The 100 American soldiers who live here call it the Alamo, although their superiors hate the connotations of defeat. The camp is a cluster of six heavily fortified houses on the front line of the vicious sectarian war being fought by Sunnis and Shias in the district of Ghazaliyah, in west Baghdad.
It has no water, no heating and only the most primitive latrines. One hot meal is brought in daily by lorry. Every window is sandbagged. The men sleep cheek by jowl, their nights interrupted by gunfire and explosions. A lone chandelier serves as a poignant reminder of happier times. “It sucks,” one private protested.
But the “Alamo” also represents President Bush’s last best hope of restoring order to the Iraqi capital. It is the first of 20 joint security stations (JSS) that the US military intends to establish in the hotspots of Baghdad using some of the 21,000 extra troops that Mr Bush is deploying to Iraq. These garrisons are supposed to suppress the fighting, train their Iraqi Army colleagues and encourage local people to turn on Shia al-Mahdi Army militiamen and Sunni al-Qaeda types.
It is a big departure from keeping US troops cooped up in huge, isolated bases, but 48 hours in Ghazaliyah left
The Times wondering whether — four years after the fall of Saddam Hussein — it was not too little, too late. Ghazaliyah is barely five miles from the green zone, but it takes most of a day to get there: three hours waiting for a helicopter to the airport on the western edge of the city, three more waiting for a convoy of Humvees to take us to the JSS past Baghdad’s long-abandoned racecourse.
I used to visit Iraqi friends in Ghazaliyah after the US invasion of 2003. Then it was a pleasant suburb, with wide streets of palm-shaded villas. Now I found abandoned homes, shuttered shops and rubble-strewn streets barricaded against marauding gangs of killers. I drove past lakes of sewage and acres of rubbish. Local services have collapsed. There is an hour of electricity a day. Most schools are closed. One headmistress who defied the terrorists was beaten, raped, tied to a bed and electrocuted, then cut up.
The JSS is ringed by blast barriers, guard posts and coiled razor wire. The men from C Company, 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry, live in two of the knocked-through houses. A similar number of Iraqi soldiers live in the second pair. The last two are buffers against incoming fire.
The man in charge is Captain Erik Peterson, a 29-year-old from Indiana who is the American can-do spirit personified. “I am succeeding already,” he said. His men can now respond within minutes when fighting breaks out, he explained. They patrol daily in Humvees and on foot. They talk to Iraqis instead of kicking down their doors. They have brought in utility workers to repair power lines and arranged the first delivery in months of propane for cooking and heating.
Captain Peterson said that the sectarian posses had disappeared, their freedom of manoeuvre curtailed. He said that fewer families were being forced from their homes, fewer corpses being found and that local people were beginning to offer high-grade information about the “bad guys” in their midst. “We are fighting a counter-insurgency campaign and you need different tools from the old-style knockdown-doors campaign,” he said.
However, the violence remains pervasive. That first night we sped to the nearby Muhagren mosque after Sunnis called to say that Shia were attacking it with rocket-propelled grenades.
The next day a mosque guard was brought to the JSS having been fatally shot by a sniper. A US patrol sent back to the mosque was fired on. That evening we rushed for our body armour after a mortar attack.
Preparing the Iraqi Army to take over may prove even harder than suppressing the violence. Captain Peterson insists that his Iraqi contingent has a “lot of potential”, but his men decry its sloppy habits, ill-discipline and trigger-happy ways.
“They are no way in hell ready to take over in Iraq,” said Private Peter Payan, 19, as he manned a watchtower. “They’re here for the paycheque,” Private Justin Kent said. “Right now we’re taking care of the problems so they don’t have anything to face. It’s just like having your Mom clean up your room for you.”
Captain Salwan al-Aden, Captain Peterson’s veteran Iraqi counterpart, admitted that Saddam’s army was more disciplined, better led and better equipped. He complained that the US military had promoted poor mid-level Iraqi officers and that the Iraqi Army lacked weapons and transport.
I witnessed no contact between the US and Iraqi soldiers below officer level, and no joint patrols.
The Iraqi Army must also win over a Sunni community that considers it to be an instrument of Shia oppression. “Sunnis absolutely hate the Iraqi Army,” Captain Peterson acknowledged. He reckoned that 90 per cent of his Iraqi contingent are Shias and admitted that it was happier pursuing al-Qaeda than the Mahdi militia.
Iraqi army patrols and checkpoints are attacked daily in Sunni-controlled southern Ghazaliyah. When Captain Peterson invited Sunni leaders to meet his Iraqi officers to discuss the defence of the Muhagren mosque, the Sunnis accused the Iraqi Army of failing to protect the mosque. The Iraqi Army accused the Sunnis of using it as a place from which to attack them. Captain Peterson said that the mere fact that Iraqi Army and Sunni leaders were talking was a “big step forward”.
Captain al-Aden refused to say how many of his men were Shia or Sunni, insisting that they were all Iraqis. “Every civilian who carries a weapon or plants a bomb is our enemy,” he said. But he nodded in agreement as Captain Dafar Khalif, a colleague, chafed at the restrictions placed on the Iraqi Army. “I think the US forces are soft,” he said. If anybody attacked the Goverment in Saddam’s day “we took him to jail and hanged him. Now we take him to jail and he’s released after seven months.”
“I don’t think any of this s*** will change anything,” one US soldier said. Before leaving I watched an Iraqi Army-led “hearts and minds” exercise, a health clinic, which proved a fitting metaphor for the state of Iraq. Hundreds sought treatment. Sergeant David Tunison, a veteran US medic, said he had never seen such poor health — children with rickets, adults with tuberculosis — or sanitation. But of the six Iraqi medics supposed to attend the clinic, only two turned up.
