U.S. Troops Meet Iraqis Peacefully
By DEXTER FILKINS
DIWANIYA, Iraq, March 30 — The first Iraqis walked in off the plains at sunrise, a group of nomads with their camels in tow. Then came a young farmer, bearing a white flag.
"I have come to get water," said the man, Khalid Juwad, staring into the rifles of several young marines. "I am willing to cooperate."
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And so the Americans lowered their guns, and Mr. Juwad walked across the front lines, becoming one of the first Iraqis to meet American soldiers here in something other than combat.
With so much of the American effort spent racing across empty deserts, the war has so far only rarely brought American soldiers and Iraqi civilians together peacefully.
Today, that began to change, when Mr. Juwad and more than a dozen other Iraqis, cut off from their homes by several days of fighting, came out of their hiding places in the plains east of here. Thirsty and bedraggled, they said they had decided to test the American assurance that their invasion is a benevolent one.
Mr. Juwad had a very specific request. He wanted to turn on his irrigation pump, which was behind the American lines, to water his barley fields.
"Sure, I think we can turn your pump on," said Maj. Mark Stainbrook, a United States marine.
After so many days of fighting, the scene that played out here seemed, just possibly, to offer the promise of better things to come.
With Iraqi fighters increasingly employing guerrilla tactics, American soldiers face a growing burden of separating the Iraqi civilians they want to help from the Iraqi fighters they want to defeat.
The encounter today between the marines and the Iraqi farmers seemed to suggest that such a distinction, though fraught with difficulty, might be successfully made.
Mr. Juwad and his family live in Hamza, a village on the other side of Highway 1, the road that bisects the area here on its way to Baghdad. On the same highway rest several thousand American soldiers, who have stopped here after driving 200 miles from Kuwait.
As Mr. Juwad waited for the soldiers to gather the tools needed to jump-start his pump, he expounded on his place in the Iraqi nation. As a follower of the Shia branch of Islam, Mr. Juwad said, he knew firsthand the evils of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim. He began a chorus of denunciations.
"Saddam has given us nothing, only suffering," said Mr. Juwad, with his cousin, Raad, nodding in assent. Mr. Juwad said he had four uncles who were in Mr. Hussein's jails, and he said he had deserted from the Iraqi Army three times in recent years.
"If the Americans want to get rid of Saddam, that's O.K. with me," he said. "The only thing that would bother me is if they don't finish the job. Then Saddam will come back, like he did in 1991."
Mr. Juwad, a 22-year-old father of one, thinks his views are shared by the majority of Iraqis living nearby, including the people in this nearest city. The resistance against the American forces here, he said, came from militias created in the days before the American invasion.
Mr. Juwad said the militia leaders had come from Baghdad and dragooned as many as 3,000 local people into military service. His account could not be independently confirmed.
Mr. Juwad's opinions appeared to be shared by the other Iraqis who live and work in the fields near Highway 1. A pair of Western reporters who walked two miles from the American base found themselves greeted warmly and invited into the homes of Iraqis they had passed along the way.
"The Arab people treat their guests well," said Abu Hamid, a farmer who invited a reporter and a photographer into his tent. "Americans are more than guests."
Yet whether the good will evident here can be nurtured by the American military is another matter. There were signs today that the sprawling military contingent moving northward through Iraq may be too focused on matters of war to do much in the way of winning over the Iraqis.
When Mr. Juwad came to the American front lines for water, for instance, his every movement was watched through the gunsights of American soldiers. When he said he wanted to cross the highway to get to his village, where his wife and children, who did not know what had happened to him, were, he was told no. When Mr. Juwad inquired about being reimbursed for his car, which was hit by a tank shell in the battle on Tuesday, he was told not to expect much.
"There is a war going on now," Major Stainbrook told him.
In sweeps through the area, marines handcuffed one of Mr. Juwad's brothers, Ahmed, and detained him for about an hour. They questioned him about his links to Iraq's power structure and his knowledge of Iraqi military activity. In a country where detention at the hands of the authorities can often mean torture or death, Ahmed seemed grateful that he had not been mistreated.
"The Americans were very nice," he said.
As Mr. Juwad entered and departed the American camp, Cobra gunships shadowed his moves and armored cars drove alongside.
One of the American soldiers coming out to greet Mr. Juwad carried a device called a "phraselator," a small computer that barks out stock Arabic phrases like, "Do you speak English?" and "I need to search your car." The phraselator speaks, but it does not translate Iraqi replies into English.
Still, for all the clumsiness of the American approach, there was good will that did not go unappreciated.
The marines who greeted Mr. Juwad had promised to help him start his irrigation pump, and start it they did. Major Stainbrook lifted two batteries from American Humvees and hooked them up to Mr. Juwad's pump. After several tries, the Russian-built machine kicked, sputtered and roared, finally flooding the canals that water the fields.
The American help, it seemed, gave Mr. Juwad a moment of relief in a difficult week.
"All I wanted was to get some water from my canal," he said.
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