Great Divide

**Shek** · 04-06-2007, 14:05 PM

An interesting article. An urban twist to the strategic hamlet concept, although the purpose is towards reducing the cycle of sectarian violence instead of keeping insurgents out.

Quote:

In Iraq, an Officer's Answer To Violence: Build a Wall - WSJ.com

GREAT DIVIDE
In Iraq, an Officer's Answer To Violence: Build a Wall
Col. Peterson CreatesA Gated Community; Body Count Declines
By GREG JAFFE
April 5, 2007; Page A1

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The lower-middle-class neighborhoods that Lt. Col. Jeff Peterson's troops patrol have been the epicenter of Iraq's civil war for most of the past year. "Every issue facing Baghdad writ large is in our area," he says.

In recent weeks, Col. Peterson has tried a controversial approach to calming his sector. As Sunnis and Shiites have separated into their own neighborhoods, he has resisted the urge to encourage reconciliation or even dialogue. Instead, he has erected massive concrete barriers between the sects.

His vision is for a series of small, homogenous, gated communities, each consisting of a two-block square. Each would be built around a market, a mosque and a generator. "The goal is to provide the neighborhoods with a chance to protect themselves, without having to rely on coalition forces, the Iraqi government or the militias," he says.

How he got to that point -- after months of bloodshed and failed experiments -- illustrates a lot about both the possibilities and limitations of the U.S. vision for Iraq.

Currently, the U.S. strategy for stabilizing Iraq is built around getting Iraqis to reconcile and support the democratically elected, Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. It's a classic approach to fighting an insurgency, in which an outside power works to strengthen a friendly, albeit weak, government. The hope is that with help, the government will eventually win the backing of the people by providing security and meeting essential needs. Once insurgents are cut off from support among the population, they will be relatively easy to crush. That's the premise of President Bush's surge strategy, built around bolstering support for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government.

The problem, say some commanders, is that they aren't fighting an insurgency in Iraq anymore. Today, they are trying to stop a civil war between feuding Sunnis and Shiites. "At times I have been tempted to call it a counter-civil war or counter-sectarian fight," Col. Peterson says.

This isn't just an academic point. In a civil war, building up the government and its security forces may be counterproductive, serving only to ratchet up the killing. Defusing a civil war depends on stopping everyone from fighting.

"If you are given the mission to stop hatred, how do you do that?" asks Brig. Gen. John Campbell, an assistant commander overseeing all U.S. forces in Baghdad.

The difficult mission has led military officials to try some unusual tactics. In an effort to reduce retaliatory attacks on locals, some U.S. commanders say they will hold off raiding a Sunni insurgent cell until they have intelligence on a Shiite cell of equal size in an adjoining neighborhood. U.S. commanders have even coined a new term for this tactic: "balanced targeting."

Success Story

Senior military officials in Iraq give mid-level commanders, like Col. Peterson, wide latitude in their sectors. They point to Col. Peterson as one of their success stories. "Gating off a Sunni neighborhood is not our idea of a free society," Gen. Campbell says. But in some neighborhoods it may be the only way to stop the killing, he concedes.

Col. Peterson, the 42-year-old son of an Army chaplain, has a shy, almost bemused grin, and an informal manner with his troops. He was working on finishing his doctoral thesis and getting ready to take over the economics department at West Point when he was chosen to command a battalion headed to Iraq.

When Col. Peterson's 500-soldier squadron arrived in Iraq last summer, he was told his top priority was to assist Iraqi troops in restoring order.

His squadron was based in southern Baghdad, where the U.S. military had little presence. In the weeks before his arrival, a radical Sunni group known as the Omar Brigade and the Shiite Mahdi militia had begun to battle for territory, targeting locals. In the typical sectarian murder, masked assassins would speed into a neighborhood, grab a resident, shoot him in the head, and then dump the body in a residential street. "The murders were designed to send a message about which side was dominating and which side was safe in a particular area," Col. Peterson says.

Col. Peterson's unit was partnered with an all-Shiite battalion of about 400 national police commandos. Their area, consisting of about 415,000 residents, is dominated by a large Sunni neighborhood and a densely packed Shiite enclave called Abu Dasheer.

It quickly became clear, he says, that one of his biggest problems was his partner, the national police. Sunni residents "feared the national police," Col. Peterson says. In some cases, he even believed that rogue police troops were helping the radical Shiite Mahdi militia target his unit and local Sunnis.

The animosity between Sunnis and Shiites dates to a seventh-century leadership struggle following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. More recently, the Sunnis, who are a minority in Iraq, dominated the top positions in Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship. Today, many Shiites are determined to exact revenge for decades of Sunni oppression.

In early October, the national police began to get into gun battles at the local Sunni mosques. They called for help from the U.S. troops, who initially joined the fight. But the police commanders could never clearly explain how or why the fights started, says Col. Peterson. "The battles were always with a Sunni mosque; never a Shiite mosque," he says. They always began when U.S. forces weren't around.

Drastic Action

"What have I gotten myself into?" he recalls thinking. "I felt as though I had been co-opted into their sectarian agenda."

After the third such battle, Col. Peterson decided to take drastic action.

On Oct. 8, he used massive concrete barriers to wall off dozens of streets in the Sunni district, home to about 120,000 people, so there were only two entrances. Col. Peterson then told the national police troops -- whom he was supposed to be mentoring -- that they weren't allowed into the area unless they were accompanied by his soldiers.

"It was a pretty big step backwards in terms of cooperation," he says.

After a few days, violence began to drop. In October, his troops discovered 54 dead bodies in their sector. In November, the number was 43. Locked out of the big Sunni neighborhood, the national police concentrated on patrolling the largely Shiite district of Abu Dasheer -- where they were welcomed by the people as an alternative to the radical Shiite militias that had been providing security. Col. Peterson concentrated his forces inside the Sunni isolation zone.

The lesson: "Self segregation might be a necessary interim step to reducing sectarian killing," he says.

The U.S. strategy for dealing with sectarian tension is focused on reconciliation and sharing power. Last month, Mr. Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, encouraged Sunnis and Shiites who had been driven from their neighborhoods by sectarian bloodletting to go back to their homes. He is promising cash payments and support from the largely Shiite Iraqi army and police forces to speed the resettlement.

Shortly after Mr. Maliki's televised address, Col. Peterson saw how disruptive such a policy might be in his area. He met with leaders of the now almost exclusively Shiite district of Abu Dasheer. The area had once been home to a sizable number of Sunnis, but most have been driven out by Shiite militias issuing death threats.

At the meeting, Sheikh Sattar, a Shiite leader of the neighborhood council, insisted that only three Sunni families had been driven from Abu Dasheer. His voice brimming with anger, he said that the three families were responsible for the deaths of 400 Shiites, including his son. The other Sunnis left willingly, selling their homes and stores to Shiites, he said.

"They all say that no Sunnis left Abu Dasheer" against their will, Col. Peterson says. "It is a denial of reality. But it is the party line."

After the meeting, Col. Peterson said prospects for any real reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites were dim because of so much mistrust and hatred. Overcoming differences is probably a "generational undertaking," he said.

Little Faith

There is also little faith among the people in the Iraqi government, which in 2006 spent only $29 billion of its $40 billion annual budget. Most of that went to salaries instead of services, say senior U.S. officials. In Col. Peterson's area, various groups -- including mosques, militias and insurgents -- have rushed to fill the void, offering security or even food and fuel. These groups don't have to do much to win support. "They just have to do better than the government. Anything above zero is a better alternative," Col. Peterson says.

By January, Col. Peterson concluded he couldn't wait for the Iraqi government to provide basic services. Nor was it realistic to think local residents would reconcile and share power any time soon. He began to search for a different approach, relying as much on his education as an economist as his training as a military commander.

"How do we give people control over their neighborhoods so they take responsibility for what happens there?" he recalls thinking.

About the same time, some Shiites asked one of his lieutenants if they could form a neighborhood-watch group to protect themselves. The group members weren't allowed to carry guns. But they did wear badges and when they spotted outsiders in their area, they could notify U.S. or Iraqi forces using cellphones.

At first, the neighborhood watch seemed to work. Then, leadership of the group was taken over by the radical Shiite Mahdi militia. "If we were not sitting in the area, there would be gunfire from sunup to sundown," says Capt. Adam Grim, the company commander in that area. In February, Col. Peterson detained eight of the watch members and charged them with participating in the murder and intimidation of Sunnis.

Analyzing the Failure

After the arrest, Col. Peterson analyzed why the watch had failed. He concluded that the neighborhood they were overseeing was too big. He hadn't controlled access to the area. Most important, he felt he hadn't given the neighborhood anything worth defending, such as a better quality of life.

The failure helped give birth to a new approach. He began to refurbish a market in the Sunni district he had blocked off. He noticed that as soon as he installed concrete barriers around the market to prevent car bombs, people flocked to the once-deserted stores. He then walled off a two-block-by- two-block-square area of homes around the market so there was only one way in and out of the neighborhood.

"That seemed to be about the right size that allowed the community to handle its own security and quickly spot outsiders," he says.

Finally, he bought the market manager a 450-kilowatt generator -- enough to power the 29 stores in the market and about 100 houses. Today, the Sunni manager, Khalid Ishmael, sells power to the stores and the houses in the gated community. The Americans help him buy fuel. He handles the maintenance and sets his own rates -- enough to turn a small profit. He has nothing but contempt for the Iraqi government and the national police in the area. "They will kill us without the American forces to stop them," he says.

Many residents feel the same way. But the area is fairly free of insurgent and militia groups, according to Col. Peterson and locals. In contrast to most Iraqi neighborhoods, where trash is piled on median strips, neighbors in the gated community collect their refuse and burn it in an abandoned lot. Mr. Ishmael keeps a handwritten log of his power customers in a small notebook. He and his staff of two take turns sleeping nights on a filthy cot next to the generator, to protect it from thieves. The streets and the market bustle with women and children.

