[wvns] EYE SCANS IN IRAQ
U.S. Tries High Walls and High Tech To Bring Safety to Parts of Baghdad
'Gated Communities' For the War-Ravaged
Karin Brulliard
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/22/AR2007042201419.html
BAGHDAD -- The U.S. military is walling off at least 10 of Baghdad's
most violent neighborhoods and using biometric technology to track
some of their residents, creating what officers call "gated
communities" in an attempt to carve out oases of safety in this
war-ravaged city.
The plan drew widespread condemnation in Iraq this past week. On
Sunday night, Prime Minister Nouri-al Maliki told news services that
he would work to halt construction of a wall around the Sunni district
of Adhamiyah, which residents said would aggravate sectarian tensions
by segregating them from Shiite neighbors. The U.S. military says the
walls are meant to protect people, not further divide them in a city
that is increasingly a patchwork of sectarian enclaves.
Boys play soccer near a blast wall in Baghdad's Karrada neighborhood.
U.S. forces plan to erect walls and Jersey barriers around at least 10
districts. (By Wathiq Khuzaie -- Getty Images)
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The military sees a simple virtue in the barriers.
"If we keep the bad guys out, then we win," said 1st Lt. Sean Henley,
24, who works out of an outpost in southern Ghazaliyah, a Sunni
insurgent stronghold on Baghdad's western edge that is among the first
of the gated communities. The square-mile neighborhood of about 15,000
people now has one entrance point for civilian vehicles and three
military checkpoints that are closed to the public.
In some sealed-off areas, troops armed with biometric scanning devices
will compile a neighborhood census by recording residents'
fingerprints and eye patterns and will perhaps issue them special
badges, military officials said. At least 10 Baghdad neighborhoods are
slated to become or already are gated communities, said Brig. Gen.
John F. Campbell, the deputy commander of American forces in Baghdad.
The tactic is part of the two-month-old U.S. and Iraqi
counterinsurgency plan to calm sectarian strife and is loosely modeled
after efforts in cities such as Tall Afar and Fallujah, where the
military says it has curbed violence by strictly controlling access.
The gated communities concept has produced mixed results in previous
wars -- including failure in Vietnam, where peasants were forcibly
moved to fortified hamlets, only to become sympathizers of the insurgency.
Soldiers and military officials said that it was too early to evaluate
the success of Baghdad's gated communities and that adjustments would
be made according to results and residents' feedback, some of which
has been negative. But they insisted the measure is worth a try in the
city's bloodiest neighborhoods.
"We've really taken a hard look and said, 'This is an area where we
need to monitor people coming in and people coming out . . . and it is
the only way we could do it,' " Campbell said.
Wartime Baghdad has become a tableau of barricades as violence has
swelled. Enterprising residents put them to use as free advertising
space, blank canvases for graffiti and sunny spots for drying carpets.
But the blockading of Baghdad has reached full throttle under this
year's security crackdown, with dozens of new neighborhood military
outposts needing protection -- and fast. The push has triggered a run
on concrete barriers, which sometimes are not fully dry when military
engineering units pick them up, said Capt. David Hudson, 30, who leads
a company charged with building many of the city's blast walls. The
unit now goes through as many as 2,000 barriers a week.
Hudson's unit spent weeks installing two six-foot-tall,
mile-and-a-quarter-long walls along the northern, western and southern
borders of southern Ghazaliyah. Another unit blocked the cross streets
on the east side with waist-high Jersey barriers.
Under cover of darkness on a recent night, Hudson's soldiers placed 44
barriers at an intersection on the eastern edge of Ghazaliyah, a spot
known for bombs and snipers. Tanks and Humvees provided security for
the cranes and forklifts being used to build what would be the
neighborhood's lone civilian checkpoint.
"They've been doing it in Florida, and the old people seem to like
it," joked the platoon's leader, Sgt. 1st Class Charles Schmitt, 37,
as he watched his team create the public entrance to the new gated
community.
If there were ever a place that defied the tidy and tranquil image
suggested by that term, it is Ghazaliyah.
Boys play soccer near a blast wall in Baghdad's Karrada neighborhood.
U.S. forces plan to erect walls and Jersey barriers around at least 10
districts. (By Wathiq Khuzaie -- Getty Images)
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Although the neighborhood used to be mixed, it was also home to many
Sunni leaders of former president Saddam Hussein's army. Many fled
when they were stripped of their jobs after the 2003 U.S.-led
invasion, but some stayed.
Their presence provided a foothold for Sunni militants, who found the
area a convenient gateway to Iraq's Sunni insurgent heartland to the
west. Now southern Ghazaliyah is a base for al-Qaeda in Iraq and other
Sunni insurgent groups, including the 1920 Revolution Brigades.
These days, dogs nose through a seemingly endless terrain of
trash-filled dirt lots. Houses are riddled with bullet holes or marked
with black X's, the insurgents' warnings to Shiites to leave or be
killed. Businesses have shuttered, and services are intermittent. More
than half the houses are abandoned.
