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Life in a remote US Army outpost in Iraq: IEDs, DVDs, and A/C
Doria, near Kiruk, is part of the new US counterinsurgency effort, where 110-degree heat isn't the only foe US troops face.
from the May 30, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 4
"We got a little ahead of ourselves before, when the thinking was to keep all our soldiers to these large bases," says Col. Patrick Stackpole, commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team in Kirkuk. "Now with footholds like Doria, thephilosophy is to establish ourselves among the people so they trust us and the Iraqi officials we're helping to stand up."
The outpost's dual mission: Keep the Rashad Valley from returning to the insurgents who controlled it just six months ago, and help the new local Iraqi officials – a mayor and city council, a post of the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi police – establish legitimacy.
As a Sunni Arab stronghold, the valley is full of people who still feel the sting of Saddam Hussein's fall – and who fear the rise of the province's more prosperous Kurdish population.
On some days, Doria's soldiers carry out joint patrols with counterparts from the Iraqi Army and police. Their patrol-base commander, Capt. Jonathan Graebner, meets weekly with the mayor of Rashad, leaders of the security forces, and village leaders to help them persuade a reluctant population that the new Iraqi authorities are working for them.
The US soldiers don't build the water projects or new schools the villages want, but they facilitate the visits of the civil-affairs assessment teams that come from Kirkuk to see what services are needed.
But Doria's soldiers are also hunting down "bad guys," the ones who pay local farm boys $100 to plant the IEDs.
As three US Humvees leave Doria on an afternoon patrol, they pass Rashad's modest high school, its classrooms silent and its windows shattered, abandoned after "terrorists" threatened teachers to either leave or be killed. They left.
The Humvees also pass under a giant elevated "wanted" poster with the images of three men sought for carrying out local terrorist acts. But the billboard also stands as an unintended symbol of the dangers facing Iraqis and foreign soldiers alike. Earlier this month, the four men from Kirkuk hired by the US military to hang the antiterror ad were ambushed and killed shortly after completing the job. Members of the Rashad police had tipped off insurgent friends that the billboard hangers had finished and were heading north on the highway, setting in motion the attack.
Plying the dusty roads that link earthen villages, the soldiers stop to discuss water needs and school supplies with village elders. Later, they assist the Iraqi police at a kidnapping scene on the highway to Tikrit.
Did the farmers plant the IED?
A three-hour tour of a few villages stretches into a seven-hour patrol after an IED misfires beneath the middle truck of the convoy. No one is hurt, no visible damage is done, and the initial assessment is that it was a small device. But the tension is suddenly palpable after an explosives disposal team arrives and reveals the IED was in fact a large, multiheaded device buried within many pounds of fuel and accelerant. It simply failed to function as designed.
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