http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HI07Ak0
US military 'loses control' of key Iraqi province
By Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily

RAMADI, Iraq - The US military has lost control over volatile al-Anbar province, Iraqi police and residents say. The area to the west of Baghdad includes Fallujah, Ramadi and other towns that have seen the worst of military occupation, and the strongest resistance.

Despite massive military operations that destroyed most of Fallujah and much of cities such as Haditha, al-Qa'im and Ramadi, real control of the city now seems to be in the hands of local resistance fighters.

In losing control of this province, the United States will have lost control over much of Iraq. "We are talking about nearly a third of the area of Iraq," said Ahmed Salman, a historian from Fallujah. "Al-Anbar borders Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, and the resistance there will never stop as long as there are American soldiers on the ground."

Salman said the US military is working against itself. "Their actions ruin their goal because they use these huge, violent military operations which kill so many civilians, and make it impossible to calm down the people of al-Anbar."

The resistance appears to be in control of the province now. "No government official can do anything without contacting the resistance first," said a government official in Ramadi. "Even the governor used to [get] their approval for everything. When he stopped doing so, they issued a death sentence against him, and now he cannot move without American protection."

Recent weeks have brought countless attacks on US troops in Haditha, Ramadi and Fallujah and on the Baghdad-Amman highway. Several armored vehicles have been destroyed and dozens of US soldiers killed in al-Anbar province, according to Iraqi witnesses and the US Department of Defense.

Long stretches of the 550-kilometer Baghdad-Amman highway, which crosses al-Anbar, are now controlled by resistance groups. Other parts are targeted by highway looters.

"If we import any supplies for the US Army or Iraqi government, the fighters will take it from us and sell it in the local market," said trader Hayder al-Mussawi. "And if we import for the local market, the robbers will take it."

Witnesses in Ramadi say many of the attacks are taking place within their city. They say the US military recently asked citizens in al-Anbar to stop targeting them, and promised to withdraw to its bases in Haditha and Habaniyah (near Fallujah) soon, leaving the cities for Iraqi security forces to patrol.

"I do not think that is possible," said retired Iraqi police Brigadier-General Kahtan al-Dulaimi. "I believe no local unit could stand the severe resistance of al-Anbar, and it will be the last province to be handed over to Iraqi security forces."

According to the group Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, 964 coalition soldiers have been killed in al-Anbar, more than in any other Iraqi province.. Baghdad is second, with 665 coalition deaths.

Residents of Ramadi said the US military has knocked down several buildings near the government center in the city, the capital of the province.

In an apparent move to secure their offices, US Army and Marine Corps engineers have started to level a 500-meter stretch of lowrise buildings opposite the center. Abandoned buildings in this area have been used repeatedly to launch attacks on the government complex.

"They are trying to create a separation area between the offices of the puppet government and the buildings the resistance are using to attack them," a Ramadi resident said. "But now the Americans are making us all angry because they are destroying our city."

US troops have acknowledged their own difficulties in doing this. "We're used to taking down walls, doors and windows, but eight city blocks is something new to us," marine First Lieutenant Ben Klay, 24, said in the US Department of Defense newspaper Stars and Stripes.

In nearby Fallujah, residents are reporting daily clashes between Iraqi-US security forces and the resistance.

"The local police force, which used to be out of the conflict, is now being attacked," said resident Abu Mohammed. "Hundreds of local policemen have quit the force after seeing that they are considered a legitimate target by fighters."

The US forces seem to have no clear policy in the face of the sustained resistance.

"The US Army seems so confused in handling the security situation in Anbar," said historian Salman. "Attacks are conducted from al-Qa'im on the Syrian border to Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad, all the way through Haditha, Hit, Ramadi and Fallujah, on a daily basis."

He added: "A contributing factor to the instability of the province is the endless misery of the civilians, who live with no services, no infrastructure, random shootings and so many wrongful detentions."

According to the new Pentagon quarterly report "Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq", Iraqi casualties rose 51% in recent months. The report says the Sunni-based insurgency is "potent and viable".

The report says that in a period since the establishment of the new Iraqi government, between May 20 and August 11 this year, the average number of weekly attacks rose to nearly 800, almost double the number of attacks in early 2004.

Casualties among Iraqi civilians and security forces averaged nearly 120 a day during the period, up from 80 a day noted in the previous quarterly report. Two years ago they were averaging roughly 30 a day.

Last Thursday, the Pentagon announced that it was increasing the number of US troops in Iraq to 140,000, which is 13,000 more than the number five weeks ago.

At least 65 US soldiers were killed in August, with 36 of the deaths reported in al-Anbar. That brought the total number killed to at least 2,642.

