Iraq's Mean Streets
U.S. forces battle on In the heart of insurgent territory
RAMADI--The war in Iraq seems to be everywhere and nowhere all at once, judging from the daily score card of car bombings, kidnappings, and attacks against oil pipelines and whatever else presents a target of opportunity. But if there's a front line in the fight between American forces and insurgents, it runs straight through Ramadi's devastated downtown.
After some three years of war, parts of the city look like Beirut after 15 years of civil war. Abandoned buildings sag under the weight of broken floors. Tens of thousands of bullets have torn the facades from buildings and chewed unnatural shapes in walls. Beyond the pools of sewage, piles of rubble, burned-out cars, and broken storefronts, the downtown streets are abandoned.
Razor wire and concrete barriers surround the Provincial Government Center compound, where more than 100 U.S. marines are hunkered down defending the buildings that house the offices of the governor and police chief. "You hear folks talk about Iraq as counterinsurgency," says 30-year-old Capt. Andrew Del Gaudio of Bronx, N.Y., commander of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, the unit responsible for downtown Ramadi. "That holds true for about 99 percent of Iraq. This 1 percent that is in and around central Ramadi, this is a full-blown kinetic fight on a daily basis."
Ramadi is a hornet's nest. The capital and largest city in western Anbar province--an area American troops often call the "wild west"--this Euphrates River city of some 400,000 mainly Sunni Muslim Arabs was once home to many Iraqi military officers who prospered under Saddam Hussein's rule. U.S. officials say that 80 percent of the insurgent fighters here are Iraqis but that foreigners play a role in planning and financing attacks. This arguably is the center of the Sunni-dominated insurgency and, on some days, accounts for about a third of all the violence in Iraq. "It's a tremendous amount of violence," says a U.S. military intelligence officer, "for such a small area."
The 5,000-strong U.S. brigade deployed in Ramadi has lost 79 men and women over the past 11 months. In just the past two months, Del Gaudio's Kilo Company has lost five. Three marines and a sailor were killed April 2 by a large roadside bomb that destroyed the last truck in a convoy. And 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Rick James of Seaford, Del., who joined the Marines a day after turning 18, was shot in the head May 13 by a sniper while at an observation post. (James was proud to serve and felt he was "making a difference," his mother, Carol James, told the Associated Press, but Ramadi could be discouraging: "He hated it. I mean, it's a filthy place, it's hot.")
"Destroy the enemy." The Kilo Company marines live and patrol out of the heavily fortified and sandbagged provincial government compound. Five minutes from the main American base here, the government center is another world. There is no running water or air conditioning, no showers or hot food.
Nearly every marine has been shot at numerous times, and nobody even flinches at the sound of an M-1 Abrams tank firing its 120-mm gun a few blocks away. The whoosh of a U.S. shoulder-fired rocket from the roof is common, followed by cheers from marines at the sound of impact. U.S. forces clash with insurgents, typically, five times a day, and the government compound comes under attack once "every three or four days," from sometimes as many as 60 or 70 insurgents using mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and machine guns. The marines here routinely call in airstrikes, artillery fire, and GPS-guided rockets fired from dozens of miles away to destroy entire buildings they suspect are sheltering insurgents. "In order to beat the wolf off the door, sometimes you've gotta use things that the enemy doesn't think you will use," Del Gaudio says. "I'm not willing to write an American mother or father and tell them that I could have used this and I didn't. I personally believe that there is no limit, that I will not stop at anything to destroy the enemy."
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