U.S. raids test Iraqis' patience
By Kirsten Scharnberg
Tribune correspondent
June 15, 2005
MOSUL, Iraq -- In the uncertainty created by Iraq's insurgency, anyone
might be the enemy.
So with weapons drawn, a dozen U.S. soldiers charged down the ramps of
their armored Stryker vehicles, roughly yanked three Iraqi students out
of a car by their necks and shoved their faces into a nearby wall.
"What's your name? Where are you going? Don't lie to me!" Lt. Col. Erik
Kurilla shouted at the first teenager.
"To my house to study," the trembling young man answered. "We have
exams next week."
Kurilla questioned each of the young men separately, twisting their
shirt collars around their throats throughout each interrogation. But
the students soon were deemed harmless; everyone had a current
university ID and told the same story.
As abruptly as they had
appeared, the soldiers from the Army's 1st Battalion of the 24th
Infantry Regiment got back into their Strykers to leave. As the ramps
clanked shut, the wide-eyed young students stood on the sidewalk, their
vehicle stopped in the middle of the street blocking carloads of
gawking Iraqis in both directions.
On the receiving end of the
U.S. military's increasingly aggressive patrol posture are many
apparently law-abiding Iraqis--the college students in Mosul getting
shoved face-first into a wall; the retired English teacher in Baiji
thrilled to practice his language skills on U.S. soldiers until they
barge into his home and search under his beds; the homemaker in Tikrit
who begs soldiers with words they don't understand to take off their
muddy boots before walking across her carefully maintained pastel
carpets.
Many Iraqis complain that their interactions with
Americans are frustrating and sometimes downright degrading
experiences, that searches feel arbitrary and civil rights have become
secondary.
During dozens of raids and patrols in various hot
spots in northern Iraq and the volatile region known as the Sunni
Triangle over the past two weeks, one result was clear: For every
insurgent killed or captured, far more Iraqis were searched,
questioned, inconvenienced, manhandled, and detained and later released.
Smiles and fury
Some Iraqis take the treatment better than others--one beaming woman
politely told soldiers her house had been searched four times since
February, even as her sobbing children huddled around her in fear; one
man offered an entire squad of soldiers cold Pepsis after they had
messily rummaged through his home. But others are furious and glare at
the young soldiers, telling them that Americans are the real terrorists
because of the way they storm through civilian homes without cause.
"The soldiers should not just enter every home in a neighborhood,
looking for bad people with no evidence," said Sali Hamdon Malah Alwo,
a community leader in Mosul with ties to virtually every ethnic group.
"This is not right; this is not freedom. It is not the way to make the
good people of Iraq grow to trust and like the Americans."
It
is no small thing how the average Iraqi citizen regards the American
soldiers they encounter on the streets or at their front doors. The
U.S. military is increasingly relying on civilians to side with
coalition forces over the insurgents, to report suspicious people, to
decline to give haven to the insurgents. And the military cannot afford
to become so hated by the local populace that it ends up creating a new
crop of insurgents.
"Some days you wonder if you've rounded up
one bad guy but created 10 others," a tired Kurilla acknowledged in his
Minnesota Vikings-decorated command post the night after stopping the
three students in Mosul. "That's the balancing act we're left with at
this point. . . .
"But I've seen too many of my boys die out
there, too many of them bleed out or get burned beyond recognition.
I've seen too many limbs blown off. I can't do my work wearing kid
gloves because if I do, it'll get soldiers killed."
Kurilla's
battalion is an example of how the nature of the insurgency has changed
the approach of U.S. soldiers on the ground. When his unit arrived in
Mosul last fall, Kurilla often was a walking ambassador of American
goodwill. A gregarious man, he would joke with residents that he was
going to buy himself "a little flat in old Mosul."
But now,
after 11 soldiers were killed and some 140 wounded, Kurilla is
unapologetically aggressive on the streets of this city, which has
remained a hideout for insurgents. Patrol strategies he and his
infantrymen employ can be linked to their experiences.
For
example, when soldiers enter any home in Mosul, they do so with weapons
drawn, running in teams throughout the house to clear each room. They
learned the hard way--after an insurgent suddenly appeared from a
balcony to shoot and kill a young soldier earlier this spring--that
even in an apparently welcoming home there may be those who will do you
harm.
Street patrols rely on the same experience. The day
before Kurilla pulled over the college students, he and his soldiers
stopped another car. The two young men in it--who like the students did
not appear suspicious--turned out to be running weapons for a local
insurgent cell; their trunk held guns, ammunition and ski masks.
"The tricky part in any insurgency is telling good guys from bad guys,
isn't it?" Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez said during a recent patrol
through a fruit market in Mosul where merchants have been known to hide
guns beneath their wares. "Maybe one guy is really just selling
watermelons. Maybe the next guy has weapons hidden at the bottom of
that wagon full of watermelons."
With the death toll for U.S.
service personnel in Iraq now over 1,700, military commanders have
improved methods of safeguarding their troops, even if those methods do
not always win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi populace.
For
example, as a convoy of vehicles travels a major highway between
restive Baiji and Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, the gunner in
the lead Humvee angrily motions for every Iraqi vehicle to pull over so
they can speed through. Families, bus drivers and truckers attempting
to make their deliveries stop their vehicles at gunpoint so the convoy
can pass, then repeat the process five minutes later.
The
delays may annoy Iraqis, but troops have good reasons for their
actions. Convoys prefer to roll down the center of the two-lane highway
because of the prevalence of roadside bombs. (More than 1,100 have been
detonated or discovered around Tikrit since February.) In addition,
frequent car bombs have forced soldiers to treat every oncoming vehicle
as if it might be carrying an explosive.
Changing attitudes
Some soldiers are better than others at shifting from an aggressive
posture to a more friendly one. Capt. Paul Carron, the Bravo Company
commander in Kurilla's battalion, recently pulled over at gunpoint a
dump truck that was driving erratically through a field.
When
the truck's owner explained that his son, who was learning to drive a
stick shift, had been at the wheel, Carron looked at the enormous truck
and said, "I feel sorry for him to have to learn on that thing." Five
minutes later, after Carron explained to the father that the truck was
stopped because the field was a suspected meeting spot for insurgents,
everyone was laughing about the travails of fathers teaching sons to
drive.
But other times Iraqis get little explanation for
soldiers' behavior. Some nights in Mosul, teams of soldiers would set
up on the rooftops of homes to survey suspected insurgent hot spots.
They would wake entire families and gather everyone under armed guard
into one room for as long as the operation lasted.
Despite such tactics, soldiers often express optimism that they can win
over the Iraqi people.
"What other army would go back the day after a raid and talk to the
neighbors, pay for any damages that happened, explain that these
searches are in order to keep their city safe?" asked Capt. Jeff
VanAntwerp.
But many Iraqis have a lingering bad taste in their mouths as Americans
leave their homes.
On a recent raid in Baiji, soldiers cordoned off dozens of homes as
they tried to find the residence of a reputed insurgent financier. They
stormed into the home of an elderly couple where the woman had just
scrubbed all the floors. The soldiers had been walking down streets
flooded with raw sewage, and by the time they left the home without
finding anything, every floor was filthy with sludge.
As the
soldiers moved on to the next house--eventually finding their
target--the old woman sat next to a bucket of dirty water and wept.