"I want to get to the point where people say, 'When are you going to build one of those gated communities for me?'" says Col. Peterson. "When we leave here, I'd like to have a string of them."

Although life has improved for many Iraqis in Col. Peterson's sector, it is far from safe or stable. In February, his unit discovered 25 bodies, down from 39 in January. In many areas, more than half the houses are abandoned. Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods exchange mortar and rocket fire on an almost daily basis, often wounding and killing innocent locals.

On a recent morning, Capt. Douglas Graham, one of Col. Peterson's company commanders, was heading out on a foot patrol through the gated community when he heard an explosion of gunfire. A national police unit was traveling on the nearby main highway when an insurgent sniper opened fire on them from a neighborhood to the north. The police stopped traffic in both directions, and, for the next hour, blasted away at that neighborhood, as well as Col. Peterson's gated community.

Capt. Graham tried to tell the Iraqi troops to cease fire. When that failed, he had his interpreter call the brigade commander. "Nothing is going to be solved by taking potshots into the neighborhood," he said.

The next day, Sgt. First Class Roger Hunceker led a patrol of about 20 soldiers through the gated community. They were met by Mr. Ishmael, the market manager, who said the gunfire had wounded a woman in the leg and left his home pockmarked with bullet holes. He was convinced the police were targeting the neighborhood on purpose. "They do not want us to succeed. Anything positive that happens in the Sunni areas they will try to destroy it," he said through an interpreter.

Sgt. Hunceker tried to reassure him, telling him that the police who opened fire were from a different area, and that the national police in his neighborhood were improving. But locals can't distinguish one police commando unit from the other. They all wear the same green camouflage uniforms and for the most part, are all feared by Sunnis. "We cannot leave our neighborhood. If we try to pass through one of their checkpoints, they will kill us," Mr. Ishmael said. However, he says he has no plans to turn to the Omar Brigade, the Sunni-based militia force that operates in the area. "We have accepted all this help. The Omar Brigade will kill us for cooperating with the Americans," he said.

For Col. Peterson, the market manager's remarks were encouraging. The gated community offers "an alternative to the militia and it's an alternative he has some control over," he says.

In late March, Col. Peterson's squadron was transferred from southern Baghdad to the Haifa Street area of the capital, the site of a massive gun battle between Sunnis and U.S. forces earlier this year. Senior U.S. officials say they moved the squadron to the area, which has been a persistent problem for U.S. forces, in the hope it will be able to replicate some of the success it has had in southern Baghdad. A new U.S. battalion has been assigned to that area.

"We'll have a fresh start to continue these techniques," Col. Peterson wrote in an email. "Hopefully it won't take as long to get started this time."

Write to Greg Jaffe at greg.jaffe@wsj.com6

**Shek** · 04-20-2007, 07:56 AM

Los Angeles Times
April 20, 2007
Pg. 1

In Baghdad, U.S. Troops Build Wall To Curb Violence

But residents aren't happy with the barrier cutting of a Sunni district from surrounding Shiite areas.

By Edmund Sanders, Times Staff Writer

BAGHDAD — A U.S. military brigade is constructing a 3-mile-long concrete wall to cut off one of the capital's most restive Sunni Arab districts from the Shiite Muslim neighborhoods that surround it, raising concern about the further Balkanization of Iraq's most populous and violent city.

U.S. commanders in northern Baghdad said the 12-foot-high barrier would make it more difficult for suicide bombers to strike and for death squads and militia fighters from sectarian factions to attack one another and then slip back to their home turf. Construction began April 10 and is expected to be completed by the end of the month.

Although Baghdad is replete with blast walls, checkpoints and other temporary barriers, including a massive wall around the Green Zone, the barrier being constructed in Adhamiya would be the first to be based in essence on sectarian considerations.

A largely Sunni district, Adhamiya is one of Baghdad's trouble spots, avoided not only by Shiites, but Sunni outsiders as well. The area is almost completely surrounded by Shiite-dominated districts such as Shamasiya and Gurayaat.

The ambitious project is a sign of how far the U.S. military will go to end the bloodshed in Iraq. But U.S. officials denied that it was a central tactic of the U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown launched Feb. 13.

"We defer to commanders on the ground, but dividing up the entire city with barriers is not part of the plan," U.S. military spokesman Army Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said Thursday.

News of the construction was first reported Thursday by the Stars and Stripes newspaper

Shiite and Sunni Arabs living in the shadow of the barrier were united in their contempt for the imposing new structure.

"Are they trying to divide us into different sectarian cantons?" said a Sunni drugstore owner in Adhamiya, who would identify himself only as Abu Ahmed, 44. "This will deepen the sectarian strife and only serve to abort efforts aimed at reconciliation."

Some of Ahmed's customers come from Shiite or mixed neighborhoods that are now cut off by large barriers along a main highway. Customers and others seeking to cross into the Sunni district must park their cars outside Adhamiya, walk through a narrow passage in the wall and take taxis on the other side.

Several residents interviewed likened the project to the massive barriers built by Israel around some Palestinian zones.

"Are we in the West Bank?" asked Abu Qusay, 48, a pharmacist who said that he wouldn't be able to get to his favorite kebab restaurant in Adhamiya.

Residents complained that Baghdad already has been dissected by hundreds of barriers that cause daily traffic snarls.

Some predicted the new wall would become a target of militants on both sides. Last week, construction crews came under small-arms fire, military officials said.

"I feel this is the beginning of a pattern of what the whole of Iraq is going to look like, divided by sectarian and racial criteria," Abu Marwan, 50, a Shiite pharmacist, said.

Marwan lives in a mostly Shiite area adjoining the wall, but works in Adhamiya. Since the wall was begun, he has had to walk to work rather than drive.

Najim Sadoon, 51, was worried that he would lose customers at his housewares store. "This closure of the street will have severe economic hardships," he said. "Transportation fees will increase. Customers who used to come here in their cars will now prefer to go to other places."

Majid Fadhil, 43, a Shiite police commissioner in a neighborhood north of the wall, said flatly, "This fence is not going to work."

So far, the barriers have cut off streets and sidewalks, avoiding homes and backyards, residents said.

Pentagon officials first broached the idea of creating "gated communities" in Baghdad this year.

But more recently, military officials have emphasized political negotiation as well as increased troop presence as a way to stem sectarian conflict.

On a tour of the Middle East this week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates repeatedly struck chords of unity and reconciliation. He is expected to meet with sectarian leaders and government officials in Baghdad today.

The construction in Adhamiya is not the first time U.S. military planners have attempted to isolate hostile regions. In 2005, U.S. troops tried to surround the Sunni-dominated city of Samarra with earthen berms to prevent insurgents from entering and leaving the city. A similar strategy was deployed in Tall Afar and Fallouja. Experiments with less extensive walls and trenches also have been attempted in Baghdad and Kirkuk.

The latest project is the work of the 407th Brigade Support Battalion, part of the 82nd Airborne Division, based in north Baghdad's Camp Taji. Since April 10, soldiers have ventured out almost nightly after curfew, overseeing installation of the 14,000-pound wall segments, using giant construction cranes and employing Iraqi crews, said Army Sgt. Michael Pryor, a public affairs specialist for the unit.

Soldiers have dubbed the project the "The Great Wall of Adhamiya." Commanders in the 82nd Airborne could not be reached for comment Thursday. In a press release Tuesday, military officials said the project was intended to protect citizens on both sides.

The wall is "on a fault line of Sunni and Shia, and the idea is to curb some of the self-sustaining violence by controlling who has access to the neighborhoods," Army Capt. Marc Sanborn, brigade engineer for the project, said in the release. He said the concept was closer to an exclusive gated community in the United States than to China's Great Wall.

In an e-mail, Pryor said it was too soon to judge how residents would respond.

"Bear in mind that the wall is an ongoing project," Pryor wrote. "We're not completely sure how the population feels either way."

A special correspondent in Baghdad contributed to this report.

**Shek** · 04-23-2007, 08:30 AM

Washington Post
April 23, 2007
Pg. 1

'Gated Communities' For The War-Ravaged

U.S. Tries High Walls and High Tech To Bring Safety to Parts of Baghdad

By Karin Brulliard, Washington Post Staff Writer

BAGHDAD -- The U.S. military is walling off at least 10 of Baghdad's most violent neighborhoods and using biometric technology to track some of their residents, creating what officers call "gated communities" in an attempt to carve out oases of safety in this war-ravaged city.

The plan drew widespread condemnation in Iraq this past week. On Sunday night, Prime Minister Nouri-al Maliki told news services that he would work to halt construction of a wall around the Sunni district of Adhamiyah, which residents said would aggravate sectarian tensions by segregating them from Shiite neighbors. The U.S. military says the walls are meant to protect people, not further divide them in a city that is increasingly a patchwork of sectarian enclaves.

The military sees a simple virtue in the barriers.

"If we keep the bad guys out, then we win," said 1st Lt. Sean Henley, 24, who works out of an outpost in southern Ghazaliyah, a Sunni insurgent stronghold on Baghdad's western edge that is among the first of the gated communities. The square-mile neighborhood of about 15,000 people now has one entrance point for civilian vehicles and three military checkpoints that are closed to the public.

In some sealed-off areas, troops armed with biometric scanning devices will compile a neighborhood census by recording residents' fingerprints and eye patterns and will perhaps issue them special badges, military officials said. At least 10 Baghdad neighborhoods are slated to become or already are gated communities, said Brig. Gen. John F. Campbell, the deputy commander of American forces in Baghdad.