(Inter Press Service)

Not since 1st Battalion, 6th Marines arrived this week.

Looks like Dahr Jamail is engaging in some wishful thinking, eh?

The cost of playing Whack-a-mole (phrase is courtesy of Sen. John McCain and I prefer to think of it as cost of guacamole).




http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story.php?...925-2064102.php


August 28, 2006

Anbar pullback: Those left behind do the best they can

By Sean D. Naylor
Staff writer


AWAH and BAGHDAD, Iraq — The call to reinforce Baghdad with U.S. forces originally destined for Anbar province may be essential to restore order in the Iraqi capital, but it risks sacrificing gains paid for with American blood in the western province.With sectarian violence spiraling out of control in Baghdad, Multi-National Forces-Iraq announced July 29 it was moving 3,700 troops from other locations in Iraq to reinforce units already in the capital.


Most came from 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, which was due to return to Fort Wainwright, Alaska, in August, but instead had its deployment stretched by up to 120 days. But at least one extra battalion-size unit sent to Baghdad was originally slated for Anbar, which stretches from Baghdad’s western suburbs away to the Syrian and Jordanian borders and forms the heart of Iraq’s Sunni insurgency.

Anbar has always been an “economy of force” theater for U.S. commanders, meaning they have never had as many troops as needed to control the province and defeat the insurgents. According to some officers, the only reasons senior leaders paid Anbar any attention was the presence there of al-Qaida in Iraq’s foreign jihadists. “If there were no foreign fighters, I don’t think anyone in Baghdad would give a flying frog about Anbar,” said Marine Lt. Col. Ron Gridley, executive officer for Regimental Combat Team 7, which is in charge of a swath of central and western Anbar. Despite limited forces, U.S. commanders felt they were making progress in the province. But the recent repositioning has left even fewer American troops there to hold down the fort while all eyes turn to Baghdad.

With Iraqi forces nowhere near ready to take the lead, U.S. officers are concerned that everything their troops sacrificed to achieve is at risk.

Occupying the battle space

Nowhere is this more so than Area of Operations Saber, a slab of northern Anbar that straddles the Euphrates and includes the towns of Rawah and Anah. From August 2005 to July 2006, the only U.S. force stationed in AO Saber, which is in RCT 7’s battle space, was a task force organized around 4th Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment, from the 172nd Stryker BCT. At 11,200 square miles, it was “the biggest AO for a battalion-size element” in western Iraq, said Capt. (P) Tom Hart, 4-14’s fire support officer.

Task Force 4-14 had fewer than 500 troops to control this vast area. “We’re an economy of force mission,” TF 4-14 commander Lt. Col. Mark Freitag said in a July interview. “If I had 800 soldiers that I could use in the battle space, maybe [I could have] forward presence all over the battle space.” The situation is much the same in the rest of RCT 7’s area. “We don’t really have the forces” to occupy the central part of Anbar, Gridley said in a July 13 interview, two weeks before the order came down to strip forces from RCT 7 to reinforce Baghdad. “The area is too large to occupy space,” he said.
U.S. forces thus are sometimes powerless to prevent insurgent operations. Gridley pointed on a map to a highway that ran parallel to the southern edge of RCT 7’s area of operations, where enemy activity was suspected around the gas stations.” We’re concerned there’s bad stuff going on there, but we can’t provide a force to provide security there 100 percent of the time,” he said.

When TF 4-14 arrived in AO Saber in August 2005 and set up headquarters just outside Rawah, they faced a daunting challenge. Rawah and Anah, whose citizens were almost all Sunni, were fertile breeding grounds for the Sunni-based insurgency. By mid-2005, both towns were in the grip of an al-Qaida in Iraq subsidiary called Jama’at al Tawid al Jihad, or Group for Monetheism and Jihad, staffed mainly by local Sunni insurgents. TF 4-14’s officers estimated that 98 percent of the locals gave passive support to the insurgents, meaning that they were reluctant to work with coalition forces, or even provide them information. “Passive resistance is just as damaging as active resistance sometimes, because you’ll shake my hand, but you won’t tell me there’s someone putting an IED [improvised explosive device] down the road,” Hart said. If someone engages in “active resistance,” — actually emplacing the IED, say — “you can kill that guy,” he said. To make things even harder for Freitag and his troops, both towns were relatively affluent, with good roads and functioning schools and sewage and water systems. Unlike Baghdad, power cuts were rare. There were few major civil-military projects that TF 4-14 could propose that might curry enough favor with the locals to make them turn against the insurgents. But TF 4-14 forged ahead using tried-and-true counterinsurgency methods — establishing a locally-recruited police force, which became a source of excellent human intelligence, and using TF 4-14’s two tactical human intelligence teams to recruit sources and informants, which helped build a more complete and nuanced picture of the insurgency and the official and unofficial power structures in the region. The task force’s intelligence shop then fused the human intelligence with other intel, which allowed troops to carry out precisely targeted raids to nab insurgents. These successes had the twin effects of not alienating innocent locals by having foreign soldiers barging into their homes, and boosting the population’s confidence in the capabilities of TF 4-14 and Iraqi security forces.

