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On Duty at the Alamo
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| Contributor | ArmyDem |
| Last Edited | ArmyDem Oct 28, 2006 08:38pm |
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| Category | News |
| News Date | Tuesday, October 31, 2006 02:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | By Christian Caryl
Newsweek
Oct. 30, 2006 issue - Officially its name is Forward Operating Base Hope, but the 25 Americans who are stationed there call it something else: "the Alamo." Just south of their fortress is Sadr City, the immense Baghdad slum controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr and his private Mahdi Army. Although the firebrand Shiite cleric has denied any involvement in violence against the Sunnis, his stronghold has become a sanctuary for sectarian death squads. If the neighborhood boils over—as it has twice before, in 2004—millions of furious Iraqis will be standing between the Alamo's residents and the nearest U.S. reinforcements, five miles across town. The base's U.S. commander, Capt. David Baer, says he's not worried. "The militants in Sadr City don't want to fight," he says. "They'd get wiped out."
Even if he's right, how long can the truce last? In an effort to stop the death squads, American units have been struggling to assert control over key Shiite neighborhoods around Baghdad. U.S. casualties have jumped accordingly. In the past few weeks, Americans throughout Iraq have been dying at rates not seen since the battles of Najaf and Fallujah in 2004. Meanwhile the sectarian carnage keeps deepening in and around the capital. "We're obviously very concerned about what we're seeing in the city," Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the senior U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, acknowledged last week. "We're taking a lot of time to go back and look at the whole Baghdad security plan."
The review may prove useless. Even as they create new study groups and ask what has gone wrong, senior officers at the Pentagon say privately that they have already tried every possible strategy. |
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