TIME: The Most Dangerous
Place
Sunday, May 21, 2006
On a harrowing trip inside Iraq's toughest city,
TIME gets an up-close view of the U.S.'s daily
battles against the insurgents. An eyewitness account
reveals why the war remains as deadly as
ever
By
MICHAEL WARE / RAMADI
It's another sweltering afternoon in the most
dangerous place in Iraq, and the men of Kilo Company,
3rd Battalion, 8th Marines, are looking to pick a
fight. First Lieut. Grier Jones splits his 30-odd-man
platoon into two squads and sets them loose on the
streets of Ramadi. They run block to block, covering
one another as they sprint across intersections.
Insurgents bob their heads out of homes to catch a
glimpse of the Marines--"turkey peeking," as the
troops call it--a sign that they are preparing to
attack. "We come out here every day, and we get shot
at," Jones tells an Iraqi woman who speaks
American-accented English. "Where are the bad guys?"
She falls silent. Outside, a blue sedan peels away.
"Watch that car," a Marine yells, sensing a possible
ambush.
His instincts are right. At the next intersection,
the Marines duck into a house. Suddenly a machine gun
lets rip, spewing bullets around them. "Where's it
coming from?" a Marine yells. Immediately, shooting
opens up from a second direction. Jones gets his men
to the roof to repel the two-sided attack. "Rocket!"
screams a grunt, unleashing an AT4 rocket at one of
the insurgent positions. Men reel from the blast's
concussion. The shooting from the east stops. But as
Jones peers over a cement wall to locate the second
ambush position, a 7.62-mm round whizzes by. "Whoa,
that went right over my head," he says, smiling. As
the Marines on the roof fire at the insurgents, Jones
orders a squad to push toward the enemy position.
Then the enemy weapons go quiet; the insurgents are
apparently withdrawing to conserve their energy.
Jones radios back to his commanders. "We saw the
enemy do a banana peel back, then peel north." He
chuckles. "This is every day in Ramadi."
There's no reason to believe that the Americans'
battle against Iraqi insurgents is going to get
better. With U.S. support for the war sinking, the
Bush Administration is eager to show that sufficient
progress is being made toward quelling the insurgency
to justify a drawdown of the 133,000 troops in Iraq.
The U.S. praised the naming of a new Iraqi Cabinet
last week, even though it includes some widely
mistrusted figures from the previous government. And
even as commanders try to turn combat duties over to
Iraqi forces and pull U.S. troops back from the front
lines, parts of Iraq remain as deadly as ever. At
least 18 U.S. troops died last week, raising the
total killed since the invasion in March 2003 to
2,456.
Nowhere is the fighting more intense than in Ramadi,
the capital of Anbar province and for the moment the
seething heart of the Sunni-led insurgency. The city
remains a stronghold of insurgents loyal to Abu
Mousab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq,
who U.S. intelligence believes is hiding in an area
north of the city. In recent weeks, the soldiers and
Marines in Ramadi have come under regular assault,
forcing commanders last week to order reinforcements
to the besieged city. In the past year, the Army's
2/28th Brigade Combat Team, the unit the Marines are
attached to, has lost 79 men in Ramadi--yet the
brigade's commander, Colonel John Gronski, says, "The
level of violence remains about the same."
TIME spent a week with Kilo Company, the 120-person
unit that goes head to head with the insurgents every
day. The goal is to lure al-Qaeda into attacks, which
Kilo Company has been doing successfully: in a single
week, five men were wounded, three foot patrols were
ambushed, and there were unrelenting attacks from
small-arms fire and mortars. The experience of the
Marines in Ramadi illuminates some of the
shortcomings of the U.S. strategy for defeating the
insurgency. The commander has only one brigade to
secure the town, even though U.S. officers say
privately that at least three are needed. Among the
troops, frustration is growing: many officers say
that the U.S. is too lenient in its dealings with the
enemy, allowing too many captured insurgents to go
free, and that soldiers can do little more than act
as international police. Others claim that superiors
are overlooking their reports about conditions on the
ground. If the U.S. and its Iraqi allies are making
progress in eroding the appeal of the resistance, the
men in Ramadi don't see it. Says an American officer:
"This s___ ain't going anywhere."
From the instant Kilo Company set foot in Ramadi, the
Marines knew they were in the middle of an insurgent
hotbed. Lance Corporal Jose (Syco) Tasayco was on the
unit's earliest patrol outside the wire in March.
"The first day was an eye opener. We got contact,
that first patrol. It was like, wow, we couldn't
believe it, but we got outta there good. Nobody got
hit," he says. The Marines are based in the
battle-scarred Government Center in the middle of
Ramadi, a magnet for al-Qaeda attacks--one of the few
ways the Marines can find their enemy. The precarious
outpost also protects the nascent local government,
which operates out of its confines.
Sitting sentry in the center of town, the Marines are
a ripe target for insurgent assaults. On April 24,
mortars begin crashing down on the compound, and the
shuddering impacts force the grunts to take cover in
their rooftop bunkers. From an alley in the
northeast, an insurgent fires a rocket-propelled
grenade that slams a wall along the narrow mouth of a
sandbagged gun pit. Shards of hot metal penetrate the
opening, hitting Corporal Jonathan Wilson. Blood
pours down his neck. "Corpsman up, corpsman up," he
cries--asking for a medic to head to the roof. He
runs downstairs and collapses into the arms of a
sergeant.
