Everyday choices spell life or death

Mohammed Azzawi, his brother and a friend faced a bedeviling choice as they neared their home in one of Baghdad’s deadliest neighborhoods: They could take a road recently closed by U.S. troops where motorists jump the curb and drive on the sidewalk, or an open route haunted by abductions and killings.

It is the sort of dilemma Iraqis encounter every day as they navigate a city with increasing numbers of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers, but still dominated by danger and uncertainty.

More than two months after the United States and Iraq launched a new plan to stanch the capital’s violence, life for residents has become a game of choices dictated by concrete barriers, traffic-choking checkpoints and the latest market bombing.

U.S. and Iraqi officials cite trends they say indicate progress: fewer death squad killings, a rising number of suspected insurgents detained, more troops on the ground. But such data mean little to Iraqis whose lives have been upended by invasion, civil war and now the latest security clampdown. For them, the plan is only as good as the calm it can bring to their neighborhoods, streets, and families. That has been as varied as the violence itself, which on any given day might result in 100 deaths, or 10.

In interviews in Sunni, Shiite, and mixed areas where U.S. and Iraqi troops are now stationed, a minority of Iraqis said the security plan had made their lives better. Most said any optimism they had felt at the start had faded in the face of continued violence and additional headaches brought about by checkpoints and road closures.

Azzawi’s driver complained that jumping the curbs would damage his blue Chevy Celebrity, so they took the alternate road toward their home in the city’s Ghazaliya neighborhood.

They were stopped at a checkpoint manned by uniformed Interior Ministry commandos, whose ranks are suspected of being riddled with Shiite militiamen. The car’s occupants, all Sunnis, were uneasy. Azzawi’s neighbor had warned him to avoid this spot. Three of his relatives, the neighbor had told him, had been abducted there and killed a month earlier.

The commandos whispered among themselves. They ordered the driver to open the trunk.

“They had a look and then went aside and had more whispers. They made some phone calls on their mobiles,” Azzawi said. “Then they came and asked for our IDs, but they did not look at them.”

Instead, the men locked their eyes on the car, as if considering their next move.

Suddenly, a U.S. military convoy came rumbling down the road. The Iraqi commandos became flustered. “Go! Go!” they told Azzawi, quickly handing back the IDs. The car sped off.

“It was too close,” Azzawi said days later, as he recounted the incident.

After that scare, Azzawi and his neighbors considered marching to a U.S.-Iraqi security outpost to demand better protection, but decided against it. They were afraid of being mistaken for troublemakers and shot.

The security push began Feb. 13, and of five U.S. combat brigades pledged to the plan, three have arrived and the rest are due in June. In all there will be an additional 21,500 front-line U.S. troops on the ground, mostly in Baghdad. Fifty thousand additional Iraqi troops also have arrived as part of the operation, said Army Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman.

More than 50 outposts have been set up across Baghdad to increase security for neighborhoods and to foster communication with residents, Garver said. Troops have seized an average of 36 weapons caches a week, up from about 16 a week before the crackdown, he said.

But Iraqis said the neighborhood patrols they had hoped for had not materialized. Neither has the trust in troops that U.S. military officials say is crucial to the plan’s success.

Some residents do say the new push has improved their lives. Haji Ismail Ibrahim, a Sunni taxi driver who lives with his Shiite wife in the mixed area of Shaab, in northeast Baghdad, is one.

“Before the surge I was afraid to leave our doorstep. I didn’t even go buy bread,” he said. Now, soldiers at checkpoints stare inside car windows and sometimes force people to get out of their cars for searches, Ibrahim said. “If you have nothing to hide, there is nothing to be afraid of.”

Most residents, though, say the traffic-clogging military checkpoints are the only visible sign of the initiative, and that the backups they create are providing new targets to bombers.

“We are calling it the traffic-jam plan rather than the security plan, because traffic jams are the only things that have increased,” said Isam Jasim of Sadr City, an impoverished Shiite district where U.S. and Iraqi troops established a presence in early March. Now, entering the massive neighborhood from central Baghdad requires going through one of three checkpoints, the roads to which are usually jammed with cars, taxis and minivans caught in bottlenecks.

Garver acknowledged that bombings had increased near checkpoints but said most victims in such incidents were troops, not civilians, because soldiers were stopping the attackers from reaching their targets.

“While security can be inconvenient when you’re talking about the number of checkpoints, I think any rational person would rather have that” than continued attacks, Garver said.

Rana Fadhil, a homemaker who lives in a northern Sunni-dominated area, sounded a common complaint -- that troops spent all their time at checkpoints and seemed unwilling to chase down insurgents deep inside neighborhoods.

“They know that these areas are where armed elements exist,” she said, adding that she would not complain about traffic jams if she thought the troops were doing their job and searching every vehicle. “But sadly this is not the case.”

Across the cacophonous city, there are calming sights: a Ferris wheel spinning lazily at an amusement park in east Baghdad; workers dabbing white paint on newly laid curbs around a traffic circle outside Mustansiriya University, a frequent target of bombers; automatic sprinklers watering pink and red flowers sprouting in public gardens.

At a checkpoint in south Baghdad, troops checking IDs sometimes even advise drivers to use their seat belts as they try to enforce laws long abandoned amid the city’s chaos, said one man who passes it regularly.

But the blast barriers and the sight of taxi-drivers frisking passengers for bombs before allowing them into their vehicles are among the reminders of the dangers that lurk everywhere.

Most people interviewed, such as Haidar Karam, had seen promises made early in the plan broken and said they had lost faith in the troops making them. Karam, a government employee, lives in Bunook, a mixed area that was one of the first to see patrols and checkpoints.

In mid-February, a U.S. soldier walked down Karam’s street and vowed to install a 1-megawatt generator to provide electricity to the neighborhood.

Asked Saturday whether the generator had arrived, Karam said, “Of course not! They just wanted to present a good image. They know when Iraqis hear the word ‘electricity,’ they get a big smile on their face,” he said.

Karam said things had looked encouraging at first. The soldier who had promised a generator also told residents that patrols, day and night, would become a regular fixture. Karam was so reassured that he took his wife on a rare outing to the zoo. They even went to restaurants in the initial days of the operation.

Now, he and several people in other neighborhoods say, kidnappings and killings have returned as death squads and insurgents have learned how to get around the crackdown.

In another part of town, Umm Ali Nuaimi pointed out the trash on the street of her mainly Sunni neighborhood, Sadiya. It was evidence, she said, that an Iraqi army checkpoint nearby had failed to secure the neighborhood enough even for garbage pickup to resume. She said residents had started their own patrols to fend off attacks.

Even Ibrahim, the taxi driver, acknowledged that security had deteriorated in recent weeks. Abductions, killings and carjackings were being reported in his neighborhood, he said, and the house-by-house searches that troops had conducted early on were not being repeated.

The situation has been worse in other neighborhoods, such as Zafaraniya, a mainly Shiite area in south Baghdad. Troops at several Iraqi army and police checkpoints search cars entering and leaving the neighborhood, but that did not stop someone from planting a bomb under a pile of trash this month at the entrance to a market, Waleed Muhanned said. It killed one person.

“The only success of the surge is on TV, where you have [the government] explaining how successful things are, but that’s it,” said Mohammed Jasim Aboodi of Sadr City. “You cannot see that success on the ground.”

susman@latimes.com

Special correspondents in Baghdad contributed to this report.