TIME: High Noon on Haifa
Street
Monday, August 30, 2004
By MICHAEL WARE
The booby-trapped artillery shell detonated shortly
before midnight. In the roar and smoke, bodies ripped
apart. Suddenly the nine-man foot patrol from Task
Force 1/9, composed of infantrymen and cavalry
troopers, was down to five, alone, in a darkened
Baghdad alley and cut off from help. One soldier was
dead. Three others lay bleeding but still alive as
fire from AK-47s rained down on the scrambling
troopers. Company commander Captain Thomas Foley
hollered orders above the din, desperately trying to
stave off the attack while getting some kind of aid
to his wounded men. One had lost a leg in the massive
blast; two others were critically wounded. Grenades
were lobbed down from houses and apartments above.
Foley banded the survivors together to cover their
fallen comrades. A minute elapsed, then another and
another. The onslaught didn't cease, but they held
on. Forty more minutes would pass before rescuers
could fight their way to them. It felt like a
lifetime.
Moments like these have become harrowingly familiar
for the men of Task Force 1/9 since their arrival in
Baghdad in April. Their area of operations lies in
the heart of the Iraqi capital, with one stretch less
than two miles from the office of the new Iraqi
government and the U.S. embassy inside the fortified
Green Zone. It centers on Haifa Street, a once busy
thoroughfare that has become the most feared stretch
of Baghdad: a vicious insurgent sanctuary where U.S.
and Iraqi government forces cannot tread except to
shoot their way in and out. The battle for Haifa
Street is illustrative of the wider challenges facing
U.S. forces across Iraq, which will remain even if
the U.S. manages to quell the uprising in Najaf led
by Muqtada al-Sadr. After 17 months in Iraq, U.S.
forces still often find themselves operating in enemy
territory--even in the heart of Baghdad. For many,
the dangers are mounting. Despite their efforts to
stand up Iraqi forces and lower the profile of
foreign troops, U.S. commanders have yet to stem the
death toll: this month U.S. personnel are dying at
three times the rate they were in February.
Like other frontline soldiers in Iraq, the men of
Task Force 1/9--of which Charlie Company, of the
National Guard's 1st Battalion, 153rd Infantry
Regiment, is a part--face the risk of almost
perpetual combat. Among the company's 119 men, dozens
of Purple Hearts have been awarded for injuries
suffered in battle. "Exceptional things are happening
out there, bits and pieces of extraordinary bravery,"
says Foley. At the same time, Foley sees these
streets stripping his young charges of their youth.
"People outside have no idea of the overall effect of
this. Eighteen-year-old kids are having to go through
this. I'm watching some of them in my company and how
quickly they're being made to grow up. It's
chilling."
The midnight fire fight on May 19, which killed one
member of Task Force 1/9 and wounded three, was a
foreshadowing of even more bold insurgent attacks. On
the morning of July 7, a 100-person company of Iraqi
National Guardsmen ventured onto Haifa Street to set
up checkpoints. Almost immediately, they came under
fire from the concrete forest of towering
Soviet-style apartment blocks that line the wide,
four-lane boulevard. After 50 minutes, Task Force 1/9
headed toward Haifa Street to evacuate the Iraqi
troops. As a platoon moved toward a former palace of
Saddam Hussein's at one end of Haifa Street, another
entered the narrow winding laneways of Old Baghdad,
dubbed the Maze, and took up positions atop the
guardhouses at Sheik Marouf Cemetery. Within a
minute, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) burst around
them, and 7.62-mm bullets buzzed past in swarms. At
the other end of Haifa Street, insurgents stepped out
from buildings and let loose their RPGs. Women hurled
potatoes onto the street like grenades, duping the
Iraqi soldiers into diving to the ground, while male
insurgents unloaded machine-gun fire or threw real
grenades. During three hours of fighting, U.S. forces
finally unleashed high-explosive rounds from a 25-mm
cannon, obliterating the two-man RPG teams, to quiet
the boulevard. Two Iraqi guardsmen were killed, and
U.S. commanders say their troops killed dozens of
insurgents in the fire fight. But the attacks haven't
subsided. "[The insurgents are] not intimidated,"
says Staff Sergeant Wilbert Tynes. "You've actually
got to wipe them out to get rid of them."
Senior officers in Task Force 1/9 concede they do not
know whom they're up against. They see boys, some as
young as 10, hurling grenades. But they also
encounter deftly executed ambushes bearing the mark
of professional soldiers and sophisticated terrorist
groups. "I really don't know who it is. I really
don't know what they want. That's the problem," says
Foley. Local militants say operations around Haifa
Street have been led by Abu Musa'ab, a former senior
Iraqi military officer who's now a commander for
Battalions of Islamic Holy War, a group tied to Abu
Mousab al-Zarqawi--the most wanted terrorist in
Iraq--and funded by wealthy Wahhabi donors in gulf
states. The insurgents say they are fighting for an
Islamic state in Iraq. A veteran of the Iran-Iraq
war, Abu Musa'ab exploits the military's reluctance
to inflict damage on residential areas. His men
barrage Task Force 1/9's base with rockets and
mortars every two or three days, knowing that the
Americans will rarely fire back. "I can fire from
anywhere I like. Go on, pick a spot. I'll show you,"
Abu Musa'ab told TIME. "They can't chase us in here."
The G.I.s of Task Force 1/9 admit to a growing dread
about the persistence of the insurgency. "My initial
feeling when I'm told we're going back in there is
'damn.' You sit and shake your head," says Staff
Sergeant Bryan Keeping. Tynes tells his crew to pray,
"'cause you never know what's going to happen. We
could have a good day, and they could have a bad day.
Or maybe not." Or maybe both. Late last month, after
a joint U.S.-Iraqi sweep of Haifa Street, the Iraqi
government announced that 263 had been detained in a
sweep for "insurgents"--a suspect figure, given that
most of the detainees were Shi'ites and the bulk of
the hard-core insurgents in this neighborhood are
Sunnis. What wasn't reported is that Task Force 1/9
was ambushed three minutes into the operation and hit
by 26 RPGs, eight roadside bombs and relentless
small-arms fire during the gun battles that followed.
One grenade landed just 3 ft. from Captain Foley; a
concrete fence and the quick reactions of the
specialist who pushed Foley out of the way are all
that saved him. "We handed them their arses, but we
were lucky," says Foley. "Each morning I thank God we
got outta there that day." No one knows about the
next time.