U.S. Lowered Its Sights in Iraq Search
Information on Fugitives Poured In After Military Turned Focus to Mid-Level Operatives
washingtonpost.com
[Unclewest: This detailed piece underscores the bad guys fear of "Gitmo".]
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 23, 2003; Page A01
BAGHDAD -- After weeks of difficult searching for the top targets on the U.S. government's list of most-wanted Iraqi fugitives, U.S. military commanders two weeks ago switched the emphasis of their operations, focusing on capturing and gathering intelligence from low-level members of former president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party who had been attacking American forces, according to military officials.
That shift produced a flood of new information about the location of the Iraqi fugitives, which came just before the attack in which Hussein's two sons were killed by U.S. forces in the northern city of Mosul, the officials said.
"We shifted our focus from very high-level personalities to the people that are causing us damage," Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander of the U.S. military in the Middle East, said in an interview last weekend. Later, he told reporters in Baghdad: "In the past two weeks, we have been getting the mid-level leadership in a way that is effective."
The captured Baathists provided much new detail about their organization and contacts, officials here said. Some gave information about their financing and their means of communication, they added. Others identified members of their networks. Some described the routes and contacts that fugitive leaders were using. Threats to ship the recalcitrant captives to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay on the eastern end of Cuba were especially helpful in encouraging them to talk, officials said.
"You get a tip, you pull a couple of guys in, they start to talk," a Central Command official said. Then, based on that information, he continued, "you do a raid, you confiscate some documents, you start building the tree" of contacts and "you start doing signals intercepts. And then you're into the network."
"The people are now coming to us with information," Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commander of the Army's 4th Infantry Division, told Abizaid in a briefing this week at Odierno's headquarters in Tikrit, Hussein's home town. "Every time we do an operation, more people come in."
The 4th Infantry, operating in a region dominated by Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority, which was a major base of Hussein's support, conducted an average of 18 raids a day in recent weeks, he added.
The number and breadth of those follow-up raids also encouraged Iraqis who had been fearful of Baathist retaliation to speak up, officials here said.
Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said at a Baghdad news conference at which he confirmed the deaths of Hussein's sons that the Mosul raid resulted from "a walk-in" Monday night who "gave us the information that those two individuals were in that residence."
Until early June, when the Army launched the first of three major offensives in the an area known as the Sunni triangle north and west of Baghdad, U.S. officials didn't fully grasp the extent of Baathist resistance in the area, one Army official said.
The first offensive, dubbed Peninsula Strike, wasn't aimed so much at Baathists as at hostile remnants of the Iraqi military that remained active in the Sunni town of Thuluya, on the Tigris River between Baghdad and Tikrit. Yet when captives from that operation, from June 8 to 15, were interrogated, they began shedding unexpected light on the role that Baath Party operatives were playing in the region in supplying weapons, recruiting fighters and financing attacks on U.S. troops and bases, officials said.
Later in June, the next offensive, Desert Scorpion, began with scores of simultaneous raids aimed at, among other things, shutting down escape routes available to the former Iraqi leaders. It also went after the secret hoards of cash and jewelry that were financing their operations, and it sought to gather more information about the size and structure of Baathist resistance in the Sunni triangle.
That series of raids yielded information on what analysts said was a surprisingly large network of Hussein loyalists. "We call it the gang of 9,000," said a senior Army official, adding that that figure was just an estimate of the number of Baath Party operatives, former intelligence functionaries and their allies active in the Sunni region and in Baghdad.
As a result, U.S. commanders changed their minds about sending the entire 3rd Infantry Division home, as they had hoped to do by the end of last month. "As we began to see the extent of Baathist pockets in the Sunni triangle, it became clear that we couldn't draw down forces as quickly as we liked," said a senior Central Command official.
The raids also led to a sharp increase in U.S. casualties in June, with a soldier dying nearly every day. This official estimated that close to 60 percent of U.S. casualties came in the course of offensive operations by the U.S. troops or Baathist responses to those attacks.
The third offensive, Soda Mountain, conducted this month, was the first aimed at capturing and interrogating the resistance leaders -- the mid-level Baathists who U.S. officials had come to believe were behind most of the attacks on American forces. That operation began with a smaller series of raids by the 4th Division, called Ivy Serpent.
The mid-level operatives who were captured turned out to be knowledgeable about how the top targets on the U.S. list were evading capture. "There was a snowball effect," a senior Army official said .
Put together, the information helped breach the wall of protection around Hussein and his sons, a U.S. official said this week. He said the information the United States now has is far more solid than that which led to last month's Special Operations raid near the Syrian border. U.S. officials initially thought that raid might have hit Hussein or people close to him, but it appears only to have damaged the smuggling network that was being used by fugitives to travel in and out of Iraq.
Despite their recent success, U.S. military officials here caution that the fighting is far from over, and they predict that the nature of the attacks could worsen. They worry that the more they succeed, the more desperate Baathist remnants will become. So, they fear, the next phase of attacks might rely more on car bombs and other terrorist methods than on direct attacks on U.S. forces. Two officials here this week, for example, expressed concern about the possibility of an Oklahoma City-like bomb attack on U.S. officials and Iraqis working with them in the capital.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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