By James Glanz and Edward Wong
New York Times
24 November 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 23 - Thousands of American, British and Iraqi troops began a new offensive sweep on Tuesday across a region south of Baghdad known as the triangle of death. The area earned its fearsome reputation as a haven for thieves, killers, crime families and terrorists, as well as insurgents who fled Falluja before the fighting started there.
The operation began with 11 simultaneous early-morning raids in Jabella, west of the Euphrates River and about 40 miles south of Baghdad, said Col. Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is leading the effort.
The new push can be seen as the opening of a third front - after the invasion of Falluja and more limited operations in the north around Mosul - by American-led forces against the insurgency. Officials said it would involve 2,000 to 3,000 American marines, soldiers and sailors, more than 1,000 members of Iraqi security forces and 850 members of the Black Watch, a British infantry battalion.
The so-called triangle of death, just north of the ruins of Babylon in Babil Province, is now best known for gruesome mass killings, insurgent hideouts, and ruthless attacks on Iraqi Army bases and police stations. But with the rousting of hundreds or possibly thousands of dedicated insurgents from Falluja before the American invasion and capture of the city last week, the role played by this area as a transit and resupply district for insurgents has become even more troublesome, Colonel Johnson said.
"We know that some of them headed in our direction before the Falluja battle," he said, citing intelligence reports. "We're going to try to isolate them. Then we're going to bounce all over. We're not going to hit just one area. We're going to hit a multiplicity of targets so that they have no safe haven that they can go to."
Military officials in the province said nearly 250 insurgents had been captured there in the past three weeks, including 32 on Tuesday in the Jabella raids.
The area is a curious mixture of impoverished villages and opulent residential compounds, many of them along the Euphrates, artifacts of a Sunni-dominated area that was favored under Saddam Hussein.
A recent drive through a central street in Mahmudiya with a police captain found a barricaded and largely abandoned police station whose facade was severely damaged from a bomb attack in which several Iraqi police officers died. The drive passed through a close-packed, grimy market of soda stands, groceries and repair shops where the squad car received only hard stares.
The police captain, who had been in place for several months, said he had never gotten out of his car or even talked to anyone on the street because it was too dangerous. He estimated there had been little police presence on the streets for about a year.
Capt. David Nevers, a spokesman for the Marine unit, said that because the area was rural and dotted with villages and towns, operations would be different from the urban combat of Falluja and Mosul. The new operation will focus on what Captain Nevers described as "precision raids," carried out with varying combinations of the American, British and Iraqi forces. The first operation, in Jabella, was led by an Iraqi commando team that was backed up by marines, officers said.
As recently as mid-October, the unit conducted a major sweep of the same area, but horrific crimes there have continued, typified by the kidnappings, beheadings and shootings of local security officers, sometimes as many as 10 at a time.
Asked how the American-led forces would proceed differently this time, Captain Nevers said that with the recent addition of the Black Watch and Iraqi forces, they would be able to "squeeze the insurgents into a tighter box."
"We're not naļ¶„ enough to think there are not avenues of escape," Captain Nevers said, "but the cordon is tighter than it's ever been."
Although the offensive, called Operation Plymouth Rock, partly in deference to Thanksgiving, is largely military in nature, Colonel Johnson has emphasized the sway of local crime families in the area. He said that both raids and undercover operations would focus on decimating those families.
"There is a lot of crime lords and bosses and mini-bosses and guys who intimidate the neighborhood," Colonel Johnson said.
He said that understanding the crime families, whether they sell weaponry or just control some piece of local turf, was critical to stopping the insurgency in the area.
As the operations began in the south, fighting continued to fade in Falluja. But new casualty figures released by the Pentagon showed that 868 American troops had been wounded since the Falluja offensive began on Nov. 8, and 9,326 since the American-led invasion of Iraq last year. The military said last week that at least 51 Americans had been killed and 425 wounded in Falluja.
In Mosul, Tuesday was a rare day when no bodies of people killed by insurgents were found, said Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, commander of the First Battalion, 24th Infantry. In the previous five-day period in Mosul, at least 28 bodies had been discovered - some beheaded, some shot execution-style in the head, some burned or otherwise mutilated.
The American military said its patrols had discovered a hoard of insurgent weapons about 30 miles south of Mosul on Monday, including 15,000 antiaircraft rounds, 4,600 hand grenades, 144 grenade launchers and 25 surface-to-air missiles. It ranked as one of the largest weapons caches ever uncovered in northern Iraq.
In Baghdad, the top aide to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who led an intense anti-American insurgency in the spring, said Tuesday that the interim Iraqi government was violating a peace agreement by continuing to arrest senior officials in his organization.
The aide, Ali Smesim, said at a news conference that two powerful Shiite political parties, the Dawa Islamic Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, were pushing for the arrests. Both parties have prominent positions in the interim government and were favored by the Americans before and after the invasion of March 2003.
Yet, even as Mr. Smesim was complaining about the arrests, all the major Shiite parties, including Mr. Sadr's group, were busy negotiating to form a powerful coalition to present a unified slate of candidates for the national elections, which are planned for Jan. 30.
Mr. Smesim's remarks came after Iraqi police arrested a senior Sadr official, Sheik Hashem Abu Reghif, last Friday in the holy city of Najaf. The government said it had acted after several Iraqis filed a court complaint accusing the sheik of detaining and torturing them.
Mr. Smesim said 160 people from the Sadr organization were still in prison, despite a peace agreement reached in October under which they were to be released.
Mr. Sadr has been one of the biggest thorns in the side of the Americans, igniting uprisings across the south and in Baghdad in April and August and delivering fiery sermons denouncing the American presence.
The American military routed Mr. Sadr's militia in Najaf this summer. In October, Mr. Sadr agreed to try to disarm his militia of thousands, the Mahdi Army, after weeks of American airstrikes in Sadr City, a sprawling area of 2.2 million people in northeastern Baghdad that is Mr. Sadr's strongest base of support.
Sabah Kadhum, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said the government would continue to arrest clerics if they incite violence. The arrests of the Sadr officials have nothing to do with political rivalries, he said.
"The government has no political stand in all of this," he said. "It's not a political matter. It's more about incitement. The government is arresting clerics who incite people."
Also on Tuesday, a spokesman for Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar, the Iraqi president and a Sunni, said that Mr. Yawar had formed a political party to run in the elections, the Iraqis' Party, and that it included the current ministers of defense and industry.
The clash between Mr. Sadr and the two major Shiite establishment parties comes as the most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is trying to bring all the Shiite political groups together to present a unified slate of candidates for the elections.
Shiites make up at least 60 percent of the population in Iraq but were subjugated for centuries by the Sunni Arabs, a historical trend that Ayatollah Sistani is determined to change.
When asked whether Mr. Sadr would join a Shiite coalition, Mr. Smesim said, "We're asking the Sadr followers to stay calm so a Shiite war will not erupt," Mr. Smesim added.
Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Mosul, Iraq, for this article.
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Citation: James Glanz and Edward Wong, "US Expanding Iraqi Offensive in Violent Area," New York Times, 24 November 2004.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/24/international/middleeast/24iraq.html?pagewanted=print&position=
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