Los Angeles Times
August 31, 2004
BAGHDAD — Two months after the U.S. handed sovereignty back to Iraq amid
hopes of reduced violence, more than 110 U.S. troops have been killed and much
of the country remains hostile territory. The toll of U.S. dead since the war
began last year is fast approaching 1,000.
Although attention in recent
weeks has focused on Najaf, where U.S. forces battled Shiite Muslim militiamen,
most of the deadly confrontations for American troops in newly independent Iraq
have occurred in the Baghdad area and the so-called Sunni Triangle to the north
and west.
The concentration of attacks in those areas is a reminder that
the fiercest and most organized opposition to U.S. forces and the U.S.-backed
interim government continues to be in Sunni-dominated cities, such as Fallouja.
Nationwide, U.S. forces are being attacked 60 times per day on average, up 20%
from the three-month period before the hand-over.
The occupation of Iraq
has technically ended, but a U.S.-commanded multinational force of mo re than
150,000 is still there, tasked with providing security to the fledgling
government. Ubiquitous graffiti denouncing the continued occupation indicate
that insurgents see little change in their enemy — U.S. troops and their
Iraqi allies.
With Iraqi security forces still largely in training, U.S.
forces continue to run raids and conduct patrols in many areas, maintaining a
very visible presence, especially on the roads. Pulling back to the garrisons
now, commanders agree, would open the door to even more chaos and violence.
Although U.S. authorities did not expect casualties to plummet
immediately after the transfer of power June 28, American, Iraqi and
international officials expressed optimism that restoring sovereignty and
officially ending the U.S. occupation would curb the violence.
"We hope
that this is going to be a true beginning, and those who are opposing occupation
will now consider that opposing occupation is not necessary anymore," Lakhdar
Brahimi, the U.N. env oy who helped select Iraq's interim government, said on
the day of the transfer.
But many of the underlying grievances that have
stoked the insurgency, such as the presence of U.S. troops and the slow pace of
reconstruction, remain. The number of fighters — including loyalists of
former President Saddam Hussein, religious militants and others dissatisfied
enough to take up a gun or plant a bomb — shows no sign of
decreasing.
"There was a government in South Vietnam all those years
ago, and we lost a lot of people back there," noted U.S. Army Col. Dana
Pittard of the 1st Infantry Division in Baqubah, a zone of conflict northeast of
the capital.
In August so far, 63 U.S. troops have died, and 54 died in
July, the first complete month after the hand-over of power. In June, 42
American troops died, according to Associated Press and the Pentagon.
Neither July nor August come close to the death tolls of April and May —
135 and 80 troops, respectively. Still, July an d August rank among the
deadliest months for U.S. forces in Iraq this year.
Overall, 974 U.S.
troops had died in Iraq as of Monday, the vast majority — 836 —
since President Bush declared an end to major combat May 1 of last year, the
Pentagon said. About 6,500 have been wounded. Since January, the majority of
attacks on U.S. forces have come in the form of "indirect fire" — such as
mortar and rocket strikes — along with homemade roadside bombs.
There is no reliable accounting of Iraqi civilian deaths, but some rough
calculations top 10,000. The number of Iraqi military dead is in the 5,000 to
6,000 range, according to think-tank estimates cited by Reuters.
"There
are munitions all over this country, remnants of the Saddam era," said Air Force
Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, deputy director of operations for the multinational
forces. "So you can't expect to rid the country of all its weapons in a month
or two."
Although daily attacks are up, debate continues over whether
the armed insurgency is growing. U.S. officials have stuck with an estimate
from last year that the number of hard-core insurgents remains between 4,000 and
6,000, a calculation others call low. The military has arrested more than
40,000 suspected insurgents, most of whom have been released.
"We're
losing more people because the resistance is just firing more shots at us," said
Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington
who supported the decision to go to war. "They are just hitting us hard and
everywhere. The reason they are effective is because they just have more people
shooting at us."
Pittard in Baqubah, like many field commanders, is
openly skeptical of official U.S. estimates of the insurgency's size. He puts
the hard-core support at about one half of 1% of the Iraqi population of 24
million — or about 120,000.
The fighting in Iraq has unfolded in
stages, as insurgents have turned to different and often bolder techniques. The
s overeignty era has seen a wave of takings of foreign hostages and attempted
assassinations.
Efforts to kill government officials are so frequent
that interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi remarked last week on the menacing
messages he receives daily. "Every day there is a threat," he said. "One of
them may succeed, I don't know."
Government ministers must travel with
bodyguards and vary their daily routes. The government itself meets inside the
heavily fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad, protected by U.S. tanks and
machine-gun nests.
Iraqi civilians have suffered tragically from the
violence, with scores dying in bombings and other attacks directed at officials
and police outposts.
Contributing to the U.S. death toll in August
and the rise in daily attacks was the three weeks of intermittent combat in
Najaf with Shiite militants that killed at least 10 U.S. troops.
"Not
to be callous, but this is war. People get hurt," said Maj. Douglas Ollivant,
operations officer of the Army's 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, in Najaf.
"Once you start a war, you don't know where it's going to end. The enemy has a
vote."
The fact that the Najaf battles didn't spark fierce uprisings in
other areas of the country — as happened during the fighting in Fallouja
and elsewhere in April — is viewed by some as a hopeful sign. "The people
in Najaf, the people around the country, have grown more and more tired of the
insurgency and the killing," Lessel said.
Muqtada Sadr, the militant
Shiite cleric whose forces were battling U.S. troops in Najaf, ordered his
militia last week to leave the city and has asked all of his armed supporters to
cease fighting while his group makes plans to join Iraq's emerging political
process. Still, much of the goodwill once enjoyed by U.S. forces among Iraq's
Shiite majority — which was repressed during the rule of Hussein, a Sunni
— has evaporated.
Efforts by Allawi to offer amnesty to former
combatants and otherw ise reach out to fighters have been less well received
among Sunni insurgents.
The Sunni Triangle — more accurately a
vast half-moon stretching from Baghdad to the west and north — remains a
bastion of armed opposition to the U.S.-led coalition. The city of Samarra,
north of Baghdad, has joined Fallouja as basically a no-go zone for U.S. troops
and a sanctuary for insurgents.
Periodic violence continues to rack
Ramadi, Baqubah and other Sunni-dominated areas. In the northern city of Mosul
— a longtime stronghold of Hussein's Baath Party once heralded as an
occupation success story — there are almost daily attacks and frequent
bombings.
Iraqi security forces, though numerous — totaling about
240,000 — are still largely in the training stage, and there is no word on
when their presence may result in a drawdown of U.S. forces.
U.S.
commanders are hopeful that much of the country will be at "local control"
— meaning that Iraqi forces wil l shoulder much of the security burden
— by January, when elections are scheduled.
"Of course, the hope
is to put the Iraqis out front — we're just not there yet," a senior Army
official in Washington said. "This is going to take a really long
time."