The Delta Company of the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment --
Henley's unit -- moved into one of the deserted homes in mid-March,
establishing an outpost in a villa with chandeliers and recessed
lighting. When they began doing sweeps, roadside bombs exploded often.
Firefights and rocket attacks occurred daily. The soldiers found piles
of mutilated bodies and empty houses whose interiors were smeared with
blood.
But shootouts and explosions have slowed, the soldiers said. They are
no longer finding piles of corpses these days -- "just onesies and
twosies," according to Sgt. 1st Class Tom Revette, 36. Tips from
residents have skyrocketed, leading the troops to weapons caches and
wanted men. Before setting up shop, Henley said, the unit had "no
viable targets, not one. Since we've been out here, we've got a
laundry list."
The outpost's leader, Capt. Darren Fowler, 30, said the raids alone
will not keep terrorists out. Walls and technology might, he figures.
So Fowler plans to have soldiers at the entry point use scanners to
log the fingerprints and eye patterns of every person who enters
southern Ghazaliyah. That will deter insurgents while building a sort
of neighborhood census, he said, something counterinsurgency experts
say is an essential step in tracking population movements. It will
also let soldiers compare the fingerprints of people who enter with
fingerprints collected during operations.
"We can pull fingerprints off all the bad stuff they handle and run it
through the database," Fowler said in an e-mail. "The soldiers'
favorite show to watch is CSI. We actually get some techniques from them."
Fowler is also considering issuing identification badges to every
resident of the gated community. But the area will not be closed off
to outsiders, because its markets are crucial to Sunnis who live in
nearby Shiite neighborhoods and are too afraid to go to their own
bazaars, he said.
The method of screening entrants is chosen by the Iraqi and U.S.
troops on the ground and will vary from one gated community to
another, said Campbell, the deputy commander in Baghdad. Some might
check Iraqi food ration cards, which show the holder's address, and
use biometrics -- which many soldiers have been collecting during
sweeps -- as a second-tier check.
"Most of the Iraqis have a card that tells where they live," Campbell
said. "So if they don't have one for that particular area, then
[soldiers will] go through the biometrics and see if there's any past
history of any activity that we would not want to have."
Many weary residents of southern Ghazaliyah are pleased with the
effort to shut out the blood bath, the soldiers said, while others
have griped about the inconveniences it presents.
Boys play soccer near a blast wall in Baghdad's Karrada neighborhood.
U.S. forces plan to erect walls and Jersey barriers around at least 10
districts. (By Wathiq Khuzaie -- Getty Images)
Special Report
Washington Post coverage of the U.S. military and its operations in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Faces of the Fallen
» FULL REPORT
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Earlier this month, Fowler led off the nightly meeting of Iraqi and
American soldiers, gathered around a dining table to review operations
on PowerPoint slides.
"Because of your help, I have gone one full week without being shot
at," said Fowler, a tall Southerner famed among his peers for having
survived 13 roadside bombings unscathed, 11 of them in Ghazaliyah.
Soon he addressed the barrier plan. The rural lanes to the west would
be sealed off soon, he said, "so terrorists cannot use the farm roads
to get into Ghazaliyah."
Many of the Iraqi soldiers nodded. But not Maj. Hathem Faek Salman,
who fears the barriers are more likely to anger residents than shut
out violence.
"This is not a good plan," Salman, 40, had said before the meeting.
"If my region were closed by these barriers, I would hate the army,
because I would feel like I was in a big jail. . . . If you want to
make the area secure and safe, it is not with barriers. We have to win
the trust of the people."
The next day, a convoy rumbled out to Bakriyah, a small village west
of Ghazaliyah -- just outside the walls and a little more than two
miles from the civilian checkpoint. It was a peaceful mission: to
track down a town leader who is on a local citizens' council that the
soldiers meet with regularly. The man, Najim Abdullah, had skipped a
recent meeting, and the soldiers thought his absence might have been
to protest the barriers.
Three U.S. soldiers, an interpreter and an Iraqi soldier removed their
helmets and sat down on the ornate carpets in Abdullah's home, leaning
against the walls with pillows propped behind their backs. Abdullah's
wide-eyed grandsons served sweet tea.
Abdullah, cross-legged in a gray dishdasha, or traditional robe, said
he had missed the meeting because of an emergency. But the gated
community idea, he said, "doesn't make any sense." His villagers had
long driven into Ghazaliyah's west end to go to its markets or
continue toward central Baghdad. Now they would have to drive around it.
"The barriers cannot be moved until all of the Ghazaliyah barrier plan
is in place," responded Lt. Lance Rae, 25. "But we will not forget the
people down here. They've been very faithful to us."
"It's your order. I disagree with it. But I accept it," Abdullah said.
"It does not matter to me. It matters to the people."
Abdullah rose, turned toward the blank white wall and sketched an
invisible picture of the area with his hands. He pointed left, to
Bakriyah. And a few feet right, to the checkpoint.
"It will take two hours to get from here to here!" he said.
Rae simply nodded and said, "Security is the key."
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