War Stories (50 page)

      
Baghdad, Iraq

      
Saturday, 25 October 2003

      
1415 Hours Local

B
y the time I returned to Iraq in the summer, there were ominous signs that “rebuilding” Iraq was not going to be a simple task. Though Uday and Qusay were gone, Saddam himself was still on the loose, and this fact alone seemed to be inspiring resistance—particularly in the Sunni Triangle. The troops on the ground had become increasingly wary of the civilian population in places like Tikrit, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Baghdad proper. Commanders in these areas privately talked about a new threat—the “marriage of convenience” between former regime elements and foreign jihadists bent on trying to prevent the transition to democracy.

Most of Saddam's army had deserted when the dictatorship collapsed. His soldiers, mostly Shi'ite conscripts and poor Sunnis, simply went home—taking their AK-47s and RPGs with them. Within a
matter of weeks, many of them began using those weapons to perpetrate crimes against their fellow Iraqis and in small-scale terror attacks against coalition forces.

Paul Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), rejected the concept of offering financial incentives to Iraqi army deserters who returned to their barracks with their weapons. Instead, the CPA embarked on a costly and time-consuming effort to completely rebuild Iraq's police, national guard, and security forces. Unbeknownst to any of us who had covered the first phase of the war—and most of those who had fought in it—Operation Iraqi Freedom was about to become a very deadly endeavor.

As the heat of summer beat down on the land between the rivers, the number and scale of the attacks increased dramatically. Several factors contributed to the escalating violence—and growing U.S. casualties:

   
First, Iraq's neighbors—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Iran—were either unable or unwilling to stop hundreds of fanatical jihadists, inspired radical Islamic clerics and leaders of terror movements, from crossing into Iraq. Terrorists from these neighboring countries and others from Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Chechnya flooded into Iraq to join the jihad. By autumn 2003, they were effectively integrated into scores of disparate but deadly “cells” throughout the Sunni Triangle and incorporated into a significant number of Shi'ite communities.

   
Second, senior members of Saddam's now outlawed Baath Party had succeeded in fleeing to Syria with tens of millions in stolen funds. From there, they launched an organized effort to convince the Sunni minority in Iraq that Saddam was going to make a “comeback.” Messengers from Syria told Sunni sheikhs and imams
that unless the Sunnis fought back against American-imposed democracy, they would soon be repressed by the Shi'ite majority.

   
Third, Iraq's abandoned ammunition depots, munitions storage facilities, and arms depositories provided a treasure trove of weapons and explosives for arming opponents and building improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

On my first trip to Iraq, I had been with Lt. Col. “Pepper” Jackson's 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment when they had captured Bayji and its enormous munitions depot. Now his battalion was providing security for USA Environmental—the contractor charged with the destruction of the site's
300 million tons
of ordnance. Their goal: to haul 100 tons per day out into the desert and destroy it in earth-shaking, ear-shattering controlled detonations. From more than a mile away, one such blast knocked my camera off its tripod.

The work is difficult and dangerous. One of the EOD experts who had also worked in Kosovo, Ukraine, and Afghanistan said, “This is the most militarized place on the planet. At this rate, just cleaning up Bayji will take us five years. But it's worth it. Once we've blown it up, the ‘bad guys' can't use it to kill anyone else.”

He's right. In the hands of suicidal terrorists bent on killing “infidels,” a stolen automobile or truck heavily loaded with explosives is a guided bomb, nearly as deadly as the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II.

On 19 August 2003, a suicide terrorist driving an explosives-laden truck destroyed the UN headquarters building in Baghdad, killing twenty-four and wounding another hundred. Within weeks, the UN closed its offices in Iraq and fled the country. By October 2003, when the last UN officials departed, IEDs had become the number-one cause of casualties in Iraq.

   
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #44

      
4th ID HQ

      
Tikrit, Iraq

      
Saturday, 13 December 2003

      
1730 Hours Local

Each time I visited the headquarters of the 4th ID in Tikrit, General Ray Odierno—the division commander—or one of his subordinates would remind me that they had made it their mission to capture or kill Saddam Hussein. Though reports at the time suggested that the deposed dictator could be hiding anywhere from the suburbs of Baghdad to the outskirts of Damascus, the 4th ID soldiers were convinced that Saddam was still hiding out in the vicinity of his hometown.

Odierno is a tough, tall, lean soldier. He had borne the frustration of getting his division into the fight with considerable grace—a quality that would be sorely tested when his own son was grievously wounded.

On one occasion he took me into the G-2 spaces at his headquarters, where his intelligence staff explained the painstaking effort they were making to track down and double-check every piece of information that had been gleaned about Saddam. I made the observation that this was impressive work and inquired as to how much help the CIA was in this endeavor. A captain working nearby chuckled and replied, “CIA? We don't get much of anything that's useful from them. So we set this up just like we would in the NYPD, where I'm a homicide detective when I'm not wearing this uniform.”