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Stryker soldiers shift to reconstruction in Baqouba

Aug-11-2007 » Filed Under: 3/2 SBCT

KAREN MCCARTHY; For The News Tribune

BAQOUBA, Iraq – Stryker brigade leaders played a central role in organizing a key meeting of politicians, locals and military this week in an attempt to restore the political process and basic services to the Iraqi city of Baqouba.

Meanwhile, a peace accord was signed between 25 Sunni and Shiite tribal leaders who agreed to work together to keep al-Qaida in Iraq from returning to the city it once declared as its headquarters in the country.

The agreements might be one of the few pieces of good news coming out of Iraq as the Stryker brigade’s Baqouba operation, Arrowhead Ripper, moves toward its third month.

On Monday, four soldiers from the unit – the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division – were killed when a booby-trapped house exploded in the city of some 200,000 people, 35 miles north of Baghdad.

Despite this loss and the fact that most U.S. soldiers are still busy securing and clearing the city, the operation has shifted into a reconstruction phase.

Baqouba has been without basic services and aid from Baghdad since Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, proclaimed Baqouba his center of operations last year.

Military leaders and Iraqi community leaders, known as muqtars, say the city was fertile ground for recruiting Sunni men plagued by 70 percent unemployment who accepted money to plant improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. But strict enforcement of Islamic law, along with fear and intimidation tactics, eventually alienated the locals.

Baqouba citizens began to take back their city in March and fought the terrorists for eight days before running out of ammunition.

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