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Soldiers raid Iraq city for insurgents; success cloudy

Jun- 6-2005 » Filed Under: 1/25 SBCT


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BY KIRSTEN SCHARNBERG, Chicago Tribune

BAIJI, Iraq - (KRT) - By military estimates, the odds in this unruly city situated at the apex of the Sunni Triangle should be firmly in favor of the Americans.

In a nine-hour raid that began well before dawn Monday, more than 600 soldiers stormed house by house through some of Baiji's most troublesome neighborhoods. Armed with a list of "high value targets" that included names, aliases and physical descriptions, they searched for the "less than a couple dozen" insurgents who the top Army commander here estimates have made this dusty, dangerous city a hotbed for roadside bombs, vehicle bombs and suicide bombers.

But military success in Iraq today is no longer solely determined by odds, by troop strength or even by who has more physical resources on the battlefield.

"It'd be nice to be able to come back ... at the end of a mission and say, `We blew up this many tanks today; we policed up this many weapons caches today; we captured or killed this many bad guys today,'" said Lt. Col. Philip Logan, commander of the 1st Battalion of the 103rd Armor Regiment, the unit that overseas Baiji and its surrounding area. "But it is no longer nearly that simple or that cut and dried. It takes a long while to figure out what we've got and how successful we've been."

What is left then is an imperfect system of imperfect patrols in an imperfect search for the enemy. [...]

Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, a top commander in Mosul, a restive city north of Baiji, likes to explain the phenomenon by quoting an Iraqi expression one of his detainees told him: "If death comes to greet you at your door, introduce him to your brother."

For nearly nine hours, soldiers went house to house in a part of the city believed to be used by al Hamdani and his deputies, who are said to have bodyguards and multiple safe havens. [...]


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