Securing Ramadi a neighborhood at a time

NY Times:

...

American and Iraqi soldiers pushed deep into the heart of this contested city on Monday, the latest step in their plan to regain control of Ramadi from guerrillas and to hold onto it. The operation began late Sunday night, when about 400 American and Iraqi soldiers advanced into the west side of downtown, quickly taking over a number of houses and converting them into a small military base.

Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, has bedeviled American forces for months, making itself the toughest city in the most violent of Iraqi regions. Whole city blocks here look like a scene from some post-apocalyptic world: row after row of buildings shot up, boarded up, caved in, tumbled down.

Many neighborhoods are out of the control of either the American or Iraqi government forces; insurgents hold sway. In some areas, it is hard to spot any Iraqi police officers — or any civilians or cars. Amid talk of timetables for reducing the number of American troops in Iraq, military commanders are not contemplating reducing the number in this part of the country.

But rather than assaulting the city frontally, as the Americans did in Falluja in November 2004 — destroying it in the process — American commanders have decided on a softer and more deliberate approach. This time, they have ringed Ramadi with thousands of American and Iraqi troops, and have begun to reclaim the city, not in one sudden attack, but neighborhood by neighborhood.

Instead of leaving after the shooting stops — as the Americans have been forced to do in other Iraqi cities — the Americans plan to leave behind garrisons of American and Iraqi troops at various points throughout the city. For the first time, they say, they believe they have the manpower to make the strategy work. The combat outpost the Americans and Iraqis started building on Monday morning was the fifth one to go up this month on the southern edge of the city.

Central to the strategy, American commanders say, is the decision to commit significant numbers of Iraqi troops who can hold the neighborhoods after the Americans do most of the work of pacification. That, the American commanders hope, will make the city safe enough for its shattered economy to renew itself and for Iraqi police officers to feel secure enough to start showing up for work.

...

I guess this reporter missed the action in Tal Afar when the US conducted a similar operation. He may also have missed other take and hold operations in Anbar province in the last nine months as US forces cleaned up enemy rat lines going all the way to the Syrian border taking towns with Iraqi forces and holding them. In Ramadi US and Iraqi forces have probably been too patient witht he enemy which has caused a greater number of casualties on both sides. If they are going to do a creeping subjugation it is hard to say that it will necessarily be less painful for the city, but the pain will be spread over a longer period of time.