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."
Yet the enemy keeps coming. In one week in late April, the American command here estimated it killed more than 100 insurgents. "It will stop, it will start again, they've got so many people," says 30-year-old Sgt. Edward Somuk of New Milford, Conn. "You could blow the s---out of a building with a JDAM [bunkerbusting bomb] from an F-16 or F-18 ... the next day there will be somebody else in there. It just never ends."
On patrols, Kilo Company marines run, rather than walk, to evade snipers and ambushes. They crawl over walls that separate houses to mask their movements through a neighborhood. And although the marines routinely go out looking to tangle with insurgent fighters and kill them, they rule only where they stand. "Once you leave that area," says Kilo's 25-year-old 1st Lt. John Roussos of Princeton, N.J., "[the insurgents] run right back in."
The fact that Kilo Company marines are even in the government center differentiates Ramadi from Fallujah, the famous insurgent stronghold in Anbar province that U.S. forces were unable to enter until a major operation devastated the city in November 2004. There are rumors of a similar assault to rout insurgents from Ramadi. But Col. John Gronski, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 28th Pennsylvania National Guard Division responsible for the Ramadi area of operations, says the American plan is long term. "We believe even though it is one of the most violent parts of Iraq, we have made significant progress here," he says. "The way ahead is to work with Iraqi security forces to help develop their capabilities to help secure Ramadi. Once they have the capability to secure the city, coalition forces will reduce their presence in the city."
There are now three times as many Iraqi soldiers in Ramadi, Gronski says, as when his brigade arrived nearly a year ago. Iraqi soldiers--mostly Shiites from other parts of Iraq--helped clear out and hold a former insurgent stronghold north of the city.
Efforts to dispatch local Sunni soldiers to Ramadi have proved as difficult as building up the local police. The police force here dissolved in May 2005, and insurgents overran their stations. The Iraqi Army later looted the police headquarters, stripping out even the wiring from the newly renovated building, as well as parts from some 40 U.S.-supplied police vehicles. There are now two police stations in the city, with 400 police in uniform and more than 1,000 in training. At this point, none of the officers set foot outside their stations while undergoing more thorough training from their American mentors. And the most recent recruiting effort, under the shadow of insurgent threats, drew only 30 applicants, not the 500 anticipated by the provincial police chief.
Intimidation. Pay is also a problem, says U.S. Army Maj. Chuck Buxton, the Provincial Police Transition Team chief for Anbar province. "The provincial treasury officer has not come to work in two weeks," Buxton says. "And so we have 3,303 [police] who haven't been paid for March, April, and we're into May already." Buxton says the treasurer may be too scared to come to work--with good reason. Insurgents have tried to kill Anbar's governor, Mamoun al-Awani, 29 times in less than a year, and his predecessor was kidnapped and later killed during an American battle with his captors.
Ramadi had seen a glimmer of hope last December. Voters turned up at the polls in record numbers as local resistance fighters guarded voting stations. Local sheiks, insurgent leaders, and religious figures had started to meet with the U.S. military to form a provincial security team because both sides shared one common goal: The Americans wanted to go home, and the Ramadi residents wanted them to go home, too. In January, 1,000 local men showed up for a drive to recruit local police. "Ramadi started to go in the right direction," says Lt. Col. Richard Miller, an American artillery commander who also works on reaching out to Ramadi's community leaders. "Local insurgents decided, 'Hey, you know, we need to get on board with this movement.'"
But on January 5, a suicide bomber disguised himself as a recruit and killed at least 70 police applicants (and a U.S. marine and soldier). Then, insurgents began assassinating tribal leaders. Local leaders, says Miller, now find themselves in a withering crossfire. The foreign and al Qaeda fighters initially welcomed by Ramadi's citizens are now killing off or intimidating anyone who tries to cooperate with the Americans. Seven local leaders have been killed since January. "From there things kind of went downhill, and they've been going downhill for the past couple months," Miller says. "We're still going down once a week, meeting with the provincial governor and council, but now [only one or two] sheiks show up, and not 20 or 25 that we had previously."
The marines in Kilo Company seem caught in the middle. Their mission appears to be buying time for the Iraqi Police and Army to develop their capabilities--which, for now, means pushing back as best they can against insurgent attacks. "Many people ask ... what does it take to help Ramadi, what it takes to get rid of the insurgency?" Kilo's Del Gaudio says. "It is exactly what we are doing right now: going on the offense and killing these people.... They'll keep coming, and we'll keep killing them. Eventually people will get the message."
This story appears in the May 29, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.