Militia not honoring Sadr City truce

Michael Gordon, NY Times:

An Iraqi soldier was watching over the concrete wall on Monday when a .50-caliber round ripped into his head.

Soon after the attack was reported on the tactical radio, two American military advisers were on their way to the scene, laser range finder in hand, to call in a Hellfire missile strike on a sniper position on the far side of a desolate no man’s land.

This is the war over the wall. It is a daily battle of attrition waged over the large concrete barrier that the Americans have been building across Sadr City in the hope of establishing a safe zone in the southern tier of the Shiite enclave.

The formal truce that was announced in the Green Zone with great fanfare on Monday has meant nothing here. Shiite militias have been trying to blast gaps in the wall, firing at the American troops who are completing it and maneuvering to pick off the Iraqi soldiers who have been charged with keeping an eye on the partition.

American forces have answered with tank rounds, helicopter rocket strikes and even satellite-guided bombs to try to silence the militia fire. On some stretches, the urban landscape has been transformed as the Americans have leveled buildings militia fighters have used as perches to mount their attacks.

“The enemy kept coming back to some of the same buildings,” Col. John Hort, the commander of the Third Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division, said during a recent visit at Thawra II, a joint American and Iraqi outpost that abuts a section of the wall that has been a hotbed of militia resistance. “We ended up having to use some larger ordnance out of our Air Force to reduce some of the buildings around here.”

Even while American forces deploy reconnaissance drones and satellite-guided rockets, the American strategy in Sadr City is a throwback to a more primitive form of warfare. It depends on concrete — lots of it, which comes in large slabs that are being assembled into an imposing barrier three miles long.

The Americans began building the wall a month ago, working east to west. The work started at night but soon extended into the day as American commanders sought to speed up the construction.

Supporters of Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, denounced the wall as a nefarious effort to divide the city. Militia fighters with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and small arms have been trying to halt its construction.

Those efforts have failed, and the barrier is now 80 percent complete. But the fighters have blown a few gaps in the wall and, in one instance, appear to have hitched a truck to a damaged slab to yank it down. To make it hard for the Americans to fix the holes, the fighters have continued to seed the strip south of the barrier with explosively formed penetrators, a particularly lethal type of roadside bomb. Some have been hidden in the cracks or depressions in the wall itself.

...

Gordon provides good detail at the US counter sniper strategy. It involves locating the source of the sniper fire and destroying it with Apache Hellfire attacks even if the sniper has moved on he loses a perch.

The continued attacks on the wall suggest that it is a real problem for the enemy. It is making it harder for the Mahdi militia to move to contact and to launch attacks on the Green Zone which are an important part of its PR effort. The evidence also suggest that many of the residents of the area appreciate the effort too. They are giving tips on the location of bombs and militia forces. Like Basra they do not like the Taliban like rules of the militia.

This wall is proving to be a sign of the weakness of the Iranian special groups and their Mahdi proxies. It is also giving the US and Iraqi forces an opportunity to destroy enemy forces who come out to fight it.

The Belmont Club looks at whether the Iranians' word is any good on these matters.