This approach often required the task force to exercise tactical patience, not launching raids as soon as intelligence on a target came in, but waiting to see what else might be revealed, and taking care whenever possible to approach “softly, softly” rather than with guns blazing. Exercising that patience was sometimes hard, and TF 4-14’s counterinsurgency campaign was not without cost. Eight soldiers were lost, while the destruction of 19 Strykers was a testament to the insurgents’ ability to adapt to a changing battlefield. “Words don’t accurately describe the emotion a squadron has when one of your soldiers is blown apart, and all you want to do is go in and clear that town,” Hart said. But each time, the squadron took a collective breath and kept on with classic counterinsurgency techniques and working by, with and through the local authorities whenever possible. To lash out in anger every time an American was killed, Hart said, would have been counter-productive in the long term.

Slowly, steadily

Slowly but steadily, TF 4-14 advanced against the JTJ. In the constitutional referendum in October, “Rawah had the largest per capita voter turnout in all of Anbar,” Hart said, although he noted this was achieved despite only one woman — a TF 4-14 interpreter — turning up to vote. Freitag slowly built a relationship with the Rawah town council. “It’s very important to get buy-in from the local senior leadership,” he said. In Anah, Freitag pitted Apache Company, 4th Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment — a Stryker unit attached to his task force — against a JTJ cell known as Abu Hamza, after its leader. By July, Apache had destroyed the cell, and JTJ had removed Abu Hamza from Anah in disgrace. The average number of roadside bomb attacks per month in AO Saber during the first six months of 2006 was 23, compared with 54 in October.

The clearest sign of progress has been Rawah’s booming economy and rapidly expanding population, which increased from 5,000 to almost 20,000 during TF 4-14’s year in AO Saber. Streets that had been deserted when the task force arrived gradually filled with shoppers and strollers.” There’s been an exponential increase in home construction, to the point where it has overloaded the electrical grid,” Hart said. “That success doesn’t come overnight. It comes from not overreacting to enemy activity. It comes from understanding that sometimes a bad government is better than no government.”

By July, TF 4-14’s one-year deployment was over. It was due to be replaced by 1st Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment, a Stryker outfit from 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, and identical to 4-14. Task Force 1-14 had been preparing for the mission for several months. Its commander, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Peterson, had visited Rawah in March on a “pre-deployment site survey,” and Freitag’s intelligence and operations officers sent weekly reports back to 1-14’s home post at Fort Lewis, Wash., keeping their presumed replacements updated on events in AO Saber.

With Freitag scheduled to hand the reins to Peterson July 28, the 1-14 commander and his advance party arrived in Rawah July 14, giving them two weeks to get up to speed and get running. But in a move that stunned leaders of each squadron, they were ordered to Baghdad a few days later as part of the reinforcement of the Iraqi capital. For 4-14, it meant a four-month extension of their deployment. For 1-14, it meant the effort they put into learning the complexities of AO Saber was wasted. To plug the gap in AO Saber, Multi-National Forces-Iraq sent a headquarters element and a company from the Marines’ 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force out of Twentynine Palms, Calif. The move put 3rd LAR, which had been at Rutbah, in western Anbar, at a disadvantage. Unlike 1-14, the Marines had no chance to do homework on Rawah and Anah. Successful counterinsurgency demands thorough understanding of local personalities and the complex interlocking networks of tribe, family, clan, religion, business and politics. But 3rd LAR’s command group arrived in Rawah with almost no knowledge of their newly assigned area of operations. Lt. Col. Matt Jones, the battalion commander, had about 10 days to prepare for an extremely challenging mission. Even had he been given all the time he needed to prepare, the small force he arrived with meant Jones had only a skeleton headquarters and about 40 percent of the combat power available to Freitag or Peterson, the 4-14 commander said. In other words, Jones had less than one Marine for every 100 square kilometers of his battle space. That left 3rd LAR unable to match 4-14th’s operational tempo, according to Freitag.
Jones was also missing critical “enablers” available to both 4-14 and 1-14, which had proven vital in the counterinsurgency fight in AO Saber. “We had the humint [human intelligence] teams that were more robust than what 3rd LAR was able to come with,” Freitag said. “We had an interrogation team that they were unable to replicate.” Another “huge difference” between the cavalry squadrons and 3rd LAR was the engineer platoon that the former had, which was equipped with Buffalo and Husky counter-IED vehicles, according to Freitag. The Marine battalion had already been in Iraq for several months, and several 4-14 officers felt their attitude upon arrival in Rawah was dismissive of the challenges posed by the insurgency there and of TF 4-14’s efforts to bring them up to speed.

