Poles Apart in Iraq

Sitting on once-elegant furniture with cushions missing and embroidered trimmings torn, Iraqi police poured out their frustrations in a midnight chat with 2nd Lt. Michal Smolen of the Polish army.

The officers wanted help: police cars and radios to replace those stolen by looters, beds for officers on overnight call, repairs to the station in this central Iraqi city. The list went on, and they saw Smolen, the leader of a Polish platoon on night patrol, as their best link to U.S. authorities.

Smolen, 25, listened sympathetically, then counseled patience. “In Poland, we started a new country in 1990, and people thought everything would be good just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. “But it’s 13 years now, and there are still many problems.”

As Iraq embarks on its own thorny path of reconstruction, Washington’s hopes of attracting more foreign troops to help stabilize the country depend in part on how successfully Smolen and others in a new Polish-led multinational force cope with the challenges they encounter.

The 21-nation division -- with 8,200 soldiers and 400 more expected soon -- took control last month of five provinces across south-central Iraq, a predominantly Shiite Muslim area where many people hated Saddam Hussein and are now intensely pro-American.

The Poles bring their own strengths to the enterprise, including the experience of their transition from communist dictatorship to free-market democracy -- to most Poles, a painful process but worth the price.

Still, like other foreign troops, Smolen and his men have been thrown into a complex situation they cannot hope to fathom immediately.

The risk from guerrilla attacks by Hussein’s backers is lower than in the Sunni Triangle west and north of Baghdad, but soldiers on night patrol still must feel their way through a murky and mystifying world.

Smolen sees schmoozing with the local police as a means of sorting things out.

“If they will be my friends, they will tell me what is going on, for sure,” he said.

This night’s patrol began with Smolen and his platoon of 20 soldiers jumping into five open trucks at their base, an old pistol factory in Musayyib, 40 miles south of Baghdad. They speeded along highways lined with date palms and soon reached the police station.

Smolen and the officers, who had met several times before, chatted casually through an interpreter in the station’s shabby office.

Smolen asked about the upcoming religious holiday, Ramadan. Soon, the talk turned to whether he was married, which he was, and whether he had children, which he didn’t.

After a 23-year-old Iraqi officer bragged that he had two children, the banter turned to Muslim law, which allows men to take more than one wife.

“You can become a Muslim and have four wives,” a policeman told Smolen.

“In Poland, you couldn’t afford it,” Smolen replied.

Such bridge-building is important for the multinational troops, who are trying to establish bonds with Iraqis. In contrast to other parts of the country, in this area U.S. soldiers made a good impression on the locals.

By comparison, the newcomers are seen as cold, distant and too quick to point their guns at people’s heads.

“Everybody is saying that the Americans are much better than the Poles. People are thinking that they are like terrorists. They always raise the guns in our faces,” said Jasim Kadhum Hamza, a marketplace worker in Musayyib, a dirt-poor city with the feel of a dusty village.

But the Americans were like that at first too, and the Poles will learn to appear less aggressive, one local policeman said. “It’s natural,” he explained. “They’re new.”

Smolen agreed. “We are very fresh. Fresh meat. So we behave like that sometimes.”

Despite such first impressions, there has been little violence directed at the multinational troops.

The division is headquartered in a compound Hussein built next to the ruins of ancient Babylon, just below a hill where one of his many palaces stands. In addition to patrolling, the troops guard fuel convoys, recruit men for the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, disburse funds for small-scale reconstruction projects and provide technical experts to upgrade power plants and other services.

“The most important thing from my point of view is to ‘keep the night’ -- to know what is going on at night,” said Lt. Col. Zenon Szczybylo, commander of the multinational division’s 1st Battle Group, a unit of 440 Polish, Latvian and Lithuanian soldiers that includes Smolen’s platoon. “So we have more patrols at night than in the day. During the day it is quite calm. During the night there is more shooting, more thieves, more action.”

After this night’s police- station schmooze session, the Iraqis and Poles set out on a joint patrol, a police vehicle leading the way and the soldiers following in their open trucks.

