Friend-or-foe frustration
Attacks leave U.S. troops with little choice but to suspect everyone
Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, June 2, 2005
Sgt. 1st Class Louis D'Angelo tosses a bag of flour looki... Sajida Turki, sister of two suspected insurgents, signs a... Samarra, Iraq. Chronicle Graphic
Samarra, Iraq -- Sgt. 1st Class Louis D'Angelo is angry.
Stomping on clothes, frying pans and construction tools strewn on the floor, D'Angelo storms into the living room where frightened Iraqi children cling to women in black abayas.
"They don't have weapons? They don't have weapons?" D'Angelo bellows, holding up two clips for a Kalashnikov semiautomatic rifle he has just found in the family's bedroom.
Soldiers from D'Angelo's unit, 2nd Platoon of the B Company of the 3-69 Armored Battalion, 42nd Infantry Division, are searching the downtown Samarra house of a suspected insurgent, Jamal Faluh Jasem, whom U.S. troops have arrested at least once for weapons possession. Jasem is not home.
They go from room to room, sifting through the family's meager possessions, tossing them on the floor. One of the women huddling on the living room carpet, they learn, is the sister of two other suspected insurgents, Ali Turki and Abu Basset Turki. But those men are not here either.
This angers D'Angelo further. Marching into a small bedroom, he spots three burlap bags lying in the corner. He rips the bags open with a pocket knife and spreads the spilled flour evenly across the floor with his combat boot, looking for hidden weapons. Nothing.
"We've been here since January," D'Angelo says, his voice raspy with rage. "I had two people shot. My track guy was hit with a VBIED (vehicle-born improvised explosive device, or car bomb), and we hit two land mines. With all that consideration it gets more personal." Many of the 1,200 U.S. soldiers in Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, share D'Angelo's sentiment. Day after day, they face elusive Iraqi insurgents, who launch hit-and-run attacks on coalition troops, making Samarra, home to about 150,000 mostly Sunni Arabs, one of the most volatile cities in Iraq.
Last week, two suicide car bombs blew up outside the southern wall of Patrol Base Uvanni, situated in the center of the town. Simultaneously, insurgents lobbed mortar rounds and rocket-propelled grenades at the base from the surrounding residential neighborhoods. The explosions destroyed an Iraqi house and damaged two others, killing at least one Iraqi civilian. The impact also threw a U.S. medic off the bunk, cutting his face. The organizers of the attack, like most of Samarra's elusive insurgents, were never found.
Attacks such as this leave increasingly frustrated U.S. soldiers with little choice but to suspect everybody.
At Jasem's house, soldiers of the 2nd Platoon have unearthed several rounds of Kalashnikov ammunition, a homemade shoulder-mounted missile launcher, a coil of copper wire and what looks like a detonator for a home-made bomb in the family's backyard. In a house next door, they find a rocket-propelled grenade.
"That's one less sniper bullet for us to get shot with, one less RPG round for us to get hit with, one less coil of wire for IEDs (homemade bombs), " says D'Angelo.
He turns to Pfc. Matthew Ghadban :
"Go in the sh-tter there and check it out. Look in the washer. These people hide stuff everywhere."
Ghadban tosses towels on the bathroom floor, and feels through a quarter- full burlap sack with sugar.
In the living room, Capt. Ryan Wylie interrogates Jasem's wife, Kaukem Abbas. She denies that her husband has anything to do with insurgents.
"I swear on the Quran that we have no weapons here," Abbas says, as other women try to hide their mouths behind their abayas. They look apprehensively at Wylie, who towers above them. He asks them to identify the men on documents Wylie's soldiers have found in a square tin in the bedroom. The women appear to know nothing about the men's whereabouts.
There's nothing more Wylie can learn here. He hands Jasem's wife $80, in U.S. bills, to compensate for the gate the platoon mowed down with a Bradley fighting vehicle earlier to get into the courtyard. The soldiers clamber into their Bradleys and take off. The vehicles raise clouds of fine dust as they rattle through downtown Samarra, past the 9th century Malwiya spiral minaret that dominates the city's skyline.
Now comes another part of the unit's mission.
In an alley a few blocks away, the Bradleys screech to a halt. Pungent black liquid seeps down the gutter that bisects the alley. Children and some adults stand in the gates, watching the Americans dismount from their Bradleys and fan out into the street, shaking hands and handing out notepads, toothpaste and crayons to children.
"The soldiers' ability to turn from one thing to another is amazing. They are engaging the enemy, and 20 minutes later, they are handing out candy to kids," says Col. Mark Wald, commander of the 3-69 Armored Battalion who was raised in Saratoga and graduated from UC Berkeley.
As Lt. Ronald Hudak chats up local residents in fluent Arabic he had learned since his February deployment, and Cpl. Ed Capps tosses a soccer ball with a rowdy pack of kids, soldiers enter the tallest residential building in the neighborhood and walk up the steep, narrow stairs to the rooftop. From there, they scan the horizon for enemy fighters. Inadvertently, they scare two women, who run to a second-floor room and stand, rooted, in the corner.
Below, several soldiers kneel in the shade of sandstone buildings, holding their M-16 and M-4 rifles at the ready. D'Angelo surveys the alley from the turret of his Bradley.
The military calls this "cordon and talk," an attempt to win the hearts and minds of Samarra residents while aiming to minimize casualties in the process.
"You just say, 'shoku-moku' -- 'wassup?' " Hudak explains. "If they share an emotional connection with us, they overcome their fear, and maybe tell us where insurgents are. If you show up at their house and ask them: 'Where are the terrorists?,' they say: 'I don't know.' "
Before tossing handfuls of candy in the air, Ghadban makes the children chant, in unison, a rapper's name: "Suge Knight, Suge Knight!"
Spc. Shimson Welch tells the kids to chant the name of the veteran American porn star, Ron Jeremy.
Imad Fleih Asam, who runs a small grocery store, throws a bottle of cold Coca-Cola to Sgt. Michael Johnson, the gunner on one of the Bradleys. "America good," Asam says. "I love America."
How sincere this is, Wylie does not know.
"These people are all about surviving, and they'll say whatever they think you want them to say," says Wylie. "They know their life will be better if they show us they are friendly to us, but they also know they have to appear, if nothing else, condoning of the terrorists."
A couple of hours later, having run out candy and soccer balls, the 2nd Platoon heads back to base.
In a makeshift war room there, Lt. Nathan Adams examines the ordnance the soldiers have found, trying to match up the rocket-propelled grenade with a military manual on small missiles, guessing how long the sand-caked missile launcher had been lying in the ground.
Suddenly, a loud snap goes off on the eastern side of the base, followed by a hollow boom to its west. One, two, three mortar rounds hit near the base, the last one just behind an abandoned school yard 200 yards outside the base's walls. Dust and smoke rise from behind the pink school building. A rocket- propelled grenade hits somewhere outside the base with a smaller pop.
"Overshot," Wylie comments, calmly. "Must be letting rookies shoot nowadays."
A few minutes later, the base is shaken as two mortar shells explode inside Uvanni's anti-blast walls, spewing shrapnel.
"Get in! Get in!" somebody shouts.
In the war room, Wylie hears that the attack likely came from the area the 2nd Platoon had been searching earlier in the day. Wylie looks for an explanation.
"What if this is Abu Basset, who came back and got pissed off that we'd knocked down his gate?"
to Dread's post. 
