Stryker Force
The focus now is on the security crackdown in Baghdad, but U.S. troops are also struggling to keep the lid on elsewhere
SKANDARIYAH, IRAQ-The moon is nearly full as the American soldiers clamber into their rugged Stryker armored vehicles and head out to catch a suspected al Qaeda cell leader. He's wanted for setting up false highway checkpoints in order to abduct and kill traveling Shiites, and the Army thinks he's holed up in a farmhouse outside of town.
The Stryker unit rolls through an area of isolated huts and lonely roads south of Baghdad where troops know all too well to expect enemy ambushes and roadside bombs. What they don't expect is to take small-arms fire-from an Iraqi Army patrol. "Every night is something different," says Staff Sgt. Darrell Griffin, sitting in the back of his eight-wheel Stryker vehicle. "The uncertainty is one of the hardest things to deal with."
But uncertainty, it seems, is the one thing these soldiers can count on. The Iraqi patrol fires only a few shots-the Americans don't know why, and they don't bother to investigate. (Perhaps, they joke, the Iraqis mistook the dozen 20-ton Stryker vehicles for insurgent pickup trucks.) A few minutes later, a call comes through that strikes dread in everyone: A Stryker up ahead has been hit by an improvised explosive device. Soldiers curse, then go silent. Their eyes turn with nervous anticipation to the radio as if it's a television, and after a moment, the news is reassuring. "IED detonated, no casualties," says Capt. Stephen Phillips, the commander of Charlie Company. "Repeat, no casualties."
Staging area. For the past few weeks, most attention has focused on Baghdad, with its ceaseless violence and the rollout of the new security plan backed up by a U.S. force increase of more than 21,000 combat troops. Senior Pentagon officials said last week that the buildup will include nearly 5,000 additional military police and support troops, and word came from Baghdad that the "surge" may extend until at least early 2008. In Washington, House Democratic leaders put together a plan calling for U.S. troops to leave Iraq by September 2008 (story, Page 28).
Attacks, meanwhile, have been increasing in surrounding areas. Groups like al Qaeda in Iraq are increasingly using cities outside Baghdad as staging grounds for attacks, according to U.S. officials. As a result, the new top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, told reporters last week, it is very likely that some units will be shifted to areas such as Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, and areas to the south of the capital to counter moves by insurgents and militia fighters fleeing the security crackdown in the capital. "We are still in the early days of this endeavor-an endeavor that will take months, not weeks, to fully implement," Petraeus said. But he also repeated his view that while military force is necessary to improve security, an end to the insurgency depends on political talks and reconciliation.
That reality seems clear to the members of this Stryker unit from the Army's 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment-part of the Tacoma-based 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team-who are growing accustomed to an increasingly wide-ranging mission that includes tracking Sunni insurgents one day, Shiite militia forces the next. This series of quick-hit operations recently included a counterattack against a little-known cult that left hundreds of Iraqis dead, including women and children-and left some soldiers in the battalion with nightmares.
Such operations are something new for the Stryker unit known as the 2-3. For the majority of its first deployment and part of the second, the unit was based in the northern city of Mosul, a largely Kurdish city that was relatively calm. Commanders say they owe much of their success there to the way they employed traditional counterinsurgency techniques, such as establishing ties with the community. But now the battalion has been pulled off that counterinsurgency effort for the sake of a greater counterinsurgency plan for Baghdad. "Mosul was like a marriage ... now we kind of have flings," says Lt. Col. Barry Huggins, commander of the battalion.
Stryker brigades, in some ways, are made for flings-units of fast-moving vehicles carrying combat troops that can quickly support underserved battle zones. The operation here, scheduled to last only a few weeks, is going after a variety of enemy targets in order to give the regular Iraqi and American units in the area a chance to work on broader security measures. The region itself is on a critical fault line between the Sunni areas near Baghdad and the Shiite-controlled south, particularly around the religious shrines at Najaf and Karbala.
The Stryker's mission is, perhaps, a preview of what the war might look like if, as some have suggested, the military is pulled back to its bases and used as a quick-reaction force. "Going after targets is doable, but there needs to be actionable intelligence beforehand and a strong Iraqi or American unit to capitalize on the situation afterwards, or all the effort is for nothing," says one American combat commander.
This particular mission is also to help protect the hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims who have migrated south of Baghdad for the Arbaeen religious festival (celebrated last weekend), 40 days after Ashura, the holiest day in Shiite Islam. It's a nearly impossible task, as there are hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, mostly moving on foot, who present countless soft targets for Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda-affiliated groups looking to further fan the sectarian warfare. Indeed, a pair of suicide bombers last Tuesday killed more than 120 pilgrims in the city of Hilla and wounded twice that number.
"Squirters." As the convoy approaches the farmhouse of the suspected al Qaeda cell leader, the ramp at the rear of the Stryker drops to the ground, the soldiers flip on their night-vision scopes, and they rush out into the darkness. Creeping up to the house, they toss a stun grenade through the front door and rush in. A single burning oil lamp sits on the stairs of the dark house-there are several men and women and numerous children, who stare wide-eyed at the flashlights mounted onto the barrels of the soldiers' rifles.