The tactic is part of the two-month-old U.S. and Iraqi counterinsurgency plan to calm sectarian strife and is loosely modeled after efforts in cities such as Tall Afar and Fallujah, where the military says it has curbed violence by strictly controlling access. The gated communities concept has produced mixed results in previous wars -- including failure in Vietnam, where peasants were forcibly moved to fortified hamlets, only to become sympathizers of the insurgency.

Soldiers and military officials said that it was too early to evaluate the success of Baghdad's gated communities and that adjustments would be made according to results and residents' feedback, some of which has been negative. But they insisted the measure is worth a try in the city's bloodiest neighborhoods.

"We've really taken a hard look and said, 'This is an area where we need to monitor people coming in and people coming out . . . and it is the only way we could do it,' " Campbell said.

Wartime Baghdad has become a tableau of barricades as violence has swelled. Enterprising residents put them to use as free advertising space, blank canvases for graffiti and sunny spots for drying carpets.

But the blockading of Baghdad has reached full throttle under this year's security crackdown, with dozens of new neighborhood military outposts needing protection -- and fast. The push has triggered a run on concrete barriers, which sometimes are not fully dry when military engineering units pick them up, said Capt. David Hudson, 30, who leads a company charged with building many of the city's blast walls. The unit now goes through as many as 2,000 barriers a week.

Hudson's unit spent weeks installing two six-foot-tall, mile-and-a-quarter-long walls along the northern, western and southern borders of southern Ghazaliyah. Another unit blocked the cross streets on the east side with waist-high Jersey barriers.

Under cover of darkness on a recent night, Hudson's soldiers placed 44 barriers at an intersection on the eastern edge of Ghazaliyah, a spot known for bombs and snipers. Tanks and Humvees provided security for the cranes and forklifts being used to build what would be the neighborhood's lone civilian checkpoint.

"They've been doing it in Florida, and the old people seem to like it," joked the platoon's leader, Sgt. 1st Class Charles Schmitt, 37, as he watched his team create the public entrance to the new gated community.

If there were ever a place that defied the tidy and tranquil image suggested by that term, it is Ghazaliyah.

Although the neighborhood used to be mixed, it was also home to many Sunni leaders of former president Saddam Hussein's army. Many fled when they were stripped of their jobs after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, but some stayed.

Their presence provided a foothold for Sunni militants, who found the area a convenient gateway to Iraq's Sunni insurgent heartland to the west. Now southern Ghazaliyah is a base for al-Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni insurgent groups, including the 1920 Revolution Brigades.

These days, dogs nose through a seemingly endless terrain of trash-filled dirt lots. Houses are riddled with bullet holes or marked with black X's, the insurgents' warnings to Shiites to leave or be killed. Businesses have shuttered, and services are intermittent. More than half the houses are abandoned.

The Delta Company of the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment -- Henley's unit -- moved into one of the deserted homes in mid-March, establishing an outpost in a villa with chandeliers and recessed lighting. When they began doing sweeps, roadside bombs exploded often. Firefights and rocket attacks occurred daily. The soldiers found piles of mutilated bodies and empty houses whose interiors were smeared with blood.

But shootouts and explosions have slowed, the soldiers said. They are no longer finding piles of corpses these days -- "just onesies and twosies," according to Sgt. 1st Class Tom Revette, 36. Tips from residents have skyrocketed, leading the troops to weapons caches and wanted men. Before setting up shop, Henley said, the unit had "no viable targets, not one. Since we've been out here, we've got a laundry list."

The outpost's leader, Capt. Darren Fowler, 30, said the raids alone will not keep terrorists out. Walls and technology might, he figures.

So Fowler plans to have soldiers at the entry point use scanners to log the fingerprints and eye patterns of every person who enters southern Ghazaliyah. That will deter insurgents while building a sort of neighborhood census, he said, something counterinsurgency experts say is an essential step in tracking population movements. It will also let soldiers compare the fingerprints of people who enter with fingerprints collected during operations.

"We can pull fingerprints off all the bad stuff they handle and run it through the database," Fowler said in an e-mail. "The soldiers' favorite show to watch is CSI. We actually get some techniques from them."

Fowler is also considering issuing identification badges to every resident of the gated community. But the area will not be closed off to outsiders, because its markets are crucial to Sunnis who live in nearby Shiite neighborhoods and are too afraid to go to their own bazaars, he said.

The method of screening entrants is chosen by the Iraqi and U.S. troops on the ground and will vary from one gated community to another, said Campbell, the deputy commander in Baghdad. Some might check Iraqi food ration cards, which show the holder's address, and use biometrics -- which many soldiers have been collecting during sweeps -- as a second-tier check.

"Most of the Iraqis have a card that tells where they live," Campbell said. "So if they don't have one for that particular area, then [soldiers will] go through the biometrics and see if there's any past history of any activity that we would not want to have."

Many weary residents of southern Ghazaliyah are pleased with the effort to shut out the blood bath, the soldiers said, while others have griped about the inconveniences it presents.

Earlier this month, Fowler led off the nightly meeting of Iraqi and American soldiers, gathered around a dining table to review operations on PowerPoint slides.

"Because of your help, I have gone one full week without being shot at," said Fowler, a tall Southerner famed among his peers for having survived 13 roadside bombings unscathed, 11 of them in Ghazaliyah.

Soon he addressed the barrier plan. The rural lanes to the west would be sealed off soon, he said, "so terrorists cannot use the farm roads to get into Ghazaliyah."

Many of the Iraqi soldiers nodded. But not Maj. Hathem Faek Salman, who fears the barriers are more likely to anger residents than shut out violence.

"This is not a good plan," Salman, 40, had said before the meeting. "If my region were closed by these barriers, I would hate the army, because I would feel like I was in a big jail. . . . If you want to make the area secure and safe, it is not with barriers. We have to win the trust of the people."

The next day, a convoy rumbled out to Bakriyah, a small village west of Ghazaliyah -- just outside the walls and a little more than two miles from the civilian checkpoint. It was a peaceful mission: to track down a town leader who is on a local citizens' council that the soldiers meet with regularly. The man, Najim Abdullah, had skipped a recent meeting, and the soldiers thought his absence might have been to protest the barriers.

Three U.S. soldiers, an interpreter and an Iraqi soldier removed their helmets and sat down on the ornate carpets in Abdullah's home, leaning against the walls with pillows propped behind their backs. Abdullah's wide-eyed grandsons served sweet tea.

Abdullah, cross-legged in a gray dishdasha, or traditional robe, said he had missed the meeting because of an emergency. But the gated community idea, he said, "doesn't make any sense." His villagers had long driven into Ghazaliyah's west end to go to its markets or continue toward central Baghdad. Now they would have to drive around it.

"The barriers cannot be moved until all of the Ghazaliyah barrier plan is in place," responded Lt. Lance Rae, 25. "But we will not forget the people down here. They've been very faithful to us."

"It's your order. I disagree with it. But I accept it," Abdullah said. "It does not matter to me. It matters to the people."

Abdullah rose, turned toward the blank white wall and sketched an invisible picture of the area with his hands. He pointed left, to Bakriyah. And a few feet right, to the checkpoint.

"It will take two hours to get from here to here!" he said.

Rae simply nodded and said, "Security is the key."

**Shek** · 04-23-2007, 08:31 AM

New York Times
April 23, 2007

Iraqi Premier Orders Work Stopped On Wall

By Alissa J. Rubin

BAGHDAD, April 22 — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Sunday that he was ordering a halt to construction of a controversial wall that would block a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad from other areas, saying it reminded people of “other walls.”

The announcement, which he made in Cairo while on a state visit, appeared intended to allay mounting criticism from both Sunni Arab and Shiite parties about the project.

“I oppose the building of the wall, and its construction will stop,” Mr. Maliki told reporters during a joint news conference with the secretary general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. “There are other methods to protect neighborhoods.”

A spokesman for the American military, Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, said the military would remain “in a dialogue” with the Iraqi government about how best to protect citizens. The military did not say whether the wall’s construction would be halted.

Mr. Maliki did not specify in his remarks what other walls he referred to. However, the separation barrier in the West Bank being erected by Israel, which Israel says is for protection but greatly angers Palestinians, is a particularly delicate issue among Arabs.

In Baghdad, the wall would surround the Adhamiya neighborhood, a Sunni Arab enclave bordered by Shiite areas. Adhamiya often comes under mortar attack and suffers incursions from those neighborhoods. However, it has also been a stronghold of militant Sunni Arab groups, and the wall would have helped the Iraqi security forces to control their movements.

Earlier on Sunday, the spokesman for the American military in Iraq sought to allay criticism of the project and explain its intent by saying that it was meant to be only a temporary barrier to improve security.

The military does not have a new strategy of building walls or creating “gated communities,” the spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said in a written statement. He described it as a tactic being used in only a handful of neighborhoods and not an effort to divide the city, much less the country.

However, American military officials said last week in a statement that the Adhamiya wall was “one of the centerpieces of a new strategy.” They also said that the wall was aimed at separating Sunni Arabs in Adhamiya from Shiites to the east.

Opposition to the wall has gathered steam since the news release was issued, and on Sunday, Sunni Arab and Shiite groups sharply criticized the idea. The Sunni Arab Iraqi Islamic Party and the Shiite group linked to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr both announced that they opposed dividing Baghdad by sect. In sharp statements, they said the wall would increase sectarian hatred and fuel efforts to partition the country.

“Surrounding areas of the capital with barbed wire and concrete blocks would harm these areas economically and socially,” the Islamic Party said in an e-mail message to news organizations. “In addition, it will enhance sectarian feelings.”

Abu Firas al-Mutairi, a representative of the Sadr movement in Najaf, which has supported Mr. Maliki, said: “The Sadr movement considers building a wall around Al Adhamiya as a way to lay siege to the Iraqi people and to separate them into cantons. It is like the Berlin Wall that divided Germany.”

