sunni and
Shi'ite militias that the Americans sought to root
out were also the forces of law and order in
Baghdad's otherwise lawless neighborhoods. They
directed traffic, arrested and/or punished common
criminals, and mediated disputes. They also
protected neighborhoods from outsiders, including
American or Iraqi soldiers, suicide bombers, death
squads and criminal gangs.
Before the
Americans entered the fray, the militia
strongholds had been the least vulnerable to
sectarian attack. After all, their streets were
saturated with armed men on the lookout for their
enemies. Ethnic violence was largely taking place
in contested mixed neighborhoods.
In
entering these strongholds, the US military won
tactical victories, chasing surviving militia
members off the streets or even out of
neighborhoods, which, without their local police
and defense forces, were suddenly vulnerable to
sectarian attack.
This vulnerability was
all too vividly illustrated in Sadr City, the
stronghold of the Sadrist movement. As the home
base of the Mahdi Army, this city-within-a-city
had not experienced a car bomb attack in two years
until American troops sealed it off, set up check
points at key entrance and exit points, and began
patrols aimed at hunting down Mahdi Army leaders
they suspected of participating in death squads
and of kidnapping an American soldier. Local
residents told New York Times reporter Sabrina
Tavernise that the operation had "forced Mahdi
Army members who were patrolling the streets to
vanish". Soon after, the first car bombs were
detonated.
The violence reached a
crescendo in November 2006, when a coordinated set
of five car bombs killed at least 215 and wounded
257. Qusai Abdul-Wahab, a Sadrist member of
Parliament, spoke for many residents of the
community when he told the Associated Press that
the "occupation forces are fully responsible for
these acts".
Such events generated immense
bitterness among Shi'ites, who took them as proof
that the Americans and the Iraqi government were
concerned only with attacking the Mahdis, not
suppressing jihadi attacks. This encouraged their
support of the death squads, which sought to exact
retribution on the Sunni communities they believed
were harboring the bombers.
The Americans
had also facilitated these retaliatory attacks.
Sunni insurgents in the Baghdad suburbs of Balad
and Duluiyah, for example, were suspected of
slaughtering 17 Shi'ite workers in a particularly
well publicized instance of sectarian brutality.
American troops and their Iraqi allies cordoned
off the two districts and invaded the
neighborhoods. The invading forces quickly
silenced the insurgent militias, leaving the
streets unpatrolled. Soon after, Shi'ite death
squads made their appearance. Some of them had
apparently been organized inside (Shi'ite) Iraqi
military units that accompanied the Americans into
the Sunni communities. According to the Washington
Post, "A police officer in Duluiyah, Captain Qaid
al-Azawi, accused American forces of standing by
in Balad while [Shi'ite] militiamen in police cars
and police uniforms slaughtered Sunnis." In the
face of these attacks, large numbers of residents
began to flee.
And so the cycle of
slaughter escalated on all sides, while
neighborhoods began to be emptied of the members
of whichever sect was losing ground locally. As
with many other developments in the war, this
unmitigated disaster for Baghdad residents was
only a partial one for the American occupation.
For the Bush administration, the storm of violence
in the Iraqi capital had at least one silver
lining: the occupation's two main enemies were now
at each other's throats. As an American
intelligence official told investigative reporter
Seymour Hersh, "The White House believes that if
American troops stay in Iraq long enough - with
enough troops - the bad guys will end up killing
each other."
The 'surge' As
Operation Together Forward continued, intense
violence spread across the city. American combat
fatalities reached a two-year high of 113 in
November 2006, not in itself surprising since
American troops were entering militia strongholds.
Other statistics, however, defied American
expectations.
The number of insurgent
attacks, which should have declined, increased
dramatically. A little under 100 a day through the
first half of 2006, they jolted up to 140 a day
soon after the offensive started, and then hovered
between 160 and 180 for the rest of the year. The
number of lethal bombings, a main target of the
offensive, also rose.
According to US
military statistics published by the Brookings
Institution, in late 2005 they rose from under 20
to over 40 per month, and then started upward
again as the American offensive began in the late
spring of 2006, reaching 69 in December of that
year. Deaths associated with these bombings soared
from under 500 per month in early 2006 to almost
1,000 in the second half of the year. Population
displacement also reached new heights - especially
in communities where the Americans were most
active. In response, the Americans sought a
new plan for pacifying Baghdad. It would become
known as the "surge". Rather than altering the
fundamental premises of Operation Together
Forward, it diagnosed the ferocious response as
evidence that insufficient force had been applied.
Now, tens of thousands of new American
troops would be poured into Baghdad, and to
Operation Together Forward's strategy would be
added tactics from the 2004 assault on the Sunni
city of Fallujah. Each target area would now first
be surrounded to prevent insurgents from escaping.
Then, once the battle was joined, overwhelming
firepower would be brought to bear. As Captain
Paul Fowler had explained to Boston Globe reporter
Anne Barnard during the Fallujah fighting, ''The
only way to root out [the insurgents] is to
destroy everything in your path."
As in
Fallujah, the new "surge" plan also called for the
Americans to remain in the community to prevent
the insurgents from returning and to supervise the
Iraqi army units they had led into battle.
The battle of Haifa Street Even
before the surge strategy was announced by Bush,
even before the new troops arrived, the first
battle was launched. Before dawn on January 9,
2007, the Americans and Iraqis attacked a Sunni
insurgent stronghold on Haifa Street just outside
the Green Zone. Washington Post reporters Sudarsan
Raghavan and Joshua Partlow described the kind of
firepower brought to bear once the battle for the
street began:
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, 1,000 American and Iraqi troops were
able to begin house-to-house searches, arresting
or killing suspected insurgents.
One week
later, McClatchy News reporters Nancy Youssef and
Zaineb Obeid visited Haifa Street. They found
massive destruction, omnipresent US military
forces locking down virtually all activity,
widespread suffering among residents, and ongoing
fighting. Elements of the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi
army had already begun a systematic campaign to
push the Sunni majority from the neighborhood:
A 44-year-old Haifa Street resident,
who asked to be identified only as Abu Mohammed
for security reasons, said that only three or
four [Sunni] families of an estimated 60
families remained on his block. He said no
vehicles were allowed to drive through the area
and that there was no electricity, kerosene or
running water. [US] Snipers have taken positions
on the rooftops.
To the fleeing
Sunnis, it seemed the Americans were sponsoring
ethnic cleansing. A resident commented: "The
Americans are doing nothing, as if they are
backing the militias. If this plan continues for
one more week, I don't think you will find one
family left on Haifa Street."
By the end
of January, before the first "surge"
reinforcements even arrived, the battle of Haifa
Street was over. A large contingent of American
soldiers would remain in the area, while a vast
cement
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
