By Ahmad Fadam
Agence France-Presse, 31 August 2006
It was too soon to be sure, and the threat of violence still hung heavy in the hot Baghdad air, but the US troops bargaining for fruit and chatting with locals seemed to have made a minor breakthrough.
The neighbourhood of Ameriyah, once a virtual no-go zone roamed by sectarian death squads and anti-American insurgents, was extending a nervous hand to its new protectors, a squad of American armoured cavalry troopers.
"We're going to block off these roads," Major Scott Coulson explained to an Iraqi father and his boisterous kids on Monday. "The only two ways into Ameriyah will be on Market Street, and we'll see how that works."
In Washington the debate has been about how quickly US troops should quit Iraq, while Ameriyah has seen hundreds more GIs, backed by the Iraqi army, deployed in response to an eruption of sectarian violence.
With Iraq's post-war government struggling to promote a national peace plan, military units are doing the job piecemeal, walling in Baghdad suburbs behind concrete barriers and building local relationships with street-level leaders.
"We're going to put in an Iraqi police station," Coulson explained to the curious locals who came out to meet them as his men stopped at a streetside store to buy fruit and explain their new strategy.
"Now people don't particularly trust the Iraqi police, and we understand that," he said. "We will recruit the police directly from Ameriyah.
"They will be trained, they will join the Iraqi police force, but they will not be going off to other places. They will be stationed here and they will continue to work in Ameriyah," he told a dubious local man.
"Okay. It's okay," said the Iraqi, shaking hands tentatively with the US major.
"Football," cried one of his sons in English, perhaps because the American's imposing helmet and body armour reminded him of US sportsmen.
"Yeah, football," Coulson replied.
In the aftermath of an explosion in February, caused when insurgents broke into a holy Shiite mosque in the Iraqi city of Samarra and bombed its golden dome, the fury that had simmered between Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites since the fall of ex-president Saddam Hussein boiled over.
What followed was a violent outpouring of sectarian rage, stirred by self-interested political factions. The killing briefly overwhelmed the US forces' plan to replace themselves with newly trained Iraqi colleagues.
Baghdad's sewers and canals began to fill up with the dead. Death squads snatched victims from the streets, bombs ripped through markets and rival suburbs fought mortar duels over the heads of powerless government forces.
On June 14, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki unveiled his response: Operation Together Forward. After a lacklustre start, thousands of US reinforcements, some of them due to fly home, poured into the capital to beef up security.
Flashpoint suburbs like Ameriyah were targeted. Concrete barriers were thrown up to seal all but tightly controlled routes, thousands of homes were searched for weapons and contacts made with local councils.
In Ameriyah, Coulson's 8th Squadron of the 10th Cavalry regiment organized a massive clean-up of the filth and debris that has accumulated in Baghdad's street since the March 2003 invasion, paying local teams to boost employment.
Meetings were held with the local council to plan tactics. Among them, a Saddam-era bomb shelter was refitted as an Iraqi police station and all but two entrances to the district were blocked to road traffic.
"There was killings going on before. They killed people in front of my door, and I was yelling and screaming to tell them not to, but there was no use," said an elderly Ameriyah resident, Um Mohammed al-Khafaji.
"Every day we used to find a new dead body in the street. We couldn't go out. We were afraid. But now, since the Americans came, thank God, things are getting better," she said.
Ameriyah is a mixed but largely Sunni area, where many resent or violently oppose US intervention. They also fear Iraq's new police, which are controlled by a Shiite-led interior ministry and often accused of death squad links.
The irony of the current surge in violence, in which the once dominant Sunni minority now often finds itself in the firing line, is that it has pushed besieged districts back into the arms of the once-hated Americans.
Many Sunnis in war-torn west Baghdad now want US troops to protect them -- and help repair infrastructure and create jobs -- or at least they say so when reporters turn up under the protection of heavily-armed American units.
"The coming days will be better. We need security and fair-minded people, to live in comfort," said 37-year-old grocer Rezwan Faisal.
Coulson is cautious about proclaiming success, noting there had been two as yet unexplained explosions in Ameriyah the day before, but US commanders boast that Baghdad's daily murder rate is down 40 percent this month.
In the meantime, the troops go about their dual task: putting physical walls around Baghdad suburbs, while breaking down psychological walls of suspicion between themselves and the traumatised population.
---------------------------
Citation: Ahmad Fadam. "Making friends at last? US troops meet nervous Iraqis," Agence France-Presse, 31 August 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060831/wl_mideast_afp/iraqunrestusbaghdad
---------------------------