How the surge has worked to bring sense of security to Iraq
BAGHDAD -- Walking down Rashid Street, chatting with shopkeepers in a district of Baghdad that a year ago was a no-go zone, you wonder how the transformation happened. The shorthand explanation is the surge of 30,000 U.S. combat troops into Iraq. But a visit here shows that successful counterinsurgency is far more than a simple numbers game.
What changed things here wasn't so much the number of troops, but how they operated. They moved out of protected garrisons and onto the streets. They met secretly with insurgent leaders, fought a bloody battle against them, and then drew them into a common alliance against al-Qaida. They created a Provincial Reconstruction Team that pumped money into the district. They established Joint Security Stations with Iraqi military and police.
This campaign didn't make Iraqis love the U.S. military occupation. But it did stop the fighting and restore security to the point where people could start rebuilding their shops and businesses.
I toured the area on Jan. 26 with Adm. William Fallon, the head of Centcom. We began with a walk down Mutanabi Street, for centuries the center of the Baghdad book trade. The street was ravaged by a car bomb a few months ago, but with American loans, the booksellers and shop owners are refurbishing their stalls. Mutanabi Street is a muddy mess, thanks to a new sewer line the Americans are building. But inside one courtyard, a shopkeeper named Karim Hansh is stacking books on newly built shelves. Hansh said his current best-seller is former Coalition Provisional Authority chief Jerry Bremer's memoir -- not the answer I would have expected.
When Fallon stopped at the al-Zahawi cafe, he encountered four men, two Sunnis and two Shia, who were playing dice and drinking sweet tea. These men, who survived the years of war that have ravaged their neighborhood, summed up the change -- and how fragile it is.
"Peace. This is peace," said an art teacher named Selim Aty. When asked what the neighborhood would look like 10 years from now, his friend Karim Ahmad answered: "The future is dark. We cannot see."
The turnaround here in the Rusafa district, a mixed Sunni-Shia area, began in February 2007 with the arrival of Lt. Col. Carl Alex and the soldiers of the 1st "Red Devil" Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. They were among the first surge units to reach Baghdad.
Alex quickly made contact with an insurgent leader named Adil Mashadani. That first meeting didn't yield any agreement, and in April, Alex's soldiers joined Iraqi army units in a battle against the insurgents in the Fadhil neighborhood, north of Rashid Street. Fourteen U.S. soldiers were wounded, and scores of Iraqis on both sides were killed or injured.
"After that, they came to us and said they wanted to start reconciliation," remembers Alex. The two sides gradually worked out a truce.
The final step in the transformation came in October, after Mashadani survived a particularly macabre suicide attack -- by a 19-year-old woman carrying a 4-year-old child. The former insurgent leader sought revenge, leading his fighters in a joint battle with U.S. troops against al-Qaida. Six of Mashadani's men died, and the shared sacrifice "solidified our relationship," Alex says. By November, 11 of 13 al-Qaida cell members in Rusafa had been captured or killed. A sense of security is taking hold, but it can be broken in an instant. On the day we were walking on Rashid Street, Maj. Alan G. Rogers, an Army officer advising the Iraqi military, was killed by a roadside bomb about a mile north.
The local police chief, Brig. Gen. Latef Mohammed, sounds confident about the future -- "one step after another," he says. But he has the reassuring figure of Lt. Col. Alex standing nearby.
© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group