- Reaction score
- 64
- Points
- 530
Seem's like this strategy will be applied to Baghdad with the recent announcement to surround the city with a trench and a limited number of access points.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/18/wiraq18.xml&site=5&page=0
Adhamiyah looks like nowhere else in Baghdad.
The streets of this district pressed against the east bank of the Tigris are clean and streetside windows are not boarded up.Children even play football down side-streets, a rare sight when fear of sectarian shootings or kidnap is rampant.
When The Daily Telegraph visited the area over the weekend with Colonel Thomas Vail, commander of 508th Regimental Combat Team in east Baghdad, locals were quick to approach him and thank him for the improved security: Shia militias armed with Kalashnikovs had previously driven through most nights.
For the last three and a half years, Adhamiyah has been the centre of the Sunni insurgency in Baghdad. A rundown district, US troops called it "Little Fallujah" due to the near-daily roadside bombs and sniper attacks.
That was then. In an unlikely reversal, Adhamiyah is now one of Baghdad's safest areas, a place where Americans patrol on foot and where the number of bodies found dumped on the roadside in sectarian killings has halved.
For it is at the heart of the US military's new strategy for seizing back control of the capital. In August, 12,000 US and Iraqi troops launched the first co-ordinated counter insurgency operation — Operation Together Forward — to be conducted in the city. Their orders: to "retake Baghdad".
Unlike previous operations, which emphasised the need to "locate and kill" the enemy, it put into practice the "ink spot" theory, which aims to secure specific areas and provide security to win the confidence of the people. Once achieved, the secure zone could then spread as an ink spot spreads when dropped into a bucket of water.
Adhamiyah is the centre of the "ink spot" in east Baghdad. Last month a brigade of troops started methodically searching 11,000 buildings there. Around 30,000 cubic metres of the rubbish which had previously covered the streets was taken away. Areas were cleared for electrical substations and half a dozen clinics are planned.
All but seven roads leading into the area were closed off and those manned by fortified checkpoints. Iraqi troops now stand at almost street corner.
During his visit, Col Vail spent an hour hearing the concerns of residents. One man showed him the bullet holes in the side of his house beside the Tigris that had come from a Shia neighbourhood on the western bank.
"Show me where they shot from," the colonel said. "We will put a stop to this."
"If Saddam was brought back he would ensure security," a young man told him.
"But don't you appreciate that you can now say political things to those in charge without being killed for it?" the colonel asked in reply.
It was the terror of the Shia death squads that made Adhamiyah ideal as the first secure zone. Fear led many Sunnis to conclude that only the US could save them.
Suspicion of the Shia-dominated Iraqi police, which Sunnis accuse of conducting sectarian murders, has meant none are now allowed within the cordon the US and Iraqi army have established around the neighbourhood.
But despite the clear success in Adhamiyah, it is an area of a few square miles only in a city of seven million people and outside the cordon the killing continues. One hundred and eighty bodies have been found in Baghdad since Wednesday.
Work has begun to extend the "ink spot" north-east into the districts of Risala, Shaab and Urr but the process of house clearing and gaining trust is a slow one.
And time is not on the coalition's side. To the east of Adhamiyah a rival "ink spot" already exists. That is Sadr City, the vast Shia slum loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-Western firebrand cleric.
There, his militia, the Mahdi army, provide security and his followers have set up schools, relief programmes and even their own judicial system. That "ink spot" is more established and spreading far faster in Baghdad than the American one, its influence already having spread to the south-eastern Baghdad district of Zafraniyah and most cities in the south.
It is a place where the US and Iraqi government forces are not welcome and, when Colonel Vine's convoy drove into Sadr City on its patrol yesterday, there were no waves or smiles as in Adhamiyah. Instead his greeting was a rock bouncing off the side of the rear vehicle.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/18/wiraq18.xml&site=5&page=0
Adhamiyah looks like nowhere else in Baghdad.
The streets of this district pressed against the east bank of the Tigris are clean and streetside windows are not boarded up.Children even play football down side-streets, a rare sight when fear of sectarian shootings or kidnap is rampant.
When The Daily Telegraph visited the area over the weekend with Colonel Thomas Vail, commander of 508th Regimental Combat Team in east Baghdad, locals were quick to approach him and thank him for the improved security: Shia militias armed with Kalashnikovs had previously driven through most nights.
For the last three and a half years, Adhamiyah has been the centre of the Sunni insurgency in Baghdad. A rundown district, US troops called it "Little Fallujah" due to the near-daily roadside bombs and sniper attacks.
That was then. In an unlikely reversal, Adhamiyah is now one of Baghdad's safest areas, a place where Americans patrol on foot and where the number of bodies found dumped on the roadside in sectarian killings has halved.
For it is at the heart of the US military's new strategy for seizing back control of the capital. In August, 12,000 US and Iraqi troops launched the first co-ordinated counter insurgency operation — Operation Together Forward — to be conducted in the city. Their orders: to "retake Baghdad".
Unlike previous operations, which emphasised the need to "locate and kill" the enemy, it put into practice the "ink spot" theory, which aims to secure specific areas and provide security to win the confidence of the people. Once achieved, the secure zone could then spread as an ink spot spreads when dropped into a bucket of water.
Adhamiyah is the centre of the "ink spot" in east Baghdad. Last month a brigade of troops started methodically searching 11,000 buildings there. Around 30,000 cubic metres of the rubbish which had previously covered the streets was taken away. Areas were cleared for electrical substations and half a dozen clinics are planned.
All but seven roads leading into the area were closed off and those manned by fortified checkpoints. Iraqi troops now stand at almost street corner.
During his visit, Col Vail spent an hour hearing the concerns of residents. One man showed him the bullet holes in the side of his house beside the Tigris that had come from a Shia neighbourhood on the western bank.
"Show me where they shot from," the colonel said. "We will put a stop to this."
"If Saddam was brought back he would ensure security," a young man told him.
"But don't you appreciate that you can now say political things to those in charge without being killed for it?" the colonel asked in reply.
It was the terror of the Shia death squads that made Adhamiyah ideal as the first secure zone. Fear led many Sunnis to conclude that only the US could save them.
Suspicion of the Shia-dominated Iraqi police, which Sunnis accuse of conducting sectarian murders, has meant none are now allowed within the cordon the US and Iraqi army have established around the neighbourhood.
But despite the clear success in Adhamiyah, it is an area of a few square miles only in a city of seven million people and outside the cordon the killing continues. One hundred and eighty bodies have been found in Baghdad since Wednesday.
Work has begun to extend the "ink spot" north-east into the districts of Risala, Shaab and Urr but the process of house clearing and gaining trust is a slow one.
And time is not on the coalition's side. To the east of Adhamiyah a rival "ink spot" already exists. That is Sadr City, the vast Shia slum loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-Western firebrand cleric.
There, his militia, the Mahdi army, provide security and his followers have set up schools, relief programmes and even their own judicial system. That "ink spot" is more established and spreading far faster in Baghdad than the American one, its influence already having spread to the south-eastern Baghdad district of Zafraniyah and most cities in the south.
It is a place where the US and Iraqi government forces are not welcome and, when Colonel Vine's convoy drove into Sadr City on its patrol yesterday, there were no waves or smiles as in Adhamiyah. Instead his greeting was a rock bouncing off the side of the rear vehicle.
