Trust Becomes an Issue on Base

Army 1st Lt. Lawrence Judkins had just sat down to eat with a couple of fellow soldiers at this base in Kirkush when he noticed six Iraqi workers entering.

As the men sat down at the next table, he and his friends got up and left.

It took only a few glances between the U.S. soldiers to communicate what played on their minds: Mosul.

“I didn’t recognize them,” Judkins said later.

Last week, a suicide bomber killed 22 people, including 18 Americans and three Iraqi guardsmen, in a mess tent at Forward Operating Base Marez near Mosul. The U.S. has been investigating how the attacker penetrated the base’s security, and military officials said they suspected that the attacker was wearing a uniform of the Iraqi security forces, which share facilities with U.S. troops.

“If it turns out that it’s a suicide bomber dressed in Iraqi national guard uniforms, it would have no effect on the relationship with the Iraqi national guards that we work with here,” said Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, commander of the 1st Infantry Division, when he visited the Caldwell base Saturday. “We fully understand that those uniforms are available. That’s a potential risk that we take.”

Iraqis have tried to defuse the situation and reduce any animosity that the U.S. soldiers might feel.

The Iraqi army’s chief of staff, Gen. Babaker B. Shawkat Zebari, told Associated Press on Sunday that the bomber could not have been a member of the Iraqi security forces.

“Certainly he was not a member of the national guards because all of our men stationed in the base have been accounted for,” he said.

Zebari suggested that the bomber could have been one of the many Iraqi civilians who work on the base.

Although military commanders said the bombing wouldn’t change relations between Americans and Iraqis, it has increased tensions and mistrust. Soldiers said they are taking an extra look at security forces, as well as translators and contractors.

“Everybody is watching everybody,” said Spc. Clay Wright, from Knoxville, Tenn., with the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment.

Along a chain-link fence in a corner of the Caldwell post, 50 miles northeast of Baghdad, U.S. soldiers live in rows of tents side by side with Iraqi interpreters. In another part of the base, Marines train Iraqi security forces. At night, Iraqis clean the bathrooms beside the U.S. soldiers’ tents.

Iraqi security forces guard entry checkpoints.

One soldier noted what appeared to be a new security measure. For a ceremony where high-ranking U.S. officers and Iraqi security forces were present, soldiers were told to wear body armor. At previous ceremonies, such as memorials or graduations, that was not the case.

“Mosul ... forces us to change our tempo, change the way we do business,” said Army Lt. Col. Gerald Waddle, who is in charge of troop security at Caldwell and oversees the training of the Iraqi national guard there. He didn’t want to specify what changes, if any, had taken place.

On this base, Americans and Iraqis play soccer together, exchange joke e-mails and share endless cigarettes, but their relationship is complicated.

“We trust them,” said one Iraqi interpreter. “But we don’t know if they trust us.”

Woven with a million tiny gestures and deeds, trust can be unraveled by violence in an instant. And after the attack near Mosul, many soldiers said that although they might know and like the Iraqis they dealt with daily, they were also wary.

“You can’t get into that mind-set that it can’t happen here -- because it can,” said Tim Norrod, a soldier with the 278th regiment. Norrod, from Crossville, Tenn., arrived on base only two weeks before the attack near Mosul.

“Soldiers here, it played on their minds a little bit -- sleepers,” he said, referring to a possible enemy among them. “You watch your conversation.”

Another soldier put it like this: “It’s like Attila the Hun,” poisoned by his wife on their wedding night, he said. “You always have to be on guard.”

U.S. officials prefer working with ethnic Kurd security forces “because they trust them more. Americans don’t even like to use Iraqis in the kitchens because they worry they might poison the food,” according to Sabah Kadhim, spokesman for Iraq’s Interior Ministry.

Working with Iraqi soldiers in the past, U.S. commanders have said they worried that the Iraqis might turn their guns on American soldiers on the battlefield. When joint operations are planned, U.S. soldiers frequently don’t inform their Iraqi counterparts about the details or the target until a couple of hours before because they worry about leaks from the Iraqi side.

Although the U.S. continues military operations and trains Iraqi security forces in preparation for the eventual hand-over of power, part of the U.S. strategy is economic. Creating jobs for Iraqis and pumping money into the local economy help fight the insurgency, commanders say. So Americans employ locals as translators, shopkeepers, cleaners and barbers on base.

“The PR is good,” said an American contractor who didn’t want to be named. “But how do we know who these people are?” Especially after the attacks near Mosul, he wondered about background checks for those on base.

He said insurgents -- who he believed to be radical Sunni Muslims -- had infiltrated the camp, a belief shared by many soldiers on the base.

Waddle said that contractor KBR does the background checks for Iraqi civilians on base, but that the process was being reevaluated by the military.

The fear of infiltration is shared by Iraqi translators, who risk their lives working on the base. While Americans spend money and create jobs, insurgents also are offering cash, if the recipient is willing to kill U.S. soldiers and the Iraqis working with them.

Several translators said they had been threatened by insurgents. Boxer, an interpreter who wanted to give only his nickname for safety reasons, said he had received a bullet in an envelope. He said killing a translator paid more than killing a U.S. soldier because “without us, they can’t do the job.”

Judkins, a federal corrections officer from Raleigh, N.C., said that when he arrived 10 months ago, “I really didn’t trust” Iraqis inside the camp.

He, like many other soldiers, didn’t appreciate the customary greeting among Iraqi men -- kissing. But over time, it became a joke. Now, Iraqis sometimes pretend to kiss the Americans, who flee in mock horror.

On a recent day, he was exchanging e-mail addresses with his Iraqi friends.

The attacks near Mosul cast a shadow for incoming soldiers, who had yet to make any Iraqi friends on the base. Judkins said: “They’re still a little jumpy.”

Times staff writer Edmund Sanders in Baghdad contributed to this report.