Battle for Baghdad: City braces itself for US surge

[Briar]

Battle for Baghdad: City braces itself for US surge

Urban fighting amid the ruins

By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad

Lina Massufi, a 32-year-old Iraqi laboratory assistant with two children, is a widow - her husband was killed by US troops when he accidentally drove down a closed road in 2003. In the past three months she has seen her house raided and her furniture smashed 12 times.

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Her story shows why the odds are against what may be President George Bush's final gamble in Iraq: the attempt by US troops, now receiving 17,500 reinforcements, to regain control of Baghdad. The plan is for US forces, along with Iraqi army and police, to enter Sunni and Shia districts in the capital, cleanse them of insurgents and militia and then stay put, preventing their return. In his State of the Union speech last week Mr Bush told Congress: "With Iraqis in the lead, our forces will help secure the city by chasing down the terrorists, insurgents, and the roaming death squads."

But the failings of this strategy become more obvious the further one gets from Washington and the closer to Baghdad. The insurgents and militiamen, both Sunni and Shia, usually have more credibility in their districts than Iraqi government forces. As for the heavily Shia police commandos, they are seen by Sunni in Baghdad as licensed death squads.

A foretaste of what the "surge" of US and Iraqi soldiers will mean came last week, as they fought their way into the tough Sunni insurgent-controlled Haifa Street neighbourhood, only a mile from the Green Zone. Iraqi soldiers happily let US forces take the lead, and a US long-range missile demolished a house from which snipers were allegedly firing. The readiness of the Americans to use such heavy weapons in densely-populated urban areas ensures that many civilians have been, and will be, killed and wounded.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2192979.ece