“This step is the first step toward dividing the regions into cantons and blockading people there,” he added. “Today it happens in Adhamiya. Tomorrow it will happen in Sadr City,” referring to the Shiite slum in Baghdad that is a stronghold of Mr. Sadr.

The wall, which was being built as part of the security plan, had been a joint project with the Iraqi Army. The Iraqi government has the final say over how the security plan proceeds, but most policies are being intensively negotiated with the Americans, who are deploying nearly 30,000 additional troops to help secure Baghdad and the surrounding areas.

Mr. Maliki’s announcement came as sectarian violence continued across Iraq, with a horrific execution by Sunni Arabs in Mosul of 23 members of a small religious sect, known as Yezidis.

The Yezidis, who are most numerous in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, practice an offshoot of Islam that combines some Muslim teachings with those of ancient Persian religion.

At least 60 people died Sunday in Iraq, with 18 killed by car bombs in Baghdad. Eleven bodies were found in the capital and five in the city of Kut, to the south.

But the most chilling attack was the one in Mosul. It followed the marriage in early April of a Sunni Arab man and a woman from the Yezidi faith, the police said.

The police said that when the woman married, she converted to Islam, which angered some of the Yezidis. She was kidnapped and as she was being brought back to her tribe, a crowd gathered and stoned her to death, said Brig. Gen. Muhammad al-Waqa of the Mosul police.

The Sunni Arabs in the area demanded that the Yezidis turn over the killers, and the police also put out a warrant for their arrest. In one Yezidi-majority town east of Mosul, residents found leaflets saying, “Unless you turn them over, we will never let any Yezidi breathe the air.”

The Yezidis refused. On Sunday afternoon, armed men stopped minibuses traveling from a government textile factory in Mosul, where many Yezidis and Christians were known to work. The men dragged the passengers off the buses, checked their identity cards and lined the Yezidis up against a wall and shot them, killing 23 people and wounding three, General Waqa said.

In Falluja, in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, the City Council chairman, Sami al-Jumaili, was assassinated Sunday. He was the fifth council chairman in Falluja to lose his life while in the job since the war began. The militant group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has attacked those who work with the government, the police or the Iraqi Army in Anbar.

A relative of Mr. Jumaili who spoke anonymously because he feared retribution described him as “an educated man who went to medical school.”

“He accepted the job because he trusts people and wanted to help the city,” the relative said. “Many people refused the job. The family warned him that the job was dangerous. And, many of his predecessors had been killed. He answered that he had not harmed anyone.”

The American military released a statement on Sunday saying two soldiers had been killed in separate attacks on Saturday, one in Baghdad and another southwest of the capital.

Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Mosul and Falluja.

**Shek** · 04-27-2007, 20:33 PM

The Urban Tourniquet â€“ â€œGated Communitiesâ€ in Baghdad (SWJ Blog)

Emphasis mine.

Quote:

The Urban Tourniquet – “Gated Communities” in Baghdad

Gated communities in counterinsurgency are like tourniquets in surgery. They can stem a life-threatening hemorrhage, but they must be applied sparingly, released as often and as soon as possible, and they have side-effects that have to be taken into account. They are never a first choice. But, given the dire current situation in Baghdad, the “urban tourniquet” is the lesser of several evils, because it breaks the cycle of sectarian violence that has caused so much damage and human suffering in Iraq.

This cycle typically involves extremists infiltrating a Sunni neighborhood, intimidating the population, setting up a base (often in derelict houses), then using that base to launch attacks on the Shi’a community in surrounding districts. Shi’a militias then retaliate, striking out at the Sunni neighborhood, killing innocent people, provoking blood feuds and further retaliation. The pall of fear, and the external threat, cements the extremists’ hold over the local population. It allows them to pose as defenders of the people – albeit defending against a threat they themselves cynically created to manipulate the people.

If we cannot break this cycle, then we cannot reverse the deteriorating security situation, and whatever else we do at the political or strategic level, the war on the streets will be lost. Thus, this cycle represents a life-threatening hemorrhage that has to be staunched, even at the cost of short-term political pain.

The “gated community” stops the cycle of sectarian violence in three ways.

First, it makes it much harder for terrorists to infiltrate a community. We only establish perimeter security (checkpoints, T-walls, etc.) once the area has been cleared and secured, close relations are established with the population, and we have troops on the ground securing the district in conjunction with the people. Once the gated community goes in, this makes it much harder for extremists to re-enter.

Second, the perimeter controls make it much harder for terrorists to launch attacks from within that district, because they have to smuggle a car bomb or suicide vest out, through a limited number of controlled access points. This reduces extremists’ ability to use gated districts as a base to attack neighboring areas.

Third, if the terrorists do manage to mount an attack, the security controls protect the gated community against retaliation by “death squads”. This reduces fear within the community, alienates extremists from the population (since they can no longer pose as defenders) and emboldens people, who would otherwise be too intimidated, to tip off the security forces to enemy presence.

Adhimiya is a case in point. This is the last remaining majority-Sunni district East of the Tigris. It has suffered a hemorrhage of refugees and a huge amount of social and humanitarian damage in the past 12 months. AQI had established a safe haven there, creating bomb factories and raiding bases from which to attack neighboring Shi’a areas in New Baghdad and Sadr City. Many of the most serious spectacular attacks on the Shi’a population originated from Adhimiya, and some extremely bloody revenge attacks were mounted in retaliation. Hundreds have been killed by car bombs emanating from Adhimiya, and hundreds of innocent Adhimiya residents have been killed in retaliation. A gated community in this district could thus save thousands of lives over the next few months.

We had to stop this hemorrhage, not only to protect the population of East Baghdad but to prevent the "cleansing" of Adhimiya and the murder or eviction of the innocent population. The gated community approach was therefore decided on – in conjunction with the community and the Iraqi security forces – as an emergency measure to break the cycle. The recent protest against the project originated as a coordinated AQI information operation (more on this in a moment).

Two other gated communities have already been established (in Ameriya and Ghazaliya districts) with no public protest, indeed with great support from the population. I was out on the ground in Ghazaliya a few weeks ago, and several locals thanked me for the security the gated community had brought to their district. Other patrols and interactions with the population tell the same story. And people from Shi’a districts that have been “gated” or provided with protective barriers have expressed the same appreciation to me in meetings over the past week.

Why the protest, then, in the case of Adhimiya? Principally because, if the gated community succeeds, AQI’s ability to strike at Shi’a communities, and thus its ability to provoke sectarian violence, will be dramatically curtailed as it loses its base in East Baghdad. Hence AQI appears to have initiated the local protests, organized using cellphone text messages and mass-produced paper flyers in the district. This is classic AQI info ops – stirring up the population through a combination of manipulation, intimidation and fear of other groups. The level of coordination and media manipulation applied in this case is also a hallmark of AQI info ops.

Incidentally, this was probably also the motivation behind the attack on the Sarafiya bridge (Iron Bridge) two weeks ago, around the time the gated community project started. This bridge is the only access from West Baghdad into Adhimiya, and thus bombing it may have been an attempt by AQI to remain un-molested in their base of operations.

The claims raised by the protesters were all false or exaggerated. The security controls are not permanent, and can be readily removed when the situation improves. They do not create a ghetto, since security forces will live inside the area alongside the population, and access (though controlled through authorized points) remains free-flowing. Thus this project does not represent oppression of the population, but rather protects them from insurgent intimidation.

Of course, there is a political downside, one that we are well aware of. But, on balance, given the extremely serious current situation, we believe this approach is valid – as a temporary, emergency measure. Just like a tourniquet, this is a necessary technique but it has side-effects that have to be taken into account, and it can only be temporary. The gated community helps break the cycle of sectarian violence. Once it is stopped, other things become possible. And short-term political and media opposition, whipped up by coordinated AQI information ops, may be the price we have to pay in order to “stabilize the patient”.

David Kilcullen is Senior Counter-Insurgency Advisor, Multi-National Force -- Iraq. These are his personal opinions, have not been vetted or screened, and do not represent the views of any government or organization.

**Shek** · 04-27-2007, 21:00 PM

Pajamas Media: Baghdad Dispatch: The Wall

Once again, emphasis in mine.

Quote:

Baghdad Dispatch: The Wall
by Omar Fadhil, PJM Baghdad editor
April 24, 2007 10:01 AM

The decision to build security walls around some Baghdad districts is getting a lot of attention in the local and world media. It’s creating many questions and even more rumors. Here’s some background straight from Baghdad, just as protests may be making both Iraqi and American officials reconsider the plan, according to some press reports.

First and foremost, I don’t know why “The Wall” is becoming such an issue now. Work to construct similar walls started weeks ago in the Amiriya and Ghazaliyah districts. The “news” went utterly unnoticed then.

But that’s not what matters. What does matter is effectiveness versus side-effects. Neither should be neglected.

Yesterday leaflets were distributed in the streets of Adhamiya (or Azamiya, English doesn’t have the exact sound anyway). The leaflets — printed and distributed by persons unknown — called on residents to protest the building of the wall. Knowing that the only organized entity capable of such quick response to events in Adhamiya are either the insurgents or al-Qaeda strongly indicates that they were behind the planned protest. More important still is that it indicates they see the wall as a threat to their movement and ability to carry out their actions.

From a tactical point of view these walls can be very useful in reducing the levels of violence in targeted areas. Militants will have to stay in their home areas to avoid passing through the controlled gates. This reduces their ability to transport weapons and munitions for storage or operations in other districts. Failing that they will have to relocate to a district where it would be easier for them to operate. In either case the capacity of the militants to sustain their current level of operations would be impaired.

