Policing Isn’t Black and White in Baghdad

U.S. Army Pfc. Ryan Heithoff stood at the shuttered entrance of an auto repair shop Monday afternoon, pressed his shotgun barrel against the lock and fired. A tremendous boom thundered through the afternoon’s baking heat. He repeated the action, blasting away a second lock, and struggled to pry open a blue metal barrier.

All at once, a hail of bullets shot out from within. Heithoff and three comrades did a dance and scattered, two of them already wounded in the leg but still shooting.

A half-hour gunfight followed, with most of the lead thrown by the Americans. When it was over, the car shop door was Swiss cheese, luxury cars inside were damaged, and the soldiers found no proof of any misdeeds and made no arrests.

Welcome to the wild world of law enforcement, Baghdad-style.

U.S. troops, with little knowledge of the city, are on the beat here -- chasing down suspected gun dealers, looters, curfew breakers, car thieves and drug dealers -- and stepping on the toes of some Iraqi civilians in the process.

Mistakes are made, but the troops argue that their proactive stance is the only way -- however clumsy -- to bring order to a city crying out for security.

The new American civil administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, said restoring order is his top priority and denies that the country is in a state of anarchy.

He and other U.S. officials say about 10,000 Iraqi police officers have been called back to duty. But few are visible, and in most cases they have no cars, phones, weapons or training on how they are supposed to operate in the new post-Baathist reality that is U.S.-occupied Iraq.

In practice, it is only the thin green line of U.S. troops providing any semblance of control over this restive country -- and often that is not enough. Two days of riding with a platoon of Army scouts showed how terrifying, confusing and frustrating the work can be, both for the soldiers and for the civilian population.

Heithoff, an 18-year-old from Des Moines in the Army for only a year, was the point man for the operation at the car repair shop. He was part of a squad headed by 27-year-old Staff Sgt. Nathan Gaines, who was out to break up what he had been told was a chop shop for stolen cars.

All day Monday, Gaines and his five-man team of scouts (accompanied by an Iraqi interpreter nicknamed Gus) had been driving around in a big white bus, looking for criminals to arrest in the mixed commercial-residential sector of east-central Baghdad that was under their supervision.

The civilian bus, driven by Gaines, was a bit of subterfuge. Confiscated earlier from looters, it had thick blue curtains and a picture of a respected Shiite religious leader in the back, making it unlikely that anyone would suspect U.S. soldiers were inside -- the better to swoop down on suspected wrongdoers who might have retreated the moment they heard an Army Humvee in the vicinity.

Back of Bus Fills Up

As the day wore on, the back of the bus began to fill with prisoners adorned with improvised nylon cord handcuffs and looks of shock that they had been seized and taken aboard with such sudden fury.

Those held included an old man operating a truck filled with bits of steel and furnishings stripped from a just-looted government building, two young men caught emerging from a business area the soldiers called “Looterville,” another young man seized on the street when he was spotted with a bayonet sticking out from under his shirt, and a middle-aged man who had just exited a bombed-out bank building where looters have been active (although his son, about 13, bawled that his father had only gone inside to relieve himself; Gaines eventually let the terrified father go).

The last arrest before the car shop shooting was of two men -- one bare-chested -- whom Gaines said he had seen fighting from his driver’s seat vantage. “Be gentle with the one in the gray shirt! He may have been doing something right,” Gaines shouted to his troops.

Most of the arrests were clouded by some element of ambiguity -- and, in some cases, summary justice. The man with the truck filled with looted materials claimed he was only renting it out, but the soldiers put two incendiary grenades on its engine block anyway to destroy it and its contents.

Gus, a man in his late 50s, scornful of danger, relayed all this in a weary voice.

“They don’t realize that they are destroying their own country,” he said of the suspects as they were taken off the bus single file and turned over to military police at an American-run jail near the center of the city. Most will eventually be tried in Iraqi courts that began running again in recent days.

The man caught with the bayonet protested his innocence. He glared with a look of unadulterated hatred at his chief guard, Sgt. Garfield Nolan of Richmond, Va., throughout the bus journey to an Army lockup. Nolan, 35, searched and tied the hands of the prisoners after flinging them into the back of the bus, and covered their mouths with his gloved hand if they complained about it.

In the end, even the shootout at the car repair shop turned out to be something of a question mark.

The scouts were acting on intelligence from neighborhood informants that a criminal gang had taken in stolen cars and chopped them for parts inside the shop.

Before they tried to open the door with Heithoff’s shotgun, Gaines had warned his men: “Don’t assume that there is nobody inside just because it’s closed. Be careful!”

Gaines was correct. Heithoff and a second soldier were both struck in the leg by the return fire.

Gaines, a 10-year Army veteran from San Diego, then called one of his unit’s Humvees into position to pound the shop with its heavy machine gun. Several withering volleys into the building followed, before Gaines and Pfc. Zac Farrell of Georgetown, Ohio, crept close from the side to throw in hand grenades.

Heithoff and one other lightly wounded soldier, Pvt. Nicholas Cicero, were loaded back onto the bus for first aid.

They later were joined by Times photographer Carolyn Cole, who had suffered a shrapnel cut to her calf.

Neighbors watched incredulously from behind a building as explosions and black smoke rose from the auto shop’s door. Reinforcements in the form of another platoon arrived to surround the area.

They finally entered the building -- but found it empty. The men inside had probably escaped through a back door into an alley.

Gaines, meanwhile, had already left the scene for an Army clinic back at a base, confident that the troops had cornered a gang of car thieves and destroyed the shop they were using for their criminal activity.

However, two men who later returned to the car shop said that they were security guards and had fired their guns not knowing that it had been U.S. soldiers shooting into the building.

They said they had been under orders from the shop’s owner to protect it against thieves.

Shop owner Ahmad Samaha, surrounded by neighbors and employees, insisted to a Times reporter that he was a legitimate businessman and that the luxury cars were simply there for repairs.

He had all the car keys, which proved the vehicles had not been hot-wired, some of his workers pointed out.

‘Who Will Pay?’

Samaha said he was at home when the shooting took place, and arrived afterward to find the floor littered with shrapnel and debris that included an unexploded grenade.

“It is a great shock for me. What I did, I don’t know,” he said. “Who will pay for all of this?”

The soldiers’ commanding officer, Lt. Col. Scott Rudder, said he had no doubts about the effectiveness and courage of his patrol.

“We got a chop shop out of business,” Rudder said. “So that is a good thing, right?”

Rudder, whose men last week shot down three armed men, killing one of them, in an alley near where Monday’s shooting occurred, said the aggressive patrolling is finally making an impact on looting and getting thievery under control.

He showed a reporter a letter, hand-printed in English, presented to him by a group of merchants.

“We ask you to protect this area from the after-Saddam bandits who are hurting the people freely and destroying their properties,” it pleaded. “We think that who was able to destroy the regime of the greatest dictator in history and its gangsters is able to finish those who roam in the streets stealing, burning and destroying.

“Our so much thanks in advance.”