Meanwhile, shrapnel has shredded the left thumb of
Lance Corporal Adam Sardinas. But he keeps his finger
on the trigger of a grenade launcher, and it's not
until another Marine arrives to relieve him that he
finally turns for the slit doorway. "Let me get outta
here," he says. "I'm hit pretty bad." But the battle
goes on: below the Marines' outpost, al-Qaeda
fighters toting AK-47s dart in and out of view. As
blood from Sardinas and Wilson pools at his feet,
Sergeant William Morrow grips the grenade launcher. A
fellow Marine spots an insurgent in the open. "Waste
his ass," Tasayco urges as they open fire on the
enemy below.
Despite heavy losses among the insurgents--112 were
killed in one week in April--they have proved
resistant to the U.S.'s onslaughts. Intelligence
officials increasingly refer to them as a "legitimate
local resistance," but it's al-Qaeda that drives
them. Long ago, al-Zarqawi's network settled in
Ramadi and, in essence, hijacked the homegrown fight.
Although Iraqi groups have bucked al-Zarqawi's
authority periodically--most notably in last year's
referendum and December election, when they opted to
vote, forcing him to stand idly by--al-Qaeda
maintains its grip.
U.S. efforts to woo Iraqi groups were beginning to
pay dividends, as the city's tribal and insurgent
leaders gave their approval for young Sunnis to join
the new police force. Recruitment mostly ran at about
40 a month, though in January, 1,000 showed up to
join. But al-Qaeda responded by sending a chest-vest
suicide bomber into the queue of applicants, killing
about 40 Iraqis, wounding 80, and killing two
Americans. When the recruits returned days later,
al-Zarqawi followed up with a wave of seven
assassinations of tribal sheiks. "That hurt us a
lot," says Gronski.
Given the ability of al-Zarqawi's men to melt into
the city, Kilo Company has few options but to search
for the insurgents on block-by-block foot patrols
through the worst areas. It's perilous work. On one
morning this month, Tasayco and Corporal Nathan Buck
take their squad out to commandeer a small shopping
complex, which will give cover for the rest of the
platoon to push east. On the roof, Buck, his helmet
emblazoned with the words DEATH DEALERS in thick
letters, warns his Marines to stay alert. When
Tasayco sees movement in a nearby window, Buck rises
to check it out. An insurgent sniper fires at his
head, cracking a round into the lip of the cement
wall in front of him. "I should be dead right now,"
Buck says to Tasayco with a laugh.
It's not long before another round flies over their
heads, this time from a little farther to the east.
The sniper is moving, hunting them. Minutes pass with
no more firing. But Tasayco is uneasy. The order
comes over the radio to move back to base. "Be
careful, we're gonna get hit," a Marine says as the
men drop to the pavement. It's only 150 yards back to
the Government Center, but every inch is hard won.
Lance Corporal Phillip Tussey pauses on the edge of a
small alley. With another Marine covering him, he
makes a dash to cross the five yards of open ground.
He doesn't get more than a couple of steps when a
shot rings out. He's cut down mid-stride, hit in the
thigh. The men around him open fire. Within seconds,
insurgents start shooting from the opposite
direction. A Marine tries to drag Tussey by a leg
toward a humvee but gets stranded out in the open.
Tasayco bolts forward and grabs the wounded man by
the arm. Someone else joins him. Still firing, they
shove him into the vehicle. Tasayco takes cover and
looks for the shooter. "Where the hell is this guy
at?" he hollers. No one answers. "C'mon, everybody,
let's go. Pick it up. Get the f___ out of here, man,"
Tasayco shouts. All his men can do is run.
So why does Ramadi remain beyond the U.S.'s control?
Part of the problem, many officers say, is that the
troops' authority to act is constrained by politics.
Soldiers cannot lock up suspected insurgents without
first getting an arrest warrant and a sworn statement
from two witnesses. And those who are convicted often
receive jail sentences that are shorter than a
grunt's tour of Iraq. "We keep seeing guys we
arrested coming back out, and things get worse
again," says an intelligence officer.
The bigger problem, though, is one that few in the
military command want to hear: there aren't enough
troops to do the job. "There's a realization, as
every military commander knows, that you cannot be
strong everywhere," says Gronski of Ramadi. "In the
outlying areas, we think in terms of an economy of
force where we are willing to accept risk by not
placing as many troops." But while Gronski says his
fighting strength is "appropriate," other commanders
bristle at the limitations. "I can't believe it each
time the Secretary of Defense talks about reducing
force," says a senior U.S. officer. War planners in
Iraq say just getting a handle on Ramadi demands
three times as many soldiers as are there now.
Several U.S. commanders say they won't ask superiors
for more troops or plan large-scale operations
because doing so would expose problems in the U.S.'s
strategy that no one wants to acknowledge. "It's what
I call the Big Lie," a high-ranking U.S. commander
told TIME.
To be fair, gains are being made in Ramadi with the
Iraqi army, the police and the young provincial
government. A brigade intelligence officer says that
"we are not getting excited because this is a long
process--though we are winning. The tide is turning."
But for those in the midst of the battle, that can
sometimes be hard to see. "No matter what they say
about the rest of the country, it ain't like this
place," says a battalion officer in the thick of the
fight. "It's the worst place in the world."