Having walls and barriers that seal off an area also means that troops don’t have to worry watching the numerous routes that connect Baghdad’s interlacing districts that militants use to maneuver around security operations. By extension it means that unit commanders would have a higher percentage of their troops free to conduct real missions against the militants. This makes the “clear and hold” strategy much easier to implement and sustain.

The wall strategy is pretty much like trying to control or protect a small crowd of, say, 50 people. If they are milling about in the street you’ll probably need a dozen cops to control the situation. But if you move the small crowd to a hall with one door one cop can stand at the door and control the movement in and out of the hall, while two cops can sort out the good guys from the bad guys. The remaining nine cops can move on to take care of other situations at other locations.

On the other hand one of the risks that needs to be taken into consideration when adopting this tactic of gated communities is that the main gate could itself become a target for spectacular suicide attacks. In the case of Adhamiya, (population estimated at 500,000 +) or other districts with large populations, the gates are likely to see a lot of traffic every day. There will be inevitably long waiting lines. That alone could attract suicide bombers or mortar barrages.

There are definitely downsides that come from surrounding communities with walls, mostly psychological and social. It’s sad to watch the capital of your country become the only city in the world that resembles a compartmentalized fortress where you need tall concrete walls to slightly improve the margin of safety.

But this is war and we can’t afford living in denial of the seriousness of threats. Emotions must not be allowed to disrupt taking practical steps that can save lives. So while I understand where PM Maliki is coming from in his opposition to the wall I have to disagree with him. The other thing I don’t like about Maliki’s move is that he broke the promise he made when he announced the security plan: he said he would not allow political interference in the work of the military. So his opposition to this particular plan is purely political in nature with disregard to the facts on the ground, and an obvious result of pressure from some politicians around him. However from his tone I suspect that he will eventually change his mind and deal practically with the issue.

Omar Fadhil is PJM’s Baghdad editor; his own blog is Iraq The Model

ChdNorm · 04-27-2007, 21:29 PM

That's an interesting approach. I can definitely see how it could potentially keep sparks of civil unrest in one neighborhood from turning into area wide wild fires in the event of actual civil war. What would concern me would be isolating areas to the point that it could lend to a bit of festering from within.

My main question I had while reading that was this ... how controlled is movement from one area to another and who controls it?

**Shek** · 05-01-2007, 04:27 AM

Washington Post
April 30, 2007
Pg. 12

The Two Sides Of Baghdad Barriers

Walls Save Lives But Also Disrupt Flow of Daily Life

By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post Staff Writer

BAGHDAD -- Sabah Abd's fruit stand is a few feet from the concrete barrier dividing Baghdad's Sadriya market from a bus depot that was bombed April 18 in one of the deadliest attacks since U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a major operation in February to secure the capital.

"The whole world shook," said Abd, 33, recalling that the blast occurred as workers were crowding into vans and buses to go home for the day, and that it threw him to the ground, splattered with blood.

But only three days after the attack, Abd was back at his stand, charred vehicles still littering the parking area a few yards away. "My wife said, 'If you go there, I will divorce you,' but what can I do? There is no work outside," he said.

Abd decided to reopen his fruit stand because the barrier erected around the market by U.S. forces had shielded him from harm, despite the huge explosion nearby. "This wall protected us," he said.

New walls around markets and other public gathering places -- one of the most visible features of the military push to stem violence in Baghdad -- are meant to counter what U.S. commanders now consider one of the most lethal and psychologically devastating weapons in the insurgents' arsenal: vehicles that suicide attackers pack with ever more powerful explosives.

"I'm concerned about the single big events that continue to occur," said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the senior U.S. military operations commander in Iraq.

Although sectarian killings have decreased in Baghdad since February, when tens of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops began arriving, attacks with the vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, known as VBIEDs, have increased. Supply of the weapons, which commanders liken to a low-tech precision bomb, is virtually unlimited. "It's a sophisticated network, but not a sophisticated weapon," said Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil Jr., commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad. "The difference is a set of keys and a driver."

The barriers and checkpoints have helped reduce civilian casualties by keeping vehicles away from markets, mosques and other places in Baghdad that draw crowds and limiting traffic to pedestrians, mopeds, bicycles and pushcarts. This has led some suicide bombers to detonate their vehicles in places with fewer people, U.S. military officials say.

But the fortifications have drawbacks as well as limitations. Too many roadblocks can choke off the business and community activities they are designed to safeguard. "What do we deny? What do we carefully monitor? What do we allow to flow freely?" Fil asked. Insurgents continually look for ways to attack "the next vulnerable target," as they did by bombing the bus depot outside the protected Sadriya market, he said.

The Rusafa district in eastern Baghdad is a center of markets frequented by Shiite residents and workers, and it has often been targeted in car bombings by Sunni extremist groups. U.S. troops stationed at a nearby outpost in Rusafa said the recent market bombing was so large it shook their building.

"We thought we were hit with a mortar," said Staff Sgt. Stuart Toney, 29, of Mount Morris, Ill., who works with Iraqi police and was one of the first soldiers on the scene. "VBIEDs are the Sunni method of madness."

Minutes later, Lt. Ian Edgerly, 24, of the 82nd Airborne Division, approached the bomb site, past people wheeling out burned corpses in carts, and quickly encountered a hostile crowd. "People were starting to call us names, all sorts of profanities," said Edgerly, of Austin. "They were blaming the coalition" for not protecting them, he said. Edgerly and other U.S. troops blocked off the area but kept their distance.

Leading a patrol through the market the following Monday, Capt. Bryan Dodd of the 82nd Airborne greeted shopkeepers in Arabic and faced no open hostility. He avoided patrolling past the bomb scene, saying U.S. troops wanted to give residents time to grieve. Indeed, police officers at the joint security station where Dodd is based said they planned to collect 80 bodies from houses in the area that day and take them to the morgue.

"We'll come back here tonight and clean up" the debris, said Dodd, 31, of Killeen, Tex. Before the bombing, Dodd said, the market area was so quiet he had chatted with residents over tea. "They said I could eat with them and didn't need any body armor," he said, but added somberly, "Our job is to be constantly looking for the threat."

Merchants complained about the lack of security, and some said U.S. forces should have been able to halt the bombing.

Abdul Aziz al-Husani, 62, a carpenter, said that "in the last four months, chaos is worse than before because there are three big explosions in this area."

Security is "too bad," said Sadik Sabri, 42, a contractor.

Still, the market was busy, and many shops and stalls were open, displaying fresh produce and goods. Sales were down, though, Abd and other merchants said.

U.S. and Iraqi commanders are planning more measures to guard against vehicle bombs, including adding barriers to parking lots such as the one outside the Sadriya market. "We will put in some more barriers," Toney said. "We had suggested it before, but the locals were adamant we didn't. Now they are receptive."

Across the river in the predominantly Sunni district along Haifa Street, Col. Bryan Roberts, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade, said an increase in vehicle bombs had led him to introduce a plan to barricade five markets in the district. "My biggest concerns security-wise are the current attack methods, the VBIEDs, suicide vests," he said.

The Iraqi military is obtaining more equipment capable of detecting vehicle bombs, according to Lt. Gen. Abud Qanbar Hashim, the Iraqi commander in Baghdad.

Iraq's government should also consider designating more "no traffic" areas and further limiting access for large trucks, said Col. Jeffrey L. Bannister, commander of the 2nd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, who oversees U.S. forces in Rusafa. Bannister's troops provided security last week while contractors installed barriers along the side streets of Baghdad's historic fish market on the Tigris River. The $450,000 project is designed to allow the opening of a riverside road and revive business in the area. As the contractors worked, a car bomb exploded across the river.

The government should take measures "at the national level to help the poor guy in the end zone who's trying to stop VBIEDs," Bannister said. Still, he and other commanders said they did not expect to eliminate the bombs.

Fadil Hussein, 50, owns a shop selling toys and clothing on a main street in Rusafa, where he was wounded in a car bombing earlier this year. He said he usually earns the equivalent of about $12 a day but that commerce has suffered because of the threat of bombs and the traffic restrictions. "Now there is no business because all the roads are closed and the bridges are closed," he said. "Maku. Nothing," he said, wiping his hands together.

"It's a constant trade-off between security and convenience," Dodd acknowledged. "We could wall this whole place in, and nothing would happen. But economically, that's not viable."

Hussein said he might eventually go elsewhere to find another job. But for now, he is staying. "Maybe it will get better," he said. "We're waiting for security."

**Shek** · 05-02-2007, 12:08 PM

Colbert's take on "Allah Acres"

Comedy Central : Motherload

**Shek** · 05-06-2007, 09:13 AM

Since I referred to Belfast in another thread, I figured that I'd post this oped. I think it is rather hyperbolic at times, but he does have some valid points.

Quote:

Eugene Robinson - Walled City - washingtonpost.com

Walled City

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, April 24, 2007; A21

Meanwhile, back in Baghdad, we're building a wall. Actually, quite a few walls.

While we were absorbed with the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech-- and before that the Don Imus affair and the Alberto Gonzales tragicomedy-- the war in Iraq was pushed below the fold. While we weren't looking, the U.S. military started building high walls in parts of the Iraqi capital to separate Sunnis from Shiites.

Basically, we're turning Baghdad into Belfast.

This is supposed to be a temporary expedient, a way to tamp down Iraq's sectarian civil war -- in the capital, at least, the ostensible goal of George W. Bush's fraudulent "surge" policy -- by making it harder for the antagonists to get at each other's throats. The "peace lines" in Belfast, separating Protestants from Catholics, were supposed to be temporary, too. That network of walls was begun in the 1970s.

The construction of barriers and checkpoints that turn Baghdad neighborhoods into what U.S. officers sardonically call "gated communities" is another sign -- as if more evidence were needed -- that Bush's "surge" is nothing more than a maneuver to buy time. His open-ended commitment for U.S. forces to patrol those barriers and guard those checkpoints will become the next president's problem.

