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U.S. and Iraq Step Up Effort to Block Insurgents' Routes

Oct- 3-2005 » Filed Under: 172nd SBCT

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By CRAIG S. SMITH, New York Times (subscription)

RAWA, Iraq - A few miles outside this sleepy river town, marked in many places with black spray-painted scrawls hailing the network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, called Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, American troops are building a desert outpost of plywood huts protected by dirt-filled blast barriers and surrounded by a high berm.

American military commanders see this effort as a crucial step in their strategy of cutting off the supply of foreign fighters that has fed the insurgency and threatens to tip the country into civil war.

Attention has focused recently on the northern city of Tal Afar, another entry point for foreign fighters, where 8,500 American and Iraqi troops have been fighting insurgents since early September.

But the greater battle lies ahead, in the towns in the Euphrates River valley, where for nearly two years Mr. Zarqawi's fighters have had free rein, blowing up police stations and building a network of safe houses to stockpile weapons, make car bombs and move fighters into the country from Syria. [...]

Rawa did not exactly send out the Welcome Wagon after the Stryker Brigade Combat Team from the Second Infantry Division arrived in late July. In little more than a month, the unit was hit by two dozen roadside bombs and eight suicide car bombs. It has been backed by two airstrikes; one on an armor-hardened safe house with a large weapons cache and another on a building booby-trapped with artillery shells. [...]


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