Iraq: The Iraqis Will Be Our Eyes And Ears. This Is Their Country

It’s 2:30 on a Thursday morning when four humvees, five Bradleys and a couple of minivans pull up in front of a two-story building in the Ghazalia district of western Baghdad. Bravo Company of the 91st Engineering Battalion is making a house call. The address is a suspected hideout of foreign fighters allied with Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, thought to be the mastermind of the recent wave of insurgent violence. Bravo has been joined by some special-forces soldiers, and together they come barreling out of their vehicles, clamber over a metal gate and charge into the house.

They quickly realize this is a “dry hole”: the house is empty. The raid has awakened the neighbors, though, which allows Bravo Company leader Captain Michael Rainey to ask some questions. The house had indeed been occupied by foreigners, says an old man, but they left a few weeks ago. They had claimed to be students, but Rainey uncovers hand-drawn maps of the area that hint at a more sinister purpose.

The predawn operation is a reminder that last week’s handover of sovereignty doesn’t mean coalition forces have marched off into the sunset; they’re lurking just over the horizon. Across the capital last week, barbed wire and concrete barriers were hauled away, opening up some roads that have been blocked for a year or more for security reasons. Iraqi national guardsmen and police are taking over from coalition soldiers and MPs at many checkpoints and police stations.

But the coalition’s reduced footprint isn’t supposed to compromise their ability to get at the “anti-Iraqi forces”–military shorthand for homegrown insurgents and foreign terrorists. “The enemy will still feel our breath on his neck,” says Major General Peter Chiarelli, commander of the 1st Cavalry, the armored division responsible for the security of Baghdad. “We’ll make damn sure the bad guys know we’re still in the neighborhood.”

When 1st Cav is in the neighborhood, you can hardly miss it. From his headquarters at Camp Victory, a sprawling base 10 miles west of downtown Baghdad, Chiarelli commands seven brigades comprising 29,000 soldiers and several thousand humvees, Bradley vehicles and Abrams tanks. At any given time, several groups of vehicles are on patrol or conducting raids, raising a huge dust cloud and a god-awful din. The base abuts Baghdad’s most hostile districts, Khadra, Ghazalia and Abu Ghraib, which makes it a target of almost daily mortar attacks. Those areas are known to harbor al-Qaeda cells and secret bombmaking factories.

Flushing them out is the task of 1st Cav’s 2nd Brigade, a.k.a. the Black Jack Brigade. The commander, Colonel Michael Formica, is keenly aware that when al-Zarqawi brings his jihad to the Iraqi capital, these districts will supply fighters and support.

As 1st Cavalry lowers its physical profile, commanders are relying more on technology to police their turf. First Cavalry is the first fighting unit to use a computer-based information system billed as, with the military’s characteristic immodesty, the Command Post of the Future, or CPOF. Much of what it does–and how it operates–is classified, but CPOF combines satellite imagery and digital maps with analytical software and constantly updated information from the field to give commanders a highly detailed view of their battle space. It allows Chiarelli to detect patterns in enemy activity and respond quickly. It also tells him, in real time, where his troops are and where there’s enemy activity.

But, as Bravo Company discovered on its raid, the latest technology is no match for that old data dictum known as GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. Commanders concede they have had little success getting intelligence about insurgent movements. Locals are often too hostile or afraid of reprisals to provide info. That’s where the new Iraqi forces are meant to come into the picture. “The Iraqis will be our eyes and ears,” says Lieut. General Thomas Metz, commander of the Multinational Corps in Iraq. “This is their country, these are their people.”

In the meantime, 1st Cavalry commanders are trying unconventional techniques. When a raid turned up a huge cache of contraband cigarettes, Formica recognized an opportunity for outreach. He had the packs distributed with special wraps printed with hotline numbers, an exhortation to report suspicious characters and the promise of a reward. A smoker called in the first bit of intelligence last week, Formica says. “Here’s something you don’t hear every day,” he says, “but that pack of cigarettes may have saved some lives.” –With reporting by Christopher Allbritton/Baghdad