With fingers on the triggers of semiautomatic rifles, the Poles worked their way down dusty, unpaved streets where the stench of sewage and poverty floated on the breeze.

Before long, they came upon agitated residents and shopkeepers who said attackers had just set off a bomb that damaged an electrical transformer, which was leaking fluid and might explode. The defenders shot at them to drive them away. Apparently the same people keep sneaking into the area at night to set off explosives, they said.

When a quick search turned up no one suspicious, the police and soldiers went to find electric company officials or technicians. But before they could roust anyone, they got word of a second bomb.

That turned out to be an explosion outside a home. Back at the police station after checking it out, Smolen expressed frustration that residents and police didn’t seem to be telling him everything they knew or guessed about such incidents. “It was a bomb at a house. They put the bomb and ran away,” he said grimly. “We don’t get information, I don’t know why.... I don’t understand this.”

The Iraqi police say they believe the bomb attacks are intended to settle old scores, not to overthrow the new order represented by U.S. and British soldiers. Yet no one ever says just what the old scores are or exactly who would want revenge.

“I think they know who did this,” Smolen said. “But maybe I’m not right.”

The language barrier is part of the problem. The Polish-led division has found ways to cope with the language differences among its troops. Many of the soldiers on the street, like their American counterparts, can talk to one another but not to the people they’re supposed to be protecting.

Polish Maj. Gen. Andrzej Tyszkiewicz holds overall command of the division, but English is the shared language at his Camp Babylon headquarters. Most troops are grouped into brigades by language or their countries’ geographic proximity.

Spain leads a brigade with soldiers from Spanish-speaking countries. As with the battle group, a mostly Polish brigade includes troops from neighboring Lithuania and Latvia. A largely Ukrainian brigade has Kazakh engineers who speak Russian, which the Ukrainians can understand.

Some countries such as Poland have their own trained Arabic speakers, and local interpreters are being hired.

The troops build links with Iraqis by helping with infrastructure repair. Szczybylo, the commander of the unit based at the pistol factory, has a budget of $200,000 for reconstruction projects, continuing an effort begun by the U.S. Marines based here before.

“Now I’ve spent about $30,000,” he said. “We bought some equipment for schools and hospitals.” His money is from the U.S. government, but he also hopes to do some projects with Polish aid, he said.

Another key part of his job, Szczybylo said, has been to recruit 150 men to serve as privates in the new Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. Once trained, they will increase the forces under his command to 590 and provide much-needed local expertise. Similar efforts are being made by other units.

“We would like to choose some who speak English, and we will provide interpreters too,” he said.

Several hundred men desperate for these 12-hour-a-day jobs -- which pay $60 a month -- lined up for interviews in mid-September outside the fence of the 1st Battle Group’s base.

One of the men, 20-year-old Mohammed Hussein Kadhum, complained that his home was destroyed and his father injured by U.S. bombing during the war. Asked why he was still willing to work as a soldier helping the foreigners, he replied: “I am obliged to, because I need to eat. The only other job I can find is to be with the terrorists. Do you want me to work for the terrorists?”

In his conversations with the Iraqi police, Smolen told them they should pay people for information about who was setting the bombs.

The Iraqis asked if the Poles could pay, but Smolen said he couldn’t promise anything. They discussed the possibility of joint raids to capture terrorists and weapons. But they agreed that would not be realistic without good intelligence.

Tired and a bit discouraged, the platoon was about to head back to base.

Before its members pulled away from the station, there was another explosion. A minute later, a louder one. It was almost 3 a.m.

“We’ll stay longer,” Smolen declared. “I want to find out if anyone was injured.” They soon located one bomb site: an empty building. Another mystery. They never found the site of the fourth explosion.

Soon they were careening through the darkness again, one of the open trucks blasting the night with a tape of American rock music as the men headed back to the pistol factory.

“Every time it’s the same,” Smolen said. “We are coming, showing up, people are waving. Then we have some bombs. We try to find somebody. Nobody saw anything.”

Yet his mission doesn’t seem pointless. “Maybe we won’t catch anyone during the half year I’ll be here,” he said. “But when we show up, people get calm.

“They know we try to protect them.”