NO MORE FLOWERS AND CANDY!
serwad
US troops fighting losing battle for Sunni triangle
By Adrian Blomfield
(Filed: 22/10/2005)
The mob grew more frenzied as the gunmen dragged the two
surviving Americans from the cab of their bullet-ridden lorry and forced
them to kneel on the street.
Killing one of the men with a rifle round fired into the back of
his head, they doused the other with petrol and set him alight. Barefoot
children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man's body to
stoke the flames.
It had taken just one wrong turn for disaster to unfold. Less
than a mile from the base it was heading to, the convoy turned left instead
of right and lumbered down one of the most anti-American streets in Iraq, a
narrow bottleneck in Duluiya town, on a peninsular jutting into the Tigris
river named after the Jibouri tribe that lives there.
As the lorries desperately tried to reverse out, dozens of Sunni
Arab insurgents wielding rocket launchers and automatic rifles emerged from
their homes.
The gunmen were almost certainly emboldened by the fact that the
American soldiers escorting the convoy would not have been able to respond
quickly enough.
"The hatches of the humvees were closed," said Capt Andrew
Staples, a member of the Task Force Liberty 1-15 battalion that patrols
Duluiya and other small towns on the eastern bank of the Tigris, who spoke
to soldiers involved.
Within minutes, four American contractors, all employees of the
Halliburton subsidiary Kellog, Brown & Root, were dead. The jubilant crowd
dragged their corpses through the street, chanting anti-US slogans. An
investigation has been launched into why the contractors were not better
protected.
Perhaps fearful of public reaction in America, where support for
the war is falling, US officials suppressed details of the Sept 20 attack,
which bore a striking resemblance to the murder of four other contractors in
Fallujah last year.
Duluiya, located in the notorious Sunni triangle, is much
smaller than Fallujah but no less violent, even if events here rarely make
the news.
The violence here seems to encapsulate the growing difficulties
the US military is facing in trying to defeat the insurgency. Pinned down by
a constant stream of hit-and-run attacks from former Saddam regime
loyalists, American soldiers are unable to focus their attention on the
foreign extremists who pose a far more dangerous threat to the future of
Iraq.
Yet it is here that the battle against the suicide bombers must
be won.
The isolated towns east of the Tigris supply the foreign
fighters and their allies and provide a haven where they can regroup after
American offensives on their urban strongholds.
If the Americans do not close off these boltholes, it seems
unlikely the war can be won.
But hopes for progress are growing more remote. The insurgency
in eastern Salahuddin province is growing more intense, more deadly and more
sophisticated.
Lt Col Gary Brito, the battalion's commanding officer, said that
in recent months the number of roadside bombs targeting his men had
increased by a third - even though journeys out of base have been cut back.
They are having a more devastating effect too.
"Before only two out of 10 used to be effective," he said. "Now
four or five have a catastrophic effect, blowing away a vehicle or causing
casualties." In the past few months at least four American soldiers in this
battalion alone have been killed. Another 39 have been wounded.
Even routine patrols are fraught with danger.
"What the hell was that," shouted Lt Chris Baldwin as a huge
explosion rocked Baker Company's convoy of humvees trundling along a street
in Dour, another town under Lt Col Brito's watch.
"Contact! Contact!" he bellowed into his radio as the gunners
opened fire on a row of nearby houses from where the rocket-propelled
anti-tank missile was fired.
As the gunfire died down, the soldiers burst into house after
house, their facades peppered with bullet holes.
But, as is so often the case, the attacker had vanished down one
of Dour's maze-like alleys.
Instead the Americans were confronted with sullen Iraqis,
holding their terrified children to their sides. An old woman sat on her
bed, clutching her heart, as the soldiers interrogated the family.
"They heard nothing, they saw nothing, same as ******* usual,"
said Sgt Jody Miller. Taking another deep drag from his cigarette, he turned
to the company's translator.
"Tell them to tell us where the bad guys are so we stop frigging
shooting up their houses," he said.
Nobody was hurt but the mutual distrust between the Americans
and the local community deepened just a little bit more.
Saddam trial lawyer abducted and killed
