Iraqi Suburb Is More Secure, but Hemmed In

Before the U.S. military moved into this suburb north of Baghdad and cordoned it off with six miles of concertina wire, insurgents had the run of the place.

They launched nearly daily attacks on the police that whittled down the 40-member force by half. U.S. patrols often were targeted by car bombs and roadside explosives. In one week in March, a bomb killed four Iraqi soldiers and a sniper killed a police officer inside Tarmiya’s bullet-pocked police headquarters.

On Thursday, during a short, highly choreographed gathering at Tarmiya’s town center arranged by the U.S. military, residents of the predominantly Sunni Arab town expressed gratitude to U.S. troops for driving out insurgents and beginning rebuilding projects that included water services, a hospital renovation, road construction and refurbishment of a youth center.

Local politicians and other residents say security has improved dramatically.

Tarmiya is an example of a cordon strategy used in towns in Al Anbar province, including Tall Afar and Fallouja, in which U.S. troops clear areas of guerrillas, form a perimeter and develop Iraqi security forces in the hope that they will be strong enough to hold off the insurgency once American soldiers leave.

The military presented Tarmiya, a verdant, palm-shaded village along the Tigris River, as a good news story: a Sunni Arab community that welcomes American troops and dislikes the Sunni Arab-driven insurgency.

But townspeople also said that although active insurgents are no longer in their midst, they are unable to live normal lives because their freedom of movement is limited. Shiite militias have in effect cut them off from the capital.

“My 2-year-old son has hemophilia, but there is no medicine here,” said Ahmad Abdullah, a construction worker. “Sometimes I try to go to Baghdad, but I am afraid because gunmen kill and kidnap those who try to go there.”

Taxi driver Qusay Abdel Hussein said that a woman who was trying to go to Baghdad to shop for food last week was killed on the way, and that he knew a man who was kidnapped while headed to the capital and was being held for ransom.

“This is a rural place, and we have many farmers who can’t take their harvests to Baghdad. We can’t take documents to the government or see our relatives in Baghdad,” Hussein said. “I haven’t been to Baghdad for eight months now because of the bad situation. I need money, but I can’t get it because all the banks are in Baghdad.”

Hussein said that he and friends and relatives had gone into debt to avoid making the dangerous trek into the capital.

Sheik Jassim Said, head of Tarmiya’s local government council, said the town had become a haven for Sunni Arabs driven out of predominantly Shiite areas. The number of families that have arrived from places such as Baghdad, Nasiriya and Basra has reached 1,300, he said.

“These families [often] come a great distance because they have been displaced from their homes by armed militias that belong to the political parties,” the sheik said.

He acknowledged that security had improved. But his son was recently slain by insurgents, and he said he did not feel safe. Council leaders still receive death threats from insurgents who oppose their cooperation with the U.S. military.

“We don’t want the American occupation,” the sheik said. “But if the Americans leave, we will be raided by armed groups.”

U.S. Army Col. James Pasquarette, commander of the 1st Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said that Tarmiya had been an “intellectual sanctuary” for high-level insurgent leaders planning attacks in Baghdad, and that the Army had expected stiff resistance when it swept in two months ago.

“We were under the assumption that the population here was giving active and passive support to the insurgents,” he said. “I’m glad to say that we were wrong. The people here didn’t like the insurgents any more than we did.”

The insurgents left town without any significant resistance and haven’t been back, Pasquarette said.

The decrease in violence has enabled Iraqi and U.S. officials to start reconstruction. A division of the Iraqi army has helped secure the area, and 450 volunteers have reestablished the police force. Many of them will soon undergo eight weeks of training at a police academy in Jordan.

Pasquarette’s unit has spent $4.5 million on reconstruction projects and plans to spend at least $7.5 million more. The town now depends on water from the Tigris. A five-mile water line that will bring fresh water from a nearby treatment plant is half completed.

U.S. funds also are paying for new surgery and birthing rooms at a medical clinic.

“The majority of our contractors are Iraqis,” Pasquarette said. U.S. soldiers said that creating jobs in Tarmiya was part of the strategy to break the grip of the insurgency.

Iraqi contractor Nabil Mohammed Yaseen said he had employed 20 men to work on Tarmiya’s youth center. “It was an unstable situation before. When the Americans came through here there would be a lot of explosions,” he said. “Lately, it’s been a lot better. There’s a lot of reconstruction here.”

But local leaders said that although the U.S. military had funded reconstruction efforts and helped to develop the security forces, national government leaders in Baghdad had not been so helpful. “They don’t know anything,” Said, the council leader, said.

In other news, the U.S. military announced that two soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in southern Iraq. They were not immediately identified and few details were given.

In Mosul, gunmen killed a local council member and his driver Thursday near a downtown mosque. In Baghdad, an assassination attempt seriously injured a high-ranking Defense Ministry official.

And U.S. military officials said they were not allowing journalists to travel with military units in Ramadi, an insurgent hot spot that has become one of the most deadly battlegrounds in Iraq, for an indefinite period. Military officials would not explain why they were stopping the practice.

Special correspondents in Baghdad and Mosul contributed to this report.