The walls that have been built so far didn't prevent the car bombs in Baghdad last week, including at the Sadriya market, that killed nearly 200 people. Even the heavy fortifications surrounding the Green Zone, where the American presence and the Iraqi "unity" government are headquartered, couldn't keep a suicide bomber from detonating his explosives in the cafeteria of the Iraqi parliament.

But let's assume that if U.S. forces build enough walls and make it hard enough for Iraqis to move around their own capital, the violence in Baghdad will decline somewhat. In that event, the Shiite death squads and Sunni suicide bombers will simply do their killing elsewhere in Iraq. There's considerable evidence that this is already happening.

Both the president and his many critics say the real problem in Iraq is political -- that there will be no genuine prospects for peace until Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Shiite-dominated government reach a negotiated accommodation with the Sunni insurgency. The barriers going up -- The Post reported that at least 10 Baghdad neighborhoods will be isolated behind walls -- probably will make Sunni-Shiite reconciliation a more distant goal. If anything, walls will accelerate the sectarian cleansing that has been purifying formerly mixed neighborhoods.

Walls divide; they do not unite. Walls give concrete expression to hatreds and prejudices, establishing them as artifacts not of the mind but of the landscape. When I was The Post's London correspondent in the early 1990s, I covered the Northern Ireland conflict. The first thing I went to see in Belfast was the notorious "peace line" between the Falls Road, a Catholic stronghold, and Shankill Road, a Protestant redoubt. Everything looked the same on both sides -- the houses, the shops, the people -- yet it was as if they were two different countries. Animosities had been passed down through generations. Even now, 15 years later, a civil exchange between two of the leading antagonists -- Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams -- is big news.

How many years will it take to get to that point in Baghdad?

Bush has enmeshed the United States in a civil conflict that will take years, probably decades, to resolve. The building of walls mocks the administration's happy-talk rhetoric about how much political progress the Iraqis are making. If the Iraqi government really were the exercise in inclusive democracy that Bush claims, walls would be coming down. Putting up walls only makes sense if the White House foresees a substantial U.S. military presence in Iraq for many years to come.

Clearly, the Iraqi government is not ready to do the job of policing the enclaves that are being created. The government doesn't even want to do the job. Maliki complained Sunday about a new wall in Adhamiyah, a Sunni neighborhood, saying it "reminds us of other walls that we reject." Maybe he was thinking of Belfast, or maybe of Berlin, or maybe of the wall that the Israelis have built between themselves and the Palestinians.

Or maybe he is beginning to realize how easy it is to build walls and how hard to tear them down.

Also, I found this article with a study on the effects of the Belfast "peace lines." However, this study shows the long-term effects of the "temporary" peace lines, and so the critical take away is that they shouldn't become permanent.

Peace but no love as Northern Ireland divide grows ever wider | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

04-20-2007, 07:56 AM	#2 (permalink)
Shek *Military Professional* Moderator Join Date: 02-23-05 Location: Krblachistan Posts: 7,798 Country:	Los Angeles Times April 20, 2007 Pg. 1 In Baghdad, U.S. Troops Build Wall To Curb Violence But residents aren't happy with the barrier cutting of a Sunni district from surrounding Shiite areas. By Edmund Sanders, Times Staff Writer BAGHDAD — A U.S. military brigade is constructing a 3-mile-long concrete wall to cut off one of the capital's most restive Sunni Arab districts from the Shiite Muslim neighborhoods that surround it, raising concern about the further Balkanization of Iraq's most populous and violent city. U.S. commanders in northern Baghdad said the 12-foot-high barrier would make it more difficult for suicide bombers to strike and for death squads and militia fighters from sectarian factions to attack one another and then slip back to their home turf. Construction began April 10 and is expected to be completed by the end of the month. Although Baghdad is replete with blast walls, checkpoints and other temporary barriers, including a massive wall around the Green Zone, the barrier being constructed in Adhamiya would be the first to be based in essence on sectarian considerations. A largely Sunni district, Adhamiya is one of Baghdad's trouble spots, avoided not only by Shiites, but Sunni outsiders as well. The area is almost completely surrounded by Shiite-dominated districts such as Shamasiya and Gurayaat. The ambitious project is a sign of how far the U.S. military will go to end the bloodshed in Iraq. But U.S. officials denied that it was a central tactic of the U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown launched Feb. 13. "We defer to commanders on the ground, but dividing up the entire city with barriers is not part of the plan," U.S. military spokesman Army Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said Thursday. News of the construction was first reported Thursday by the Stars and Stripes newspaper Shiite and Sunni Arabs living in the shadow of the barrier were united in their contempt for the imposing new structure. "Are they trying to divide us into different sectarian cantons?" said a Sunni drugstore owner in Adhamiya, who would identify himself only as Abu Ahmed, 44. "This will deepen the sectarian strife and only serve to abort efforts aimed at reconciliation." Some of Ahmed's customers come from Shiite or mixed neighborhoods that are now cut off by large barriers along a main highway. Customers and others seeking to cross into the Sunni district must park their cars outside Adhamiya, walk through a narrow passage in the wall and take taxis on the other side. Several residents interviewed likened the project to the massive barriers built by Israel around some Palestinian zones. "Are we in the West Bank?" asked Abu Qusay, 48, a pharmacist who said that he wouldn't be able to get to his favorite kebab restaurant in Adhamiya. Residents complained that Baghdad already has been dissected by hundreds of barriers that cause daily traffic snarls. Some predicted the new wall would become a target of militants on both sides. Last week, construction crews came under small-arms fire, military officials said. "I feel this is the beginning of a pattern of what the whole of Iraq is going to look like, divided by sectarian and racial criteria," Abu Marwan, 50, a Shiite pharmacist, said. Marwan lives in a mostly Shiite area adjoining the wall, but works in Adhamiya. Since the wall was begun, he has had to walk to work rather than drive. Najim Sadoon, 51, was worried that he would lose customers at his housewares store. "This closure of the street will have severe economic hardships," he said. "Transportation fees will increase. Customers who used to come here in their cars will now prefer to go to other places." Majid Fadhil, 43, a Shiite police commissioner in a neighborhood north of the wall, said flatly, "This fence is not going to work." So far, the barriers have cut off streets and sidewalks, avoiding homes and backyards, residents said. Pentagon officials first broached the idea of creating "gated communities" in Baghdad this year. But more recently, military officials have emphasized political negotiation as well as increased troop presence as a way to stem sectarian conflict. On a tour of the Middle East this week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates repeatedly struck chords of unity and reconciliation. He is expected to meet with sectarian leaders and government officials in Baghdad today. The construction in Adhamiya is not the first time U.S. military planners have attempted to isolate hostile regions. In 2005, U.S. troops tried to surround the Sunni-dominated city of Samarra with earthen berms to prevent insurgents from entering and leaving the city. A similar strategy was deployed in Tall Afar and Fallouja. Experiments with less extensive walls and trenches also have been attempted in Baghdad and Kirkuk. The latest project is the work of the 407th Brigade Support Battalion, part of the 82nd Airborne Division, based in north Baghdad's Camp Taji. Since April 10, soldiers have ventured out almost nightly after curfew, overseeing installation of the 14,000-pound wall segments, using giant construction cranes and employing Iraqi crews, said Army Sgt. Michael Pryor, a public affairs specialist for the unit. Soldiers have dubbed the project the "The Great Wall of Adhamiya." Commanders in the 82nd Airborne could not be reached for comment Thursday. In a press release Tuesday, military officials said the project was intended to protect citizens on both sides. The wall is "on a fault line of Sunni and Shia, and the idea is to curb some of the self-sustaining violence by controlling who has access to the neighborhoods," Army Capt. Marc Sanborn, brigade engineer for the project, said in the release. He said the concept was closer to an exclusive gated community in the United States than to China's Great Wall. In an e-mail, Pryor said it was too soon to judge how residents would respond. "Bear in mind that the wall is an ongoing project," Pryor wrote. "We're not completely sure how the population feels either way." A special correspondent in Baghdad contributed to this report.

