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U.S. Troops Lock Down Much of East Baghdad

Feb-11-2007 » Filed Under: 3/2 SBCT

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr., The New York Times

BAGHDAD, Feb. 11 — American troops locked down a large industrialized area of eastern Baghdad all day today, while Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq, without indicating how he would do it, vowed to speed the deployment of Iraqi forces throughout the war-ravaged capital.

American commanders described the operation today as an early taste of large-scale weeklong sweeps through eastern Baghdad intended to take back some measure of control from militias. Troops from the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team took automatic rifle fire from insurgents as they searched for a car-bomb manufacturing site on a violent sectarian fault line between a Shiite enclave and the bleak and insurgent-ridden Sunni Arab neighborhood of Fadhil.

Six months ago, American forces began a major operation to curb rampant sectarian killings across the city. But that failed, and commanders said efforts to conduct meaningful operations in Sadr City were stymied. Sadr City is the eastern Baghdad home base of the Mahdi Army, the militia controlled by the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, Mr. Maliki’s most powerful and important backer.

Now, the looming operations in eastern Baghdad are a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s new security plan that adds 21,000 combat troops to Iraq, a move viewed by some as a last-ditch effort to keep the country from deteriorating into a full-scale civil war. Eastern Baghdad “is a focal point for us right now,” said Brig. Gen. John Campbell, deputy commander of coalition troops in Baghdad. American-led forces said they had conducted 3,400 patrols and detained 140 suspects in the past week. [...]

As he spoke, the crackle of automatic gunfire erupted to the southwest and American troops and Iraqis dove behind nearby vehicles. Taking cover behind his 19-ton Stryker armored vehicle, the brigade commander, Col. Steve Townsend, looked through the sight of his M-4 rifle and drew a bead on several suspicious men a few hundred yards away.

“See the radio antenna?” he asked one of his soldiers, as they both looked through their sights. “Two fingers from that. A cluster of heads.” No one returned fire, as it did not become clear who had fired the shots.


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