Virtual Iraq

AP/Journal Gazette:

Hypothetical: Department of Defense higher-ups want to infiltrate a certain area of Baghdad with hopes of breaking up a growing insurgent stronghold. But before they do, they’re wondering how the local neighborhood will react. Do they have sympathizers at a nearby bakery? Has the man living in the apartment upstairs been accused of making bombs?

Answers will soon be at their fingertips thanks to a Purdue University assistant professor and her students. They’re researching real day-to-day life details about Baghdad and its residents and inputting those facts into databases to create a kind of war game the military can use to foresee outcomes of possible actions and plan more strategically.

“If you plug in something like – this insurgency group takes over this bank – what are the options for coalition forces?” says Stacy Holden, an assistant professor of history.

The goal is to create the most realistic picture of Baghdad possible using uncompromised sources, she says. And just knowing that a particular city street is working-class Shiite isn’t enough.

“We want to be able to get into the head of the regular Iraqi person in Baghdad,” Holden says. “We don’t want to just stick with looking at what this or that political leader says.”

So how are the students finding such specific information about a city nearly 6,500 miles away?

Guided by a list of 700 research terms provided by the Department of Defense, a half-dozen students are scanning English-language Web sites. They’re looking for Iraqi memoirs and blogs and taking information from media reports and non-governmental organizations. Any little bit or detail that could be useful is added to the database.

Richard Oloffson, a graduate student from Naperville, Ill., working on the project, calls it “Virtual Iraq.”

He says if he’s looking at a neighborhood he wants to know, “the ethnic makeup, the religious makeup, is there raw sewage in the street, is there disease?”

Rashmi Chaturvedi works for Simulex Inc., which hired the Purdue students as subcontractors with the company’s Department of Defense dollars. Simulex, based near Purdue in West Lafayette, will take the information the students gather and create the program for the military by June.

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