04-23-2007, 08:30 AM	#3 (permalink)
Shek *Military Professional* Moderator Join Date: 02-23-05 Location: Krblachistan Posts: 7,798 Country:	Washington Post April 23, 2007 Pg. 1 'Gated Communities' For The War-Ravaged U.S. Tries High Walls and High Tech To Bring Safety to Parts of Baghdad By Karin Brulliard, Washington Post Staff Writer BAGHDAD -- The U.S. military is walling off at least 10 of Baghdad's most violent neighborhoods and using biometric technology to track some of their residents, creating what officers call "gated communities" in an attempt to carve out oases of safety in this war-ravaged city. The plan drew widespread condemnation in Iraq this past week. On Sunday night, Prime Minister Nouri-al Maliki told news services that he would work to halt construction of a wall around the Sunni district of Adhamiyah, which residents said would aggravate sectarian tensions by segregating them from Shiite neighbors. The U.S. military says the walls are meant to protect people, not further divide them in a city that is increasingly a patchwork of sectarian enclaves. The military sees a simple virtue in the barriers. "If we keep the bad guys out, then we win," said 1st Lt. Sean Henley, 24, who works out of an outpost in southern Ghazaliyah, a Sunni insurgent stronghold on Baghdad's western edge that is among the first of the gated communities. The square-mile neighborhood of about 15,000 people now has one entrance point for civilian vehicles and three military checkpoints that are closed to the public. In some sealed-off areas, troops armed with biometric scanning devices will compile a neighborhood census by recording residents' fingerprints and eye patterns and will perhaps issue them special badges, military officials said. At least 10 Baghdad neighborhoods are slated to become or already are gated communities, said Brig. Gen. John F. Campbell, the deputy commander of American forces in Baghdad. The tactic is part of the two-month-old U.S. and Iraqi counterinsurgency plan to calm sectarian strife and is loosely modeled after efforts in cities such as Tall Afar and Fallujah, where the military says it has curbed violence by strictly controlling access. The gated communities concept has produced mixed results in previous wars -- including failure in Vietnam, where peasants were forcibly moved to fortified hamlets, only to become sympathizers of the insurgency. Soldiers and military officials said that it was too early to evaluate the success of Baghdad's gated communities and that adjustments would be made according to results and residents' feedback, some of which has been negative. But they insisted the measure is worth a try in the city's bloodiest neighborhoods. "We've really taken a hard look and said, 'This is an area where we need to monitor people coming in and people coming out . . . and it is the only way we could do it,' " Campbell said. Wartime Baghdad has become a tableau of barricades as violence has swelled. Enterprising residents put them to use as free advertising space, blank canvases for graffiti and sunny spots for drying carpets. But the blockading of Baghdad has reached full throttle under this year's security crackdown, with dozens of new neighborhood military outposts needing protection -- and fast. The push has triggered a run on concrete barriers, which sometimes are not fully dry when military engineering units pick them up, said Capt. David Hudson, 30, who leads a company charged with building many of the city's blast walls. The unit now goes through as many as 2,000 barriers a week. Hudson's unit spent weeks installing two six-foot-tall, mile-and-a-quarter-long walls along the northern, western and southern borders of southern Ghazaliyah. Another unit blocked the cross streets on the east side with waist-high Jersey barriers. Under cover of darkness on a recent night, Hudson's soldiers placed 44 barriers at an intersection on the eastern edge of Ghazaliyah, a spot known for bombs and snipers. Tanks and Humvees provided security for the cranes and forklifts being used to build what would be the neighborhood's lone civilian checkpoint. "They've been doing it in Florida, and the old people seem to like it," joked the platoon's leader, Sgt. 1st Class Charles Schmitt, 37, as he watched his team create the public entrance to the new gated community. If there were ever a place that defied the tidy and tranquil image suggested by that term, it is Ghazaliyah. Although the neighborhood used to be mixed, it was also home to many Sunni leaders of former president Saddam Hussein's army. Many fled when they were stripped of their jobs after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, but some stayed. Their presence provided a foothold for Sunni militants, who found the area a convenient gateway to Iraq's Sunni insurgent heartland to the west. Now southern Ghazaliyah is a base for al-Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni insurgent groups, including the 1920 Revolution Brigades. These days, dogs nose through a seemingly endless terrain of trash-filled dirt lots. Houses are riddled with bullet holes or marked with black X's, the insurgents' warnings to Shiites to leave or be killed. Businesses have shuttered, and services are intermittent. More than half the houses are abandoned. The Delta Company of the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment -- Henley's unit -- moved into one of the deserted homes in mid-March, establishing an outpost in a villa with chandeliers and recessed lighting. When they began doing sweeps, roadside bombs exploded often. Firefights and rocket attacks occurred daily. The soldiers found piles of mutilated bodies and empty houses whose interiors were smeared with blood. But shootouts and explosions have slowed, the soldiers said. They are no longer finding piles of corpses these days -- "just onesies and twosies," according to Sgt. 1st Class Tom Revette, 36. Tips from residents have skyrocketed, leading the troops to weapons caches and wanted men. Before setting up shop, Henley said, the unit had "no viable targets, not one. Since we've been out here, we've got a laundry list." The outpost's leader, Capt. Darren Fowler, 30, said the raids alone will not keep terrorists out. Walls and technology might, he figures. So Fowler plans to have soldiers at the entry point use scanners to log the fingerprints and eye patterns of every person who enters southern Ghazaliyah. That will deter insurgents while building a sort of neighborhood census, he said, something counterinsurgency experts say is an essential step in tracking population movements. It will also let soldiers compare the fingerprints of people who enter with fingerprints collected during operations. "We can pull fingerprints off all the bad stuff they handle and run it through the database," Fowler said in an e-mail. "The soldiers' favorite show to watch is CSI. We actually get some techniques from them." Fowler is also considering issuing identification badges to every resident of the gated community. But the area will not be closed off to outsiders, because its markets are crucial to Sunnis who live in nearby Shiite neighborhoods and are too afraid to go to their own bazaars, he said. The method of screening entrants is chosen by the Iraqi and U.S. troops on the ground and will vary from one gated community to another, said Campbell, the deputy commander in Baghdad. Some might check Iraqi food ration cards, which show the holder's address, and use biometrics -- which many soldiers have been collecting during sweeps -- as a second-tier check. "Most of the Iraqis have a card that tells where they live," Campbell said. "So if they don't have one for that particular area, then [soldiers will] go through the biometrics and see if there's any past history of any activity that we would not want to have." Many weary residents of southern Ghazaliyah are pleased with the effort to shut out the blood bath, the soldiers said, while others have griped about the inconveniences it presents. Earlier this month, Fowler led off the nightly meeting of Iraqi and American soldiers, gathered around a dining table to review operations on PowerPoint slides. "Because of your help, I have gone one full week without being shot at," said Fowler, a tall Southerner famed among his peers for having survived 13 roadside bombings unscathed, 11 of them in Ghazaliyah. Soon he addressed the barrier plan. The rural lanes to the west would be sealed off soon, he said, "so terrorists cannot use the farm roads to get into Ghazaliyah." Many of the Iraqi soldiers nodded. But not Maj. Hathem Faek Salman, who fears the barriers are more likely to anger residents than shut out violence. "This is not a good plan," Salman, 40, had said before the meeting. "If my region were closed by these barriers, I would hate the army, because I would feel like I was in a big jail. . . . If you want to make the area secure and safe, it is not with barriers. We have to win the trust of the people." The next day, a convoy rumbled out to Bakriyah, a small village west of Ghazaliyah -- just outside the walls and a little more than two miles from the civilian checkpoint. It was a peaceful mission: to track down a town leader who is on a local citizens' council that the soldiers meet with regularly. The man, Najim Abdullah, had skipped a recent meeting, and the soldiers thought his absence might have been to protest the barriers. Three U.S. soldiers, an interpreter and an Iraqi soldier removed their helmets and sat down on the ornate carpets in Abdullah's home, leaning against the walls with pillows propped behind their backs. Abdullah's wide-eyed grandsons served sweet tea. Abdullah, cross-legged in a gray dishdasha, or traditional robe, said he had missed the meeting because of an emergency. But the gated community idea, he said, "doesn't make any sense." His villagers had long driven into Ghazaliyah's west end to go to its markets or continue toward central Baghdad. Now they would have to drive around it. "The barriers cannot be moved until all of the Ghazaliyah barrier plan is in place," responded Lt. Lance Rae, 25. "But we will not forget the people down here. They've been very faithful to us." "It's your order. I disagree with it. But I accept it," Abdullah said. "It does not matter to me. It matters to the people." Abdullah rose, turned toward the blank white wall and sketched an invisible picture of the area with his hands. He pointed left, to Bakriyah. And a few feet right, to the checkpoint. "It will take two hours to get from here to here!" he said. Rae simply nodded and said, "Security is the key."

