Cleaning Up After Combat, a Street at a Time

Lakes of sewage-blotched stagnant water and piles of rotting garbage still dot the streets of Sadr City. But for residents of Baghdad’s vast Shiite Muslim slum, it’s the filth they don’t see that gives them hope.

“Just a few days ago, you couldn’t walk this street because the sewers were overflowing. Now they’ve taken care of it,” said a mattress merchant in his mid-50s, who identified himself only as Abu Mustafa. “As long as there is security, the rest will follow.”

Modest reconstruction and cleanup efforts are proceeding in the district, home to 2 million, thanks to seven weeks of relative tranquillity after months of violence. A tenuous peace agreement has held since mid-October, when firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr told his Al Mahdi militia to lay down its arms.

Thousands of workers have cleared fetid trash from about half the streets of Sadr City as work on $134 million in projects finally forges ahead. Two newly revamped pumping stations have removed raw sewage from some parts of the district.

The rest of Baghdad, and large sections of the country, may remain vulnerable to daily insurgent violence. But in Sadr City, police patrol the streets, Al Mahdi volunteers direct traffic, and workers in orange jumpsuits fill in hundreds of craters left by roadside bombs.

Still, the relationship between the Americans and Sadr’s forces, who staged deadly uprisings across Iraq, is far from cooperative. The two sides remain deeply hostile toward each other, and coordination is nonexistent.

Sadr representatives are still bitter over the continued detention of hundreds of Al Mahdi fighters -- a violation, they say, of the cease-fire agreement reached after weeks of clashes in the capital. The U.S., meanwhile, appears determined to handle the reconstruction in a way that provides as little cash, power and prestige to Sadr as possible.

Zeidan Rubaie, the director of Sadr’s economic office, complained that U.S. planners were “neglecting” Sadr’s people and downplayed the extent and efficiency of the work accomplished so far.

“A little simple cleaning and trash removal,” he said with a shrug. “Their work is very slow.”

Charles Hess, director of the Iraq Project and Contracting Office in the U.S. Embassy here, acknowledged the disconnect between the Americans and the people who control the district.

“Nobody that I know is sitting down with Sadr,” Hess said in an interview. “We’re still making progress. Is it as fast as people would like? It’s never going to be as fast as people would like.”

Both sides do agree, however, that the district’s needs are dire.

Children step over a stream of sewage that runs through their classroom in a school on Moqtar Street, one of 25 areas with major sewage backups. In this Shiite slum that never had enough electricity under the old regime’s campaign of deliberate neglect, only the sewage pumping stations and a handful of other public facilities have 24-hour power.

Resident Mohammed Qassim, a former cobbler who now earns about $28 a week on a road crew filling potholes and bomb craters, said the district’s electrical grid remained a disaster, with power available for only two hours on some days.

Nevertheless, Sadr City has emerged as a bright spot. In other regions, daily attacks on U.S., Iraqi and allied troops have brought reconstruction to a halt. Nationally, the program has just topped 1,000 projects, a milestone. But of the 1,051 projects, 20% have been attacked or affected by intimidation, according to U.S. military figures.

The insurgent campaign to derail reconstruction has grown since the interim Iraqi government formally took over June 28. In the last month, there have been an average of 30 insurgent attacks targeting reconstruction efforts each week, far more than the 18 attacks in the week before the hand-over.

The projects affected are largely scattered throughout the perilous swath in central Iraq known as the Sunni Triangle, which stretches from just south of Baghdad to Ramadi in the west and Tikrit in the north.

In Ramadi, capital of restive Al Anbar province, some locals have been hired to remove trash, but daily attacks make it impossible to do more now, Hess said.

“We have a limited amount of money. If I spend one dollar more in security, then I spend one dollar less in construction.”

The greatest challenge lies in Fallouja. The United States has earmarked $80 million for the city, where nearly every building has been struck by U.S. or insurgent fire and the downtown business district needs to be demolished. The Iraqis have allotted an additional $50 million, bringing total funding to substantially more than the $100 million previously reported.

Yet it won’t be nearly enough, Hess said after a recent visit to the city. He had hoped the reconstruction would be underway by now, but it would be nearly Christmas before the first worker begins to rebuild the city, he said.

“My opinion is that a lot more money is going to be needed there,” Hess said. “The downtown commercial shops were shot up, burned up, trashed, littered. It just seems to me that there is a tremendous amount of significant damage that is not going to be fixed with the money we currently have identified.”

Even in Sadr City, commanders say they will need an additional $214 million to meet unfunded requirements.

Elsewhere, projects are moving forward, but the going is slow. Of the $18.4 billion in reconstruction funds earmarked for the fiscal year that ended in September, $9.1 billion has been allocated for current and future projects, but only $1.86 billion has been spent. Hess acknowledged that the number seemed low but noted that only partial payments are made until projects are completed.

To stay off insurgent radar, American reconstruction overseers often hire Iraqi workers with no U.S. military protection. There are no signs saying, “Your tax dollars at work.”

“If somewhere along the line they get linked with an American project, they may get intimidated or they may get killed. We’ve had that happen,” Hess said. “People say, ‘We don’t see the projects going on.’ Well, the reality is we’re not necessarily advertising them. I wouldn’t say it’s clandestine construction, but it’s very low-profile.”

Even Sadr City’s peace-enabled reconstruction efforts take place under the shadow of hostility that could erupt anew at any moment.

For now, the cease-fire holds while Sadr himself works to build support in advance of elections scheduled for the end of January. But if he were to lose faith in the electoral approach, his fighters could pour into the streets again.

Al Mahdi uprisings in April and August left neighborhoods pockmarked with bullet holes and roads peppered with craters from roadside bombs. In October, militia members and local residents turned in bomb-making materials and thousands of weapons. Army commanders complained at the time that the weapons handed in accounted for just a fraction of the arms Al Mahdi was believed to possess.

Ominously, the reconstruction efforts appear to have had little effect on the perception of U.S. forces as intruders.

“They’re the reason for the instability everywhere in Iraq. Once they leave, everything will be fine,” said Qassim, the former cobbler turned road worker.

In a contrast that underscores the power and grass-roots popularity of Sadr’s organization, residents were quick to praise the efforts of Al Mahdi cadres.

His followers provide security and assistance for the workers, help to dismantle dormant roadside bombs and have taken charge of the district’s gas stations amid an ongoing fuel crisis, organizing distribution and preventing price gouging.

U.S. commanders, meanwhile, seem willing to take their moral victories in small doses.

“There’s less people ... that wanted to kill us than there were before. So we’re winning,” said Lt. Col. David Batchelor, commander of the Army’s 1st Armored Division task force in charge of southern Sadr City. “But they’ll also tell you that if Muqtada told them to take up their weapons, they’d start fighting again tomorrow.”