What the president calls ‘kicking ass’ the soldiers call something else.
“It’s just a slow, somewhat government-supported sectarian cleansing,” said Maj. Eric Timmerman, the battalion’s operations officer.
That describes the situation in the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadiyah, formerly a ‘bustling middle-class district, popular with Sunni officers in Saddam Hussein’s military.’ Joshua Partlow spent some time with the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, and reported on what he saw.
The streets of Sadiyah are deserted again. To the right, power lines slump down into the dirt. To the left, what was a soccer field is now a pasture of trash, combusting and smoking in the sun. Packs of skinny wild dogs trot past walls painted with slogans of sectarian hate.
A bomb crater blocks one lane, so they cross to the other side, where houses are blackened by fire, shops crumbled into bricks. The remains of a car bomb serve as hideous public art. Sgt. Victor Alarcon’s Humvee rolls into a vast pool of knee-high brown sewage water — the soldiers call it Lake Havasu, after the Arizona spring-break party spot — that seeps in the doors of the vehicle and wets his boots.
“When we first got here, all the shops were open. There were women and children walking out on the street,” Alarcon said this week. “The women were in Western clothing. It was our favorite street to go down because of all the hot chicks.”
That was only fourteen months ago. In fourteen months the neighborhood has been totally destroyed. Everything these soldiers have tried has failed to stop the descent into hell.
American soldiers estimate that since violence intensified this year, half of the families in Sadiyah have fled, leaving approximately 100,000 people. After they left, insurgents and militiamen used their abandoned homes to hold meetings and store weapons…
The focus of the battalion’s efforts in Sadiyah was to develop the Iraqi security forces into an organized, fair and proficient force — but the American soldiers soon realized this goal was unattainable. The sectarian warfare in Sadiyah was helped along by the Wolf Brigade, a predominantly Shiite unit of the Iraqi National Police that tolerated, and at times encouraged, Mahdi Army attacks against Sunnis, according to U.S. soldiers and residents. The soldiers endured repeated bombings of their convoys within view of police checkpoints. During their time here, they have arrested 70 members of the national police for collaboration in such attacks and other crimes…
…in one instance about two months ago, the American soldiers heard that the Wolf Brigade planned to help resettle more than 100 Shiite families in abandoned houses in the neighborhood. When platoon leader Lt. Brian Bifulco arrived on the scene, he noticed that “abandoned houses to them meant houses that had Sunnis in them.”
“What we later found out is they weren’t really moving anyone in, it was a cover for the INP to go in and evict what Sunni families were left there,” recalled Bifulco, 23, a West Point graduate from Huntsville, Ala. “We showed up, and there were a bunch of Sunni families just wandering around the streets with their bags, taking up refuge in a couple Sunni mosques in the area.”
Looking back the soldiers can see that their efforts to build up a national police was doomed from the beginning.
“We were so committed to them as a partner we couldn’t see it for what it was. In retrospect, I’ve got to think it was a coordinated effort,” Timmerman said. “To this day, I don’t think we truly understand how infiltrated or complicit the national police are” with the militias.
Of course, this is just a specific example that exemplifies what John Murtha, Jim Webb, and others have been saying for several years: that we shouldn’t be arbitrating a civil sectarian war. And these soldiers are the people that are suffering for a hopeless strategy.
Asked if the American endeavor here was worth their sacrifice — 20 soldiers from the battalion have been killed in Baghdad — Alarcon said no: “I don’t think this place is worth another soldier’s life.”
Listen to the men in the field. Get them out.
