Force to space locks down east Baghdad

NY Times:

American troops locked down a large industrialized area of eastern Baghdad all day on Sunday while Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq, without indicating how he would do it, vowed to speed the deployment of Iraqi forces throughout the war-ravaged capital.

American commanders described the operation on Sunday in the Rusafa district as an early taste of large-scale sweeps expected to come in eastern Baghdad to take back some measure of control from militias. Troops from the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, of Ft. Lewis, Wash., were fired on by insurgents with automatic rifles but detained 10 Iraqis while searching for a car-bomb manufacturing site in the area, on a violent sectarian fault line between a Shiite enclave and the bleak and insurgent-ridden Sunni neighborhood of Fadhil.

The looming operations in eastern Baghdad are a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s new security plan that adds 21,000 combat troops to Iraq, a move viewed by some as a last-ditch effort to save the country from full-scale civil war. Eastern Baghdad “is a focal point for us right now,” said Brig. Gen. John Campbell, deputy commander of the American-led troops in Baghdad. The American-led forces say they have conducted 3,400 patrols and detained 140 suspects in the past week.

Under immense pressure from his Shiite backers, who say their neighborhoods are becoming increasingly vulnerable to attacks by Sunni insurgents, Mr. Maliki announced Sunday that he had ordered the deployment of Iraqi soldiers and the police accelerated so they can surround and search areas considered sanctuaries for insurgents and militias. “It will not start in just one area, but in all areas at the same time,” he said.

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The American brigade commander, Col. Steve Townsend, whose unit is part of the Second Infantry Division, said later Sunday that he believed most Iraqis would welcome more American troops. “I don’t think the security plan is a hard sell,” he said. “I just think that at this point they are a bit jaded.”

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Residents in and around Fadhil said they hoped the presence of American troops would quiet the fighting that has trapped some Iraqis in their homes for weeks. They said their streets and alleys have become a frontline battleground for Shiite fighters from neighborhoods to the northeast, near Sadr City, and Sunni gunmen who have sought to protect their turf from the Mahdi Army, the militia based in Sadr city that is loyal Moktada al-Sadr, the militant Shiite cleric who is Mr. Maliki’s most important backer.

Shiites in Sadriya, one neighborhood bordering Fadhil, have said that Sunni Arabs from Fadhil have been going after Shiites for months — as evidenced, they say, by the truck bomb that killed at least 135 people last week.

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The high force to space ratio is going to disrupt the traffic pattern of the terrorist and make it more difficult for them to move to contact. It will probably also result in finding places where they are building their car bombs. As these operations continue and the Iraqis are trained to do the same thing it will be difficult for the enemy forces to move back into these neighborhoods. I suspect that this warehouse district is where many of the car bombs have been made recently.