When Bush goes after AQ in Afghanistan, he gets the accolades of the world. But he cannot afford to adopt the same approach with the Iraqi civilians as he does with AQ. He needs to be careful in what he does in Fallujah etc. He can be more effective with propaganda in Iraq so as to counter the anti-US propaganda being perpetrated by the Shiite mullahs.
Violence in Sadr City Embitters Both Sides
By Karl Vick and Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 6, 2004; Page A01
BAGHDAD, April 5 -- To the soldiers inside the armored vehicles ringing with the sound of bullets, the night was one long ambush. It began with a sneak attack -- rocket-propelled grenades fired from an alley, shredding Humvees and the Americans inside -- then quickly escalated into a nightlong firefight. The battleground was the vast warren of narrow streets called Sadr City, but it suddenly reminded 1st Lt. Dave Swanson of Mogadishu.
"As soon as we came into the city, it's like the whole place came alive with fire," Swanson said of his arrival, in a 1st Cavalry Division Bradley Fighting Vehicle, in a district he used to regard with the arm's-length affection of a cop on the beat.
"In our minds, it totally changes our opinion about how we think about this area," said Swanson, from Owensville, Ohio. "In a day, we went from a humanitarian mission to combat. It's just amazing that the kids I talked with two, three days ago are the same ones that are throwing the rocks at us as hard as they can."
The people of Sadr City were no less amazed. When American tanks first rolled in a year ago, it was to the rhythmic cheers of the neighborhood's poor Shiite Muslim residents.
"When the Americans came, we applauded. We were giving the thumbs-up. We were jumping and shouting. I took a picture of Saddam Hussein and stomped on it," said Iqbal Jabbar, 38.
She lifted a foot to demonstrate on the dirty tile floor beside the hospital bed of her husband, a burly man who lay groaning, with bullet wounds in the stomach, arm, legs and feet. The fire that Americans returned into the suddenly mean streets of Sadr City caught Sabri Sharrati Badr behind the wheel of the family car; it caught 10-year-old Weaam Abdulatif Walhan in the doorway of her house; and it caught Ali Sagheer Kherallah walking home from work.
"Why do they do like this to us?" Jabbar asked.
The question was asked in a dozen different ways Monday at Chawadir Hospital, a Sadr City fixture that received 96 people wounded in the chaos that left at least 43 Iraqis dead and opened a chasm between a community and its occupiers.
U.S. commanders, who reported eight dead and 40 wounded, termed the battle for Sadr City the capital's largest and longest engagement since the fall of Baghdad almost a year ago. Between the 5 p.m. ambush and the calming of the area seven hours later after the decisive arrival of a tank column, about 1,000 American soldiers churned into the filthy streets of Sadr City to reassert authority in a slum that had become home to the Mahdi Army, an anti-American militia answering to a firebrand young Shiite cleric, Moqtada Sadr.
The militiamen who fired AK-47s from rooftops and rocket-propelled grenades from alleys probably numbered between 500 and 1,000, said Maj. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, which patrols Baghdad with the 1st Cavalry. In the heat of battle, estimates of enemy numbers become almost impossible, the general noted.
"You're not exactly sure whether you're being shot at by three people, or hundreds," said Dempsey, later adding: "There is no more confusing moment in a man's life than when he's being shot at."
But the confusion Sunday night ran both ways.
At one point, U.S. fire tore into an ambulance driven by Raad Diaheer Lazem, who took a bullet in the abdomen. Rounds from a .50-caliber machine gun punctured the vehicle 100 yards from the entrance to Chawadir Hospital, killing a pregnant woman with a leg wound and the 6-year-old son riding with her to the hospital.
"The lights were on, the siren -- all the things an ambulance should use in a battle zone," Lazem said. "I don't know why they shot at me. When I left the hospital they saw me. I was shuttling patients back and forth all night."
Muntahah Shekhawer, who works in the children's ward, broke down in tears as she recalled children carried into the emergency room. "I felt so bad I couldn't save them," she said. "Two, 3 years old. All of them shot in the head. Always in the head.
"Even when Baghdad fell, we didn't see anything like this."
The military outcome of Sunday's battle was clear enough. U.S. troops took control of Sadr City's major streets within seven hours, fighting past three major ambushes before driving militias out of police stations they had occupied in a challenge to U.S.-led forces' dominion over the district.
As a fighting force, Sadr's militia impressed neither U.S. commanders nor the Iraqi officers at one police station they occupied for three hours.
"Mahdi Army! They're not an army!" Officer Haider Raheem said of the unemployed young men who took over one station by brandishing grenades. "They're a bunch of looters." Before running off at the sound of approaching tanks, Raheem said, they scooped up everything from rifles to food for the prisoners. "Can you believe they even stole the water cup from the restroom?" he said.
"It was really a mob," Dempsey said. "A mob with a lot of weapons."
But the battle here is not only military. At Sadr City's main patrol station, Mahdi militiamen were welcomed by Iraqi police, who said the fighters gathered to help protect the property from looting.
"We are all brothers, me and the Mahdi Army," said one uniformed officer, who declined to give his name because he said he was not authorized to speak. "These are our people."
The differing receptions reflect the division of opinions among Sadr City residents. Many of the neighborhood's perhaps 2 million residents have transferred to Sadr, 30, the respect accorded his late father, a senior cleric believed killed by Hussein's government. His militantly anti-occupation rhetoric appeals to the district's many unemployed young men, who in the months following the U.S. invasion were formed into the Mahdi Army.
Many other Shiite residents, however, regard Sadr as an upstart. These people follow more senior -- and more moderate -- clerics, especially Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. But in a showdown between a prominent cleric and U.S. forces, no Shiite cleric can side publicly with Iraq's occupiers, at least to judge by their public statements issued in the wake of the fighting.
The statements did not mention Sadr but condemned civilian casualties, an issue near the heart of the matter for many residents. U.S. commanders, however, place it lower on their list of concerns.
"I'm more concerned about making sure that we've applied combat power wherever it happens to be applied and no place else," Dempsey said. "But we didn't start this fight and had no choice but to finish it, and we did so as carefully as we could.
"You've been to Sadr City. It is a densely populated place."
And it appeared to change overnight. Monday dawned cool and clear. Men loitered on the sidewalk, feeling the rays of the sun and the pulse of the street, finely strung the morning after.
An Apache attack helicopter skimmed overhead, and two girls and a boy of grade-school age aimed their fingers toward it, shouting "Pow! Pow! Pow!"
Two blocks from Sadr's headquarters, a column of oily black smoke went up from a tire burning in front of an M1-A1 Abrams tank. A torrent of children chucked rocks at it, as the turret swung back and forth in a metronome of menace.
A small boy ran down a side street shouting, "Jihad! Jihad!"
"Well, they see a lot of al-Jazeera [television] and they kind of emulate the Palestinians throwing rocks at the Israeli tanks," said Capt. George Lewis, standing behind a Bradley at the police station he had guarded since midnight.
In Chawadir Hospital, angry young men regarded the Palestinians as victims, not role models.
"They want to make us like Palestine, but no way," said Mohammad Abdulwahid, in a hospital ward where his uncle was the only patient not wounded the night before. "We will not be like Palestine."
Abdulwahid's gaze was flat as he contemplated the occupiers and vowed: "We will change their night into day."
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