That wasn’t Freitag’s impression. “Any time you get a unit that’s been in country for a substantial period of time, they may not feel that they need to know all of the intricate details, because they’re already comfortable with how they do business,” he said. “But [Lt.] Col. Jones was like a sponge. He did want to know everything. … I was very pleased about his desire to learn what I knew about the AO.”

But Jones and his men were to face a steep learning curve. The day after they took charge, a suicide truck bomb killed four Marines at a checkpoint. In late July a member of the Anah town council was assassinated. The insurgents began planting roadside bombs along routes TF 4-14 had kept clear for months. Jones got another company, giving him about 80 percent of the combat power that Freitag had, but on Aug. 20, an IED blew up a 3rd LAR Light Armored Vehicle, killing another two Marines and a Navy corpsman. Jones’ force has lost at least eight personnel in less than a month on the ground in AO Saber, despite not having the forces to conduct as many operations as TF 4-14. That is the same number of troops killed in action as TF 4-14 sustained over the course of the previous year.

Neither Jones nor an RCT 7 spokesman answered questions e-mailed to RCT 7 for this article. That a reduction in force in AO Saber was followed by a rise in insurgent violence should not have come as a surprise. The same dynamic had occurred less than a year previously, in November, when most of TF 4-14 departed Rawah for three weeks to northwestern Anbar to support RCT 7’s Operation Steel Curtain, leaving only a platoon in Rawah. While the operation succeeded in reducing insurgent violence in Qaim and other towns close to the Syrian border, this was partly because insurgents took advantage of the vacuum left in towns like Rawah, Anah and Ramadi and moved there instead, according to TF 4-14 officers.

Roadside bomb attacks in AO Saber climbed from 54 in October to 92 in November. This reflected what many have come to call the “whack-a-mole” effect, in which moving forces to one part of Iraq just leaves a vacuum for insurgents to fill. Gridley compared the approach to squeezing a balloon. “These guys went elsewhere,” he said. The U.S. military does not have enough forces in Iraq to conduct operations like Steel Curtain everywhere at once, Hart said. Just filling the gap left by 1-14 in AO Saber with Jones’ force meant “you’re accepting risk somewhere else” — such as the parts of Anbar that Jones’ companies had been covering previously, Freitag said.
Decision and Risk

Few are willing to say so publicly, but TF 4-14’s soldiers worry that the gains they made in Rawah and Anah over the past year, bought with the lives of eight of their comrades, have been put at risk by the decision to use TF 1-14 to reinforce Baghdad. “A lot of people felt like they worked hard over the past year for something and now it was not receiving the same attention that they were able to give it,” Freitag acknowledged. However, he said, he tried to convince them that it made sense to make Baghdad the priority. “Western Anbar has been an economy of force … and our senior leaders have continued to treat it as an economy of force, because the mission is here in Baghdad,” he said. “If Baghdad doesn’t succeed, then Iraq isn’t going to succeed. If we have to buy time and treat western Anbar as an economy of force in order to save Baghdad, then that’s the right answer.”

Spokesmen for MNF-I did not respond to e-mailed questions about the rationale for pulling forces from Anbar to reinforce Baghdad, rather than deploying more troops into Iraq to buttress the coalition effort in the capital. But there is little doubt among officers familiar with Anbar that the strategy has left the violent province vulnerable. But no one is declaring defeat. “I don’t intend to give up this AO without a fight,” RCT 7 leader Col. W. Blake Crowe told the RCT 7 and TF 4-14 staffs July 31 at his headquarters in Al Asad Air Base, alluding to the possibility that he might lose another battalion to the fight in Baghdad.



It is cold comfort for the U.S. officers in Anbar trying to achieve victory with fewer troops, but their situation is almost a counterinsurgency cliché. In “Counterinsurgency Warfare — Theory and Practice,” a slim 1964 volume by French writer David Galula that is now required reading at the Army’s Command and General Staff College, the author states: “The junior officer in the field who, after weeks and months of endless tracking, has at last destroyed the dozen guerrillas opposing him, only to see them replaced by a fresh dozen … the general who has ‘cleared’ Sector A but screams because ‘they’ want to take away two battalions for sector B … these are typical illustrations of the plight of the counterrevolutionary.” As Galula’s countrymen say, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
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Color added by poster.

I don't like the menu.

lenal