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Insurgency
Hotbed: In Ramadi, Fetid Quarters and Unrelenting Battles
By Dexter Filkins
The New York Times
Wednesday 05 July 2006
The
provincial Government Center in Ramadi is defended by the Third Battalion,
Eighth Marine Regiment.
Ramadi,
Iraq:
The Government Center in the middle of this devastated
town resembles a fortress on the wild edge of some frontier: it is sandbagged,
barricaded, full of men ready to shoot, surrounded by rubble and enemies
eager to get inside.
The American marines here live eight to a room,
rarely shower for lack of running water and defecate in bags that are
taken outside and burned.
The threat of snipers is ever present; the marines
start running the moment they step outside. Daytime temperatures hover
around 120 degrees; most foot patrols have been canceled because of
the risk of heatstroke.
The food is tasteless, the windows boarded up.
The place reeks of urine and too many bodies pressed too close together
for too long.
"Hey, can you get somebody to clean the
toilet on the second floor?" one marine yelled to another from
his office. "I can smell it down here."
And the casualties are heavy. Asked about the
wounded under his command, Capt. Andrew Del Gaudio, 30, of the Bronx,
rattled off a few.
"Let's see, Lance Corporal Tussey, shot
in the thigh.
"Lance Corporal Zimmerman, shot in the
leg.
"Lance Corporal Sardinas, shrapnel, hit
in the face.
"Lance Corporal Wilson, shrapnel in the
throat."
"That's all I can think of right now,"
the captain said.
So it goes in Ramadi, the epicenter of the Iraqi
insurgency and the focus of a grinding struggle between the American
forces and the guerrillas.
In three years here the Marine Corps and the
Army have tried nearly everything to bring this provincial capital of
400,000 under control. Nothing has worked.
Now American commanders are trying something
new.
Instead of continuing to fight for the downtown,
or rebuild it, they are going to get rid of it, or at least a very large
part of it.
They say they are planning to bulldoze about
three blocks in the middle of the city, part of which has been reduced
to ruins by the fighting, and convert them into a Green Zone, a version
of the fortified and largely stable area that houses the Iraqi and American
leadership in Baghdad.
The idea is to break the bloody stalemate in
the city by ending the struggle over the battle-scarred provincial headquarters
that the insurgents assault nearly every day. The Government Center
will remain, but the empty space around it will deny the guerrillas
cover to attack. "We'll turn it into a park," said Col. Sean
MacFarland.
Ramadi, a largely Sunni Arab city, is regarded
by American commanders as the key to securing Anbar Province, now the
single deadliest place for American soldiers in Iraq. Many neighborhoods
here are only nominally controlled by the Americans, offering sanctuaries
for guerrillas.
While the focus in Baghdad and other large Iraqi
cities may be reconciliation or the political process, here it is still
war. Sometimes the Government Center is assaulted by as many as 100
insurgents at a time.
Last week a midnight gun battle between a group
of insurgents and American marines lasted two hours and ended only when
the Americans dropped a laser-guided bomb on an already half-destroyed
building downtown. Six marines were wounded; it was unclear what happened
to the insurgents.
"We go out and kill these people,"
said Captain Del Gaudio, the commander here. "I define success
as continuing to kill the enemy to allow the government to work and
for the Iraqi Army to take over."
Government Mostly in Name
That day seems a long
way off. The Iraqi government exists here in little more than name.
Last week about $7 million disappeared from the Rafidain Bank - most
of the bank's deposits - right under the nose of an American observation
post next door. An Iraqi police officer was shot in the face and dumped
in the road, his American ID card stuck between his fingers.
The governor of the province, Mamoun Sami Rashid
al-Alwani, still goes to work here under an American military escort.
But many of the province's senior officials deserted him after the kidnapping
and beheading of his secretary in May.
The previous governor was assassinated, as was
the chairman of the provincial council, Khidir Abdel Jabar Abbas, in
April. At a meeting of the provincial cabinet last week, only six of
36 senior officials showed up.
"The terrorists want to keep Anbar people
out of the government," said Taha Hameed Mokhlef, the director
general for highways, who went into hiding last month when his face
appeared on an American-backed television station here showing him in
his job. He has since re-emerged. "My friends told me that the
terrorists were planning to kill me, so I went to Jordan for a while,"
he said.
The Iraqi police patrol the streets in only
a handful of neighborhoods, the ones closest to the American base. In
the slow-motion offensive that has been unfolding, in which the Americans
have been gradually clearing individual neighborhoods, nearly all of
the fighting has been done by American marines and soldiers, not the
Iraqi Army.
The 800-member Third Battalion, Eighth Marine
Regiment, which until recently was responsible for holding most of the
city on its own, has lost 11 marines since arriving in March. Commanders
declined to disclose the number of wounded. Over all in Iraq the number
of American wounded in action is roughly seven times the number killed.
Be Polite, and Ready to Kill
One of the "habits of mind" drilled
into the marines from posters hung up inside: "Be polite, be professional
and have a plan to kill everyone you meet."
