Fighting where you live

A good article in the LA Times on how the forces being used in the surge are patiently accumulating small successes – members of the 82^nd Airborne Brigade roll up an insurgent kidnapping clan and earn the confidence of locals through persistence:

The high-value target was shacked up with a prostitute.

That, at least, was the story provided by an Iraqi man who approached this combat outpost dug into the muddy east bank of the Tigris River in Baghdad. The target was Usama Kokez, a Sunni accused of leading a kidnapping ring that had executed several Shiite civilians.

The tip sent 1st Lt. Larry Pitts and his troops on a wild dash through the dark streets of Adhamiya in northwest Baghdad, their night-vision goggles on and their headlights off. For a battalion of 82nd Airborne paratroopers that is part of the “surge” of 21,500 troops being dispatched to stabilize Baghdad and Al Anbar province to the west, the Kokez tip was one small return on an investment.

The unit had been hiking down garbage-strewn streets for three weeks, imploring Iraqis to provide information on insurgents and militias in Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods. Such boots-on-the-ground probing is a staple of counterinsurgency warfare, but it was scrapped several months after U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003. Now it has been revived in the face of a rampant insurgency and a devastating sectarian war.

“The difference this time is, we’re not leaving,” said Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq…

Kokez was a prized quarry. According to battalion officers, he had joined Al Qaeda against his father’s wishes. Either he or his brother Amar, also an alleged Al Qaeda member, killed the father in order to join, the officers said…

The assault team crashed through the front gate and door. In the half-lighted living room were three frightened women and two squalling infants. Questioned by Spc. Andrea Pierce, 21, an intelligence soldier, the women at first said they had never heard of Usama Kokez.

“Stop lying to me!” Pierce yelled, her face flushed beneath her helmet.

Ultimately, the women admitted that Kokez lived there. In fact, they were hardly prostitutes, as the informant claimed. They were Kokez’s wife, sister and mother.

Pierce hauled Kokez’s wife, Rhagad, 22, into a side room and strip-searched her. The woman was wearing two bras. Tucked inside were two 9-millimeter pistol ammunition magazines and a cellphone. Inside her panties was a second cellphone, Pierce said.

In the alley behind the house, barely visible in the shadows, Sgt. Billy Davidson’s Humvee formed part of the security cordon. A barefoot man in a dark tracksuit tumbled over a wall and landed next to the vehicle.

Davidson and two other soldiers piled out and pointed their M-4 automatic rifles at him. The man said something in Arabic. Davidson told him in English to shut up and get on his belly.

“He was crying like a baby,” Davidson said later.

In the man’s pocket was a firecracker and an ID card. It was Usama Kokez.

Three days after the Kokez raid, a young man from the neighborhood called the number on the tip card. He said Amar Kokez was inside a house near his brother’s place.

The young man said he came forward because a friend had been killed by insurgents, and because he had been heartened by the earlier raid. Three other sources had previously linked Kokez to an insurgent cell, Capt. Harvey said.

Because this was a “time-sensitive target,” planning was rapid. The tip came in at 7:30 p.m. By 9 p.m., the raiding party was picking up the informant under a deserted bridge en route to Kokez’s house.

Three shotgun blasts crumpled the front gate. The assault team found Kokez and his wife on a bed, their freshly cooked dinner of roast meat and salad spread before them.

Kokez, a slender man with a thin black mustache, was forced to the floor, cuffed and blindfolded. A sergeant knelt down to interrogate him, shining a light into his face. Amar began to weep softly.

“Oh, you’re gonna cry now?” the sergeant said, mocking him.

For the next 15 minutes, the sergeant bore down on Kokez. Threatening and pleading, he coaxed a steady flow of information. Kokez provided names of men he said were planning kidnappings and killings. He told the sergeant where they lived, near the Fish Market, and the market store where they planned their attacks.

This is how security can be created at the local level, with the persistent application of pressure. It will be sustained when the Iraqi Army is trained to perform at approximately the same level – at least they won’t need translators – without resorting to sectarian violence under the guise of the state.

The most frightening thing right now for the anti-war politicians and their enablers must be that this surge thing just might work – they’ve invested so much political, intellectual and emotional capital in our defeat.

I bet that’s hard to grapple with, in the dark watches of the night – the fear that we might actually win.