Anti-Insurgent Raids Continue in Iraq’s Babil Province

About 1,000 U.S. Marines and British soldiers, accompanied by Iraqi SWAT forces, punched into homes and compounds of suspected insurgents south of Baghdad early today as military forces accelerated efforts to restore order in the lawless area.

Before dawn, helicopters delivered the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit’s elite Force Reconnaissance platoon to Rushdi Mulla, a small town just east of the Euphrates River. While the Marines secured the town, the Iraqi SWAT team conducted house-to-house searches.

U.S. commanders suspect that the town may be home to some fighters who had migrated to join the insurrection in Fallouja in recent months but returned before U.S. and Iraqi forces stormed that city two weeks ago.

Hours before the latest raids, three companies of Britain’s Black Watch regiment laid a temporary bridge and drove over the Euphrates in Warrior armored troop carriers. They entered a neighborhood of plush waterfront estates they said was a retreat for wealthy supporters of Saddam Hussein’s former regime. Several former Iraqi Republican Guard members also live there, the British said.

Black Watch soldiers raided four targets and detained 20 men as well as suspected bomb-triggering devices. The 80 British troops were still sweeping this morning through the half-mile stretch along a bend in the river that they dubbed “Millionaires’ Row.”

The men who were held were being taken to a temporary detention facility for questioning.

Northern Babil province, where the raids and sweeps are underway, has become notorious for ambushes, assassinations and the homemade roadside bombs that the military calls improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

Several suicide car bombings have targeted British troops and Iraqi security forces, including two recent attempts to kill a local police chief.

Insurgents are also planting bombs in parked cars, military officials said. The daily detonations have severely curtailed civilian traffic and interfered with convoys in northern Babil.

Restoring free passage through northern Babil is a high priority for the interim Iraqi government.

The province is where Iraq’s heavily Shiite Muslim south meets the largely Sunni Muslim satellite towns of Baghdad, and the rampant banditry and intimidation have in effect cordoned off the capital along its southern perimeter.

The province is home to a power plant outside Iskandariya that supplies nearly half of Baghdad’s electricity, the military says. Oil pipelines and key power lines also are there.

Today’s operations included rebuilding a key bridge -- for the second time -- that crosses a canal on Route 8. Insurgents have attacked the span so many times that the American military refers to it as IED Bridge.

The road is the only north-south route through the province open to civilians, since the U.S. military closed the main road, Route 1, in an attempt to create a secure supply path for itself. Still, American convoys routinely come under small-arms fire and encounter homemade bombs along Route 1.

Today’s raids are part of the early stages of an operation called Plymouth Rock, which began Tuesday and involves the 4,000 U.S. and British troops in the area as well as about 1,000 Iraqi security personnel.

The operation focuses on a string of towns along the Euphrates plagued by assassinations and kidnappings. Unlike the recent U.S.-led frontal assault on Fallouja, this offensive aims to push the insurgents out of their scattered strongholds through a series of raids, arrests and strikes by special forces.

The operation’s path and targets will be flexible, American officers say, dictated by intelligence culled from interrogations of those detained in the raids.

“We are going to contain them, squeeze them, hold them, then we will kill them if we cannot capture them,” said Col. Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marines and leader of the operation.

U.S. commanders have been frustrated by the insurgents’ continuing attempts to close roads and restrict movement in the area.

On Nov. 4, an American Cobra attack helicopter destroyed a barricade manned by about 20 insurgents west of the town of Latifiya, but illegal checkpoints where insurgents harass or rob drivers continue to pop up.

“They want to deny us access to certain places and to dominate movement out of Baghdad,” said a British military spokesman at the Marines’ Forward Operating Base Kalsu. “Some of the insurgents are mobile, but there is also an element that wants to hold the ground they control.”