The humor runs dark, too. On a sheet of paper
hung up in the Government Center, marines wrote down suggestions for
their company's T-shirt once they go home. Most are unprintable, but
here is one that got a lot of laughs: "Kilo Company: Killed more
people than cancer."
The marines at the Government Center have held
on, but the fighting has transformed the area into an ocean of ruin.
The sentries posted on the rooftops have blasted the larger buildings
nearby so many times that they have given them nicknames: Battleship
Gray, Swiss Cheese. The buildings are among those that will be bulldozed
under the Green Zone plan.
"Aesthetically it will be an improvement,"
Lt. Col. Stephen Neary said.
Holding the place has cost blood. A roadside
bomb killed three marines and a sailor on patrol here in March. Another
marine was shot through the forehead by a sniper, just beneath the line
of his helmet.
The number of Iraqi casualties - insurgents
or civilians - is unknown and impossible to determine in the chaotic
conditions.
As in the rest of Iraq, the insurgents' most
lethal weapon is the homemade bomb. The bombs virtually cover Ramadi:
an American military map on display here showed about 50 places where
roadside bombs had recently been discovered. Two weeks ago a marine
sniper was killed by a homemade bomb when he ran from a house where
he had been spotted.
Bombs Nearly Everywhere
Sometimes it
feels as if the bombs are everywhere. On a single hourlong patrol one
night last week, a group of marines spotted two likely bombs planted
in an area that is regularly inspected, meaning that they had been laid
within the previous few days.
One was hidden under a pile of trash. Another
was thought to be under a pair of gasoline cans that had been set in
the middle of the road. The marines spied them with their night vision
glasses; without them, it is likely that the Humvees would have run
over them.
Indeed, the marines often manage to spot bombs
- covered in trash, made of metal and wires - in streets that are themselves
covered in trash, metal and wires.
"Right there, look at that," Gunnery
Sgt. John Scroggins said from the passenger seat of his Humvee, pointing
to the street.
And there it was: a thin metal tube, with a
long green wire protruding and sticking into the pavement, almost certainly
a bomb. The pipes typically contain what is called a pressure trigger,
which closes an electrical circuit - and detonates a bomb - when crushed
by a vehicle. The Humvee was about two feet away when the marines spotted
it.
Some of the marines have been hit by so many
bombs that they almost shrug when they go off. On Sunday a Humvee carrying
four marines on a patrol dropped off a reporter and photographer for
The New York Times at the Government Center. The Humvee rumbled 100
yards down the road and struck a bomb. No one was killed, and the marines
returned to base as if they had encountered nothing more serious than
a fender bender.
"It's my fifth," said Cpl. Jonathan
Nelson, 21, of Brooklyn. "It's the best feeling in the world to
get by one and live - like bungee jumping."
In the end, whether the Americans can succeed
in bringing security to Ramadi will depend on how much support they
can draw from the Iraqis.
Many Iraqi civilians have spent the last three
years caught between the two warring camps, too afraid to throw their
lot with one group or the other. It is, by nearly all accounts, a miserable
situation, with individual Iraqis often simultaneously under threat
by insurgents and under suspicion by the Americans.
Many complain of bad treatment and unjustified
killings by both sides. That civilians have been killed here is beyond
dispute, but the circumstances are nearly impossible to verify.
Qais Mohammed, 46, owned a dress shop across
the street from the Government Center but moved away when the Americans
set up and the fighting began. Then a mortar shell hit his home and
he moved with his wife and 10 children to a refugee camp outside the
city.
Fed up with conditions at the camp, Mr. Mohammed
and his family moved back to the city not long ago, into a seedy little
place much reduced from the comfort he once knew.
"We do not want gold, or dresses or the
food of kings," Mr. Mohammed said. "We want to live without
fear for our lives and our kids. These days neither your tribe nor the
police can protect you. It is the jungle law."
The marines say their highest priority is winning
over people like Mr. Mohammed, even at the cost of letting insurgents
escape. Indeed, the marines seem far less aggressive than they were
during their earlier tours here, when the priority was killing insurgents.
Now they seem much more interested in capturing the loyalty of the residents.
Civilians in the Middle
Iraqi
civilians, by and large, did not seem to fear the American marines as
they passed on patrol. When the Americans rumbled past, the Iraqis often
continued whatever they were doing: talking, sitting, standing, eating.
The children held up their hands for soccer balls, and occasionally
a marine would toss one to a child.
"Football! Football!" the children
cried.
"The people are in the middle, between
us and the insurgents," Lance Cpl. Sean Patton said as he wheeled
his Humvee through a neighborhood downtown. (He says he is a great-great-grandnephew
of Gen. George S. Patton.) "Whoever is friendly, they will help."
A few moments later, Corporal Patton and his
men were reminded of just how bewildering this city could be. As he
turned slowly down a street, all the Iraqis milling about, maybe 30
people in all, suddenly disappeared.
"They're going to hit us," the corporal
said, convinced that the crowd had been tipped off to the presence of
a bomb or an impending attack.
When the Americans left the street, the Iraqis
returned.
Corporal Patton turned onto the street again,
and the people vanished a second time.
"We're going to get hit," he said,
bracing himself.
The attack never came.
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