04-23-2007, 08:31 AM	#4 (permalink)
Shek *Military Professional* Moderator Join Date: 02-23-05 Location: Krblachistan Posts: 7,798 Country:	New York Times April 23, 2007 Iraqi Premier Orders Work Stopped On Wall By Alissa J. Rubin BAGHDAD, April 22 — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Sunday that he was ordering a halt to construction of a controversial wall that would block a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad from other areas, saying it reminded people of “other walls.” The announcement, which he made in Cairo while on a state visit, appeared intended to allay mounting criticism from both Sunni Arab and Shiite parties about the project. “I oppose the building of the wall, and its construction will stop,” Mr. Maliki told reporters during a joint news conference with the secretary general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. “There are other methods to protect neighborhoods.” A spokesman for the American military, Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, said the military would remain “in a dialogue” with the Iraqi government about how best to protect citizens. The military did not say whether the wall’s construction would be halted. Mr. Maliki did not specify in his remarks what other walls he referred to. However, the separation barrier in the West Bank being erected by Israel, which Israel says is for protection but greatly angers Palestinians, is a particularly delicate issue among Arabs. In Baghdad, the wall would surround the Adhamiya neighborhood, a Sunni Arab enclave bordered by Shiite areas. Adhamiya often comes under mortar attack and suffers incursions from those neighborhoods. However, it has also been a stronghold of militant Sunni Arab groups, and the wall would have helped the Iraqi security forces to control their movements. Earlier on Sunday, the spokesman for the American military in Iraq sought to allay criticism of the project and explain its intent by saying that it was meant to be only a temporary barrier to improve security. The military does not have a new strategy of building walls or creating “gated communities,” the spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said in a written statement. He described it as a tactic being used in only a handful of neighborhoods and not an effort to divide the city, much less the country. However, American military officials said last week in a statement that the Adhamiya wall was “one of the centerpieces of a new strategy.” They also said that the wall was aimed at separating Sunni Arabs in Adhamiya from Shiites to the east. Opposition to the wall has gathered steam since the news release was issued, and on Sunday, Sunni Arab and Shiite groups sharply criticized the idea. The Sunni Arab Iraqi Islamic Party and the Shiite group linked to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr both announced that they opposed dividing Baghdad by sect. In sharp statements, they said the wall would increase sectarian hatred and fuel efforts to partition the country. “Surrounding areas of the capital with barbed wire and concrete blocks would harm these areas economically and socially,” the Islamic Party said in an e-mail message to news organizations. “In addition, it will enhance sectarian feelings.” Abu Firas al-Mutairi, a representative of the Sadr movement in Najaf, which has supported Mr. Maliki, said: “The Sadr movement considers building a wall around Al Adhamiya as a way to lay siege to the Iraqi people and to separate them into cantons. It is like the Berlin Wall that divided Germany.” “This step is the first step toward dividing the regions into cantons and blockading people there,” he added. “Today it happens in Adhamiya. Tomorrow it will happen in Sadr City,” referring to the Shiite slum in Baghdad that is a stronghold of Mr. Sadr. The wall, which was being built as part of the security plan, had been a joint project with the Iraqi Army. The Iraqi government has the final say over how the security plan proceeds, but most policies are being intensively negotiated with the Americans, who are deploying nearly 30,000 additional troops to help secure Baghdad and the surrounding areas. Mr. Maliki’s announcement came as sectarian violence continued across Iraq, with a horrific execution by Sunni Arabs in Mosul of 23 members of a small religious sect, known as Yezidis. The Yezidis, who are most numerous in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, practice an offshoot of Islam that combines some Muslim teachings with those of ancient Persian religion. At least 60 people died Sunday in Iraq, with 18 killed by car bombs in Baghdad. Eleven bodies were found in the capital and five in the city of Kut, to the south. But the most chilling attack was the one in Mosul. It followed the marriage in early April of a Sunni Arab man and a woman from the Yezidi faith, the police said. The police said that when the woman married, she converted to Islam, which angered some of the Yezidis. She was kidnapped and as she was being brought back to her tribe, a crowd gathered and stoned her to death, said Brig. Gen. Muhammad al-Waqa of the Mosul police. The Sunni Arabs in the area demanded that the Yezidis turn over the killers, and the police also put out a warrant for their arrest. In one Yezidi-majority town east of Mosul, residents found leaflets saying, “Unless you turn them over, we will never let any Yezidi breathe the air.” The Yezidis refused. On Sunday afternoon, armed men stopped minibuses traveling from a government textile factory in Mosul, where many Yezidis and Christians were known to work. The men dragged the passengers off the buses, checked their identity cards and lined the Yezidis up against a wall and shot them, killing 23 people and wounding three, General Waqa said. In Falluja, in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, the City Council chairman, Sami al-Jumaili, was assassinated Sunday. He was the fifth council chairman in Falluja to lose his life while in the job since the war began. The militant group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has attacked those who work with the government, the police or the Iraqi Army in Anbar. A relative of Mr. Jumaili who spoke anonymously because he feared retribution described him as “an educated man who went to medical school.” “He accepted the job because he trusts people and wanted to help the city,” the relative said. “Many people refused the job. The family warned him that the job was dangerous. And, many of his predecessors had been killed. He answered that he had not harmed anyone.” The American military released a statement on Sunday saying two soldiers had been killed in separate attacks on Saturday, one in Baghdad and another southwest of the capital. Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Mosul and Falluja.

04-27-2007, 21:29 PM	#7 (permalink)
ChdNorm New Member Join Date: 04-27-07 Location: Dallas, Texas Posts: 15 Country:	That's an interesting approach. I can definitely see how it could potentially keep sparks of civil unrest in one neighborhood from turning into area wide wild fires in the event of actual civil war. What would concern me would be isolating areas to the point that it could lend to a bit of festering from within. My main question I had while reading that was this ... how controlled is movement from one area to another and who controls it?

05-01-2007, 04:27 AM	#8 (permalink)
Shek *Military Professional* Moderator Join Date: 02-23-05 Location: Krblachistan Posts: 7,798 Country:	Washington Post April 30, 2007 Pg. 12 The Two Sides Of Baghdad Barriers Walls Save Lives But Also Disrupt Flow of Daily Life By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post Staff Writer BAGHDAD -- Sabah Abd's fruit stand is a few feet from the concrete barrier dividing Baghdad's Sadriya market from a bus depot that was bombed April 18 in one of the deadliest attacks since U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a major operation in February to secure the capital. "The whole world shook," said Abd, 33, recalling that the blast occurred as workers were crowding into vans and buses to go home for the day, and that it threw him to the ground, splattered with blood. But only three days after the attack, Abd was back at his stand, charred vehicles still littering the parking area a few yards away. "My wife said, 'If you go there, I will divorce you,' but what can I do? There is no work outside," he said. Abd decided to reopen his fruit stand because the barrier erected around the market by U.S. forces had shielded him from harm, despite the huge explosion nearby. "This wall protected us," he said. New walls around markets and other public gathering places -- one of the most visible features of the military push to stem violence in Baghdad -- are meant to counter what U.S. commanders now consider one of the most lethal and psychologically devastating weapons in the insurgents' arsenal: vehicles that suicide attackers pack with ever more powerful explosives. "I'm concerned about the single big events that continue to occur," said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the senior U.S. military operations commander in Iraq. Although sectarian killings have decreased in Baghdad since February, when tens of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops began arriving, attacks with the vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, known as VBIEDs, have increased. Supply of the weapons, which commanders liken to a low-tech precision bomb, is virtually unlimited. "It's a sophisticated network, but not a sophisticated weapon," said Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil Jr., commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad. "The difference is a set of keys and a driver." The barriers and checkpoints have helped reduce civilian casualties by keeping vehicles away from markets, mosques and other places in Baghdad that draw crowds and limiting traffic to pedestrians, mopeds, bicycles and pushcarts. This has led some suicide bombers to detonate their vehicles in places with fewer people, U.S. military officials say. But the fortifications have drawbacks as well as limitations. Too many roadblocks can choke off the business and community activities they are designed to safeguard. "What do we deny? What do we carefully monitor? What do we allow to flow freely?" Fil asked. Insurgents continually look for ways to attack "the next vulnerable target," as they did by bombing the bus depot outside the protected Sadriya market, he said. The Rusafa district in eastern Baghdad is a center of markets frequented by Shiite residents and workers, and it has often been targeted in car bombings by Sunni extremist groups. U.S. troops stationed at a nearby outpost in Rusafa said the recent market bombing was so large it shook their building. "We thought we were hit with a mortar," said Staff Sgt. Stuart Toney, 29, of Mount Morris, Ill., who works with Iraqi police and was one of the first soldiers on the scene. "VBIEDs are the Sunni method of madness." Minutes later, Lt. Ian Edgerly, 24, of the 82nd Airborne Division, approached the bomb site, past people wheeling out burned corpses in carts, and quickly encountered a hostile crowd. "People were starting to call us names, all sorts of profanities," said Edgerly, of Austin. "They were blaming the coalition" for not protecting them, he said. Edgerly and other U.S. troops blocked off the area but kept their distance. Leading a patrol through the market the following Monday, Capt. Bryan Dodd of the 82nd Airborne greeted shopkeepers in Arabic and faced no open hostility. He avoided patrolling past the bomb scene, saying U.S. troops wanted to give residents time to grieve. Indeed, police officers at the joint security station where Dodd is based said they planned to collect 80 bodies from houses in the area that day and take them to the morgue. "We'll come back here tonight and clean up" the debris, said Dodd, 31, of Killeen, Tex. Before the bombing, Dodd said, the market area was so quiet he had chatted with residents over tea. "They said I could eat with them and didn't need any body armor," he said, but added somberly, "Our job is to be constantly looking for the threat." Merchants complained about the lack of security, and some said U.S. forces should have been able to halt the bombing. Abdul Aziz al-Husani, 62, a carpenter, said that "in the last four months, chaos is worse than before because there are three big explosions in this area." Security is "too bad," said Sadik Sabri, 42, a contractor. Still, the market was busy, and many shops and stalls were open, displaying fresh produce and goods. Sales were down, though, Abd and other merchants said. U.S. and Iraqi commanders are planning more measures to guard against vehicle bombs, including adding barriers to parking lots such as the one outside the Sadriya market. "We will put in some more barriers," Toney said. "We had suggested it before, but the locals were adamant we didn't. Now they are receptive." Across the river in the predominantly Sunni district along Haifa Street, Col. Bryan Roberts, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade, said an increase in vehicle bombs had led him to introduce a plan to barricade five markets in the district. "My biggest concerns security-wise are the current attack methods, the VBIEDs, suicide vests," he said. The Iraqi military is obtaining more equipment capable of detecting vehicle bombs, according to Lt. Gen. Abud Qanbar Hashim, the Iraqi commander in Baghdad. Iraq's government should also consider designating more "no traffic" areas and further limiting access for large trucks, said Col. Jeffrey L. Bannister, commander of the 2nd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, who oversees U.S. forces in Rusafa. Bannister's troops provided security last week while contractors installed barriers along the side streets of Baghdad's historic fish market on the Tigris River. The $450,000 project is designed to allow the opening of a riverside road and revive business in the area. As the contractors worked, a car bomb exploded across the river. The government should take measures "at the national level to help the poor guy in the end zone who's trying to stop VBIEDs," Bannister said. Still, he and other commanders said they did not expect to eliminate the bombs. Fadil Hussein, 50, owns a shop selling toys and clothing on a main street in Rusafa, where he was wounded in a car bombing earlier this year. He said he usually earns the equivalent of about $12 a day but that commerce has suffered because of the threat of bombs and the traffic restrictions. "Now there is no business because all the roads are closed and the bridges are closed," he said. "Maku. Nothing," he said, wiping his hands together. "It's a constant trade-off between security and convenience," Dodd acknowledged. "We could wall this whole place in, and nothing would happen. But economically, that's not viable." Hussein said he might eventually go elsewhere to find another job. But for now, he is staying. "Maybe it will get better," he said. "We're waiting for security."

05-02-2007, 12:08 PM	#9 (permalink)
Shek *Military Professional* Moderator Join Date: 02-23-05 Location: Krblachistan Posts: 7,798 Country:	Colbert's take on "Allah Acres" Comedy Central : Motherload