Troops Target a Restive Iraqi City

Thousands of U.S. soldiers backed by armored vehicles, helicopter gunships and F-16 fighters swooped down early Wednesday on this ancient city north of Baghdad, seeking to restore their control over an insurgent stronghold that has brazenly challenged coalition authority.

About 3,000 troops began rumbling into the city hours before daybreak, sealing off its entrances and exits and blasting down doors in one of the largest U.S. displays of force in recent months and an unusual sweep into a city of 200,000.

The large-scale offensive four days after the capture of Saddam Hussein appeared to underscore the fact that fighting continues despite the deposed leader’s detention.

“We are very much in control of the city right now,” declared Army Col. Frederick Rudesheim, commander of the 4th Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team. “Our presence will dictate whatever actions occur in the city.”

Initial casualties were reported to be light -- a few residents wounded but no one killed. Despite the expectation of a major battle, there were no large firefights in the early hours and little damage to the city.

The operation, dubbed Ivy Blizzard, was described by U.S. military officials as a robust response to an audacious insurgent force in Samarra that has mounted coordinated ambushes on American convoys and also targeted civilians and police working for the U.S.-led coalition.

In late November, for example, scores of combatants in Samarra opened fire on U.S. troops accompanying two money-exchange convoys. The ensuing battle lasted hours.

“Samarra has been a bit of a thorn in our side,” Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman, who heads an infantry battalion, said Wednesday. “We will bring Samarra up to speed.”

The offensive was in the planning stages long before the capture Saturday of Hussein near Tikrit, to the north.

The operation Wednesday was part of a broader plan by the U.S. to take the offensive and use its military’s superior firepower against the stubborn insurgency that has claimed many American lives and slowed reconstruction plans.

The sweep came a day after U.S. troops arrested a suspected rebel commander, Qais Hattem, just south of Samarra, along with 72 suspected insurgents, in what the coalition called a major success. Troops also seized numerous weapons and bomb-making materials, officials said.

Hattem is a former high-level official in Hussein’s Baath Party who is believed to have led an insurgent cell and had access to ample cash, the military said. This month, the military seized $1.9 million during a raid in Samarra.

On Tuesday, insurgents ambushed a U.S. Army patrol in the city, prompting a fierce firefight in which 11 attackers were killed, the military estimated. There were no U.S. casualties.

“There’s a tremendous satisfaction in conducting this operation on the heels of the capture of Saddam,” Rudesheim said. “It offers hope to the people of Samarra, who have really been starved for the kind of stability that they deserve.”

U.S. forces arrived Wednesday with the names and addresses of purported insurgent bomb makers, weapons dealers, recruiters and other operatives and headed to their homes.

About 30 suspected insurgents were taken into custody, officials said.

Samarra was also suspected to be a base for foreign fighters, but none were taken into custody in the early part of the operation, officials said.

Indeed, the lack of hostile fire was somewhat of a surprise for U.S. soldiers, who were told to be ready for major combat -- “just like Mogadishu,” as one said, referring to the intense, door-to-door fighting a decade ago in Somalia’s capital.

“They hyped this place like it was the Wild West,” Staff Sgt. Tom Walker, 29, of Walla Walla, Wash., said during infantry patrol Wednesday afternoon.

“We heard there were two factions of foreign fighters, and Fedayeen Saddam,” Walker added, referring to a pro-Hussein paramilitary group heavily involved in the insurgency. “We haven’t seen it yet. Maybe later in the week.”

In the opening hours of the offensive, there were no signs that the armed combatants would mount a counteroffensive. Some commanders speculated privately that insurgents might have sensed a U.S. strike was imminent and left town.

Nor was there any indication of a mass surrender by insurgents, as some have speculated might happen after the capture of Hussein.

“I want to see if folks start capitulating with Saddam Hussein being caught,” Sassaman said. “This will give us a read as to whether Saddam has his fingers in some of these cells.”

Despite the overwhelming U.S. military advantage, the raids did not appear to have changed any minds in Samarra, a city long mistrusted by Hussein and now suspected by U.S. authorities of being close to pro-Hussein elements.

The assault might well serve to harden attitudes, demonstrating that the coalition risks further alienating Iraqis as its forces step up operations to smash the insurgency. “Saddam accused us of being against him, and now the Americans accuse us of being with Saddam,” said Ali Hassan, a 35-year-old laborer.

The U.S. effort generally was met with deep skepticism in a community where U.S.-trained Iraqi civil corpsmen have taken to wearing ski masks to conceal their identity and avoid being targeted as collaborators.

“This is a tribal town, and everyone knows everyone else,” explained Sideck Ahmed, 32, a masked corpsman at the city entrance. “If someone knows who I am, they will surely try to kill me as a collaborator. The resistance is everywhere here.”

A massive traffic jam caused by U.S. checkpoints made tempers boil.

Shopkeepers complained about having to shut down on a normally busy day. By midmorning the streets were largely deserted, except for the occasional rumble of a tank.

“The best thing America can do for us is go home and let us take care of our own security,” said Menal Raheem Abdullatif, a teacher and mother of five who said she woke to the commotion on the streets and U.S. soldiers outside her home. “This will only make the resistance stronger.”

Abdullatif spoke from the emergency room of the Samarra Public Hospital, where her son, Issam Naim Hamid, 17, lay on a bed with a bullet wound to his abdomen. According to Abdullatif, an unprovoked volley of bullets at her home hit both her son and husband, a policeman.

Her husband, who was more seriously hurt, was taken to a hospital in Tikrit. Because the shooting happened during a U.S.-imposed curfew, Abdullatif said, she had to wait for two hours for a taxi, fearing all the while that her son and husband might bleed to death.

“How can the Americans treat us this way?” she asked. “Where is the democracy they promised us?”

U.S. officials were unapologetic. They offered to compensate any unintended victims.

“Certainly we’ve inconvenienced a number of the citizens of Samarra,” Rudesheim said. “But these same citizens are the ones who’ve been living with terrorists among them.”

U.S. commanders have rebuffed the notion that there is any such thing as a rebel town under insurgents’ sway in Iraq, even in predominantly Sunni Muslim areas such as Samarra. Anti-occupation sentiment generally runs highest in the nation’s largely Sunni heartland, the base of the insurgency.

But many residents here and elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle fear that U.S. forces are catering to Shiite Muslim and Kurdish populations at the expense of the minority Sunni Arabs, favored by Hussein and historically dominant in Iraq.

That sentiment was evident in conversations Wednesday afternoon with townsfolk after they emerged into near-deserted streets following a partial U.S. withdrawal.

“All America cares about now are the bearded ones,” said Hassan, the laborer, referring to the Shiite clerics and pilgrims who daily visit Samarra’s landmark, gold-domed mosque, revered as the place of the last known sighting of the Mahdi, a Messiah-like figure. “We are to be left with nothing -- no security, no power, no gasoline. If that is the case, then, yes, we prefer Saddam, though I was against Saddam.”

Some here even questioned the capture of Hussein.

Ali Husain, 54, who was reading a newspaper, called the photographs of the captured former leader a hoax.

“This is a Hollywood job, something the CIA did to make us think Saddam is a prisoner,” he said. “We know Saddam is still with us.”

The military assault, officials said, will be followed by a civil commitment to help rebuild Samarra’s shattered infrastructure and provide it with a professional police department.