The soldiers identify one of the men as the brother of the cell leader they are seeking, so they bind him with plastic handcuffs and take him back to the base. The platoon leaves the house and continues to another. Then a report comes through the radio that five men have slipped the net and are fleeing across the open farmland. ("Squirters," the soldiers call them.) Soldiers give chase, but all five escape into a web of canals and drainage ditches. Half a dozen dogs bark in the darkness. The entire neighborhood knows what's going on. No one offers to help.
There's another operation the next night: The Stryker unit raids the local headquarters of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the town of Mahawi, north of Hilla. They are looking for weapons, particularly components of EFPs, explosively formed penetrators-the deadly variant of the IED that American officials say come from Iran. When a squad of soldiers bursts through the door, no one is inside. A phone is ringing. The unit's Iraqi interpreter quickly grabs it, pretending to be a guard at the office. The voice on the other end is excited. "Get out of there," says the voice. "The Americans are coming."
Meanwhile, a Stryker smashes through the gates of a car dealership across the street, and the soldiers begin riffling through papers in the front offices. They suspect that the dealership is being used to supply cars to be made into car bombs. But it seems more likely that the soldiers are just there to make their presence known. They find some Mahdi Army propaganda in some of the cars in the parking lot and some green headbands traditionally worn by Sadr's militia. It's unclear what role the car dealer plays, or if he's a member of the militia.
Like searching for al Qaeda, it's difficult to know who is a true believer and who is simply affiliated with the groups for his own protection. Shiite militias, like the Mahdi Army, for example, occasionally may protect a Sunni neighbor. Sometimes Sunni or Shiite factions target members of their own sect, and criminals get into the act, too. "There's a lot about the enemy that is unclear," says Phillips. "Al Qaeda is the 16-year-old down the street with an AK-47 and one magazine; al Qaeda is the 60-year-old man with a cane that's paying other guys to do the work. [The enemy] is broad and amorphous."
Two days after the raid on the local Sadr headquarters, the 2-3 is targeting Shiite militia leaders, having located what the Americans think are two militia commanders in the small town of Jabella. It's a village that has seen little overt action in the war. In fact, the convoy nervously slows down when crossing one of two canal bridges in town after being told that they are the first recorded coalition vehicles to have traversed them. Driving along one of the canals, the soldiers spot a body floating face down in a canal, shot multiple times in the back.
The soldiers find the target houses packed with Shiite pilgrims, and it is unclear who is militia and who is not. They find a lone 60-mm mortar round buried near a pair of palm trees, where they suspected an entire cache of weapons was hidden. In another house, they find some homemade explosives, blasting caps, and other potential components for an IED. They take a few men in for questioning and let most of them go. Maj. Scott Green, a commander of the Stryker unit, says there is a constant debate over whom to let go and whom to arrest. "If we detain the wrong guy and take him away from his family for a week or two," he says, "then when he gets out, the appeals to join the militias sound even better than before."
Nightmares. There is, perhaps, no better example of the changing face of the enemy here than what the 2-3 faced at the beginning of Ashura, five weeks earlier. In what was surely one of the more horrific incidents of the war, the 2-3 was sent to recover a downed Apache helicopter, in an operation dubbed Fallen Angel. What began as a rescue-and-recovery mission soon turned to something quite different, as soldiers began taking heavy fire from what American and Iraqi officials say was a Shiite religious cult that had gathered fighters and women and children in a compound near Najaf. The Army asserts that the cult was plotting the assassination of nearly all the country's Shiite leaders.
What the soldiers saw after the Air Force bombarded the compound for several hours continues to haunt them. There were hundreds of bodies-men, women, and children. "There was one guy that was blown in half, and he had a half-eaten packet of crackers in his pocket," says a soldier, who helped clean up the compound after the attack. "We didn't know what to do, so ... we ate the crackers," he says, his voice cracking as he blows cigarette smoke off into the desert night. Pictures taken by soldiers and the Army's own after-action report show hundreds of the dead of all ages strewn around the defensive trenches and buildings of the compound, many still clutching weapons. "I still have nightmares about those kids," says one of the young medics who treated the survivors the day after the bombardment.
For members of the Stryker unit, the mission is made tougher with the knowledge that whatever gains are made can be wiped out by the next sectarian or terrorist attack. Most of all, soldiers lament, it's difficult to show to the increasingly disillusioned people back home that any progress is being made. "Americans like football, not soccer," says one senior U.S. commander involved in operational planning in the areas south of Baghdad. "In football, if the ball moves backwards, it's a penalty. But in soccer it's seen as a way to eventually move forward. If the American people could see those longer-term goals, perhaps they'd feel differently."
It's a fitting analogy, as far as it goes. But perhaps the more relevant point about the two sporting contests-and the war here-is that they are all ultimately waged against a ticking clock.
This story appears in the March 19, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.