http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/26/international/middleeast/26BATT.html

June 26, 2004

Army Used Speed and Might, Plus Cash, Against Shiite Rebel

By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- In April, as festering resistance exploded into full-fledged rebellion, soldiers of the First Armored Division were given their final mission in Iraq: to wrest control of a string of southern towns from a radical Shiite militia intent on disrupting the scheduled transfer of sovereignty on June 30.

These American soldiers, some of whom had already left Iraq and others just short of leaving after a year in combat, would instead spend nearly three months in one of the most significant campaigns of the war.

The division's operation against the militia of Moktada al-Sadr, a rebellious Shiite cleric, is already being studied by an Army struggling to learn the lessons of a war that continues to evolve even as the formal occupation of Iraq changes gears next week.

As described by top commanders in Iraq and senior policy makers in Washington, the campaign was a mix of military tactics, political maneuverings, media management and a generous dollop of cash for quickly rebuilding war-ravaged cities -- a formula that, if it survives the test of time, could become a model for future fighting against the persistent insurrections plaguing Iraq.

But on the eve of the transfer of power, the question is whether the tactical successes the commanders are quick to claim have guaranteed a lasting strategic victory.

As the division's new date for departure approaches, Mr. Sadr remains at large. Despite an Iraqi arrest warrant for the murder of a rival cleric, he recently hinted that he would challenge the new government in the political arena.

When the First Armored Division got orders to mount its counterattack against the Sadr militia, one-fourth of its 30,000 soldiers and more than half of its 8,000 tanks, armored vehicles and artillery pieces had already left Iraq. The division, along with the Second Light Cavalry Regiment, also under its command, did an about-face, recalling troops, unpacking gear and receiving unwelcome orders to extend its stay by 90 days.

"I called together all my commanders, and I told them that we were going to demonstrate that a heavy force could be agile -- to put heavy and agile in the same sentence, a place where they had never been before," said Maj. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the First Armored Division, whose signature weapon is the 70-ton Abrams tank.

"And 15 hours later, from a standing start in Baghdad, we moved 170 kilometers down to Najaf, and were in contact with the enemy," General Dempsey said, referring to a distance of just over 100 miles.

As quickly as the military spent its ammunition, though, it spent its money in an effort to heal some of the wounds it was inflicting, and those dealt by the militia as well.

From the moment the Americans recaptured Kut, the first town where they reclaimed control, officers switched from military to civil operations. Having scattered the enemy, they pulled them back together and put them to work in an amusement park destroyed in the fight.

"These are young men who have been poisoned, unemployed, disenfranchised and very poorly led," General Dempsey said. "We found a local tribal sheik who said he could corral them. We hired him to repair the amusement park, and he in turn hired these young men."

The example was repeated in Diwaniya and all across south-central Iraq, where General Dempsey spent several hundred thousand dollars to pay locals to remove rubble, rebuild roads and finance claims for damaged homes and businesses.

The campaign against the Sadr militia in south-central Iraq also had to be fought elsewhere -- inside military headquarters in Baghdad, in the command-and-control "Tank" at the Pentagon, inside the National Security Council at the White House and even at the United Nations, as senior commanders debated with civilian policy makers how best to counter this menacing militia presence that grew in the shadows of the American occupation.

On one side were those who believed that Mr. Sadr could be sidelined, and that to attack him would only stoke support among his followers in Iraq and beyond its borders. This view was convincing to the uppermost level of commanders in Iraq, and certainly was the stance of Bush administration officials, especially after they heard the opinions of Iraq's own nascent leadership. On the other side were those, mostly field commanders, who argued that Mr. Sadr was a growing threat in advance of the June 30 transfer of sovereignty, and that eventually he would have to be arrested or eliminated to guarantee the future of a stable and democratic Iraq.

Mr. Sadr had taken refuge in one of the shrines in Najaf, the holiest site in all of Shiite Islam, making a direct assault on him very difficult without inflicting large civilian casualties and possibly damaging the shrines.

"We never had an operation to go after Sadr inside the holy city," said Maj. Gen. John Sattler of the Marine Corps, director of American military operations for the Middle East. "We did not want to endanger the holy shrines. We stayed clear of those."

So the plan focused on chipping away at the Sadr militia with controlled strikes, and working behind the scenes with more moderate Shiite clerics to isolate him and undercut his local support.

"The more he and his followers occupied towns like Najaf and Kufa, the more Iraqis were becoming fed up with the negative impact on their towns," General Sattler said. "We felt very strongly he was being marginalized."

During this period, other Shiite leaders made public calls for Mr. Sadr to withdraw his forces from the holy cities and return the cities to police and civil defense units operating under American command.

Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior American commander in Iraq, said this did not mean ceding territory. But others, even within the military, worried that the Americans had in effect allowed large parts of southern Iraq to slip out of their control.

A number of field officers had argued -- as a few still do -- for a swift strike at Mr. Sadr himself.

One senior administration official said that after June 30, the decision about how to deal with him "is no longer up to us." The new Iraqi government will be making those calls.

But back in early April, officers and policy makers were wondering whether America was about to lose Iraq. General Dempsey, whose troops had previously been in charge of securing Baghdad and its suburbs, planned a far-reaching campaign to seize control of provincial capital after provincial capital.

"In Baghdad, our area of operations was 750 square kilometers, and now we were looking at 20,000 square kilometers," General Dempsey said. "In Baghdad, we had strictly urban terrain, and now we were looking at a complex mix of rural, tribal and some urban elements. My immediate decision was that we really didn't need to control the white spaces between the urban areas."

"What Moktada al-Sadr was trying to do was take a very narrow uprising -- it was not a broad-based popular uprising; it was narrow -- and demonstrate his ability to stand up to the coalition and in so doing broaden his support base," General Dempsey said. "We decided that we can't allow that to happen. It had to be dealt with very aggressively, very rapidly, very decisively."

His division would retake Kut, Diwaniya, Karbala and then Kufa and Najaf, and in that order.

He issued the order, and 19 hours later a brigade and 112 combat vehicles had made the 180-mile trip from Najaf to Kut.

The Americans first had to cross a bridge that engineers said could withstand the weight of their tanks -- maybe.

Instead, General Dempsey sent smaller, armor-plated Humvees of the Second Light Cavalry charging over the bridge into the militia forces. The heavier tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles sidestepped 46 miles north to a stronger bridge at Numaniya and then back south along the river bank to Kut, attacking simultaneously and catching the militia fighters in the pincer.

Within 48 hours, the Americans recaptured the municipal building, the local TV station and bridges in and out of Kut. The Americans then took back Diwaniya, relieving a Spanish brigade that then withdrew after the new Spanish prime minister summoned them home, and securing a provincial capital that sits between two of the occupation forces' major supply routes.

The offensive into Karbala presented the Americans with their first battle in a town with a shrine, as Sadr militiamen had taken over a holy site and the adjacent main thoroughfare. Seventy-two hours of intense fighting brought hundreds of Iraqi casualties, but the militia still could not be dislodged.

"We didn't want to take our combat vehicles right up to the shrine, so we conducted a feint," General Dempsey said. "We ran a tank company team on each side of the ring road, north and south of the holy shrine."

The militiamen left the mosque area to confront the rolling and dismounted troops, not knowing that General Dempsey had put a pair of AC-130 gunships aloft to attack the exposed militiamen with devastating Gatling guns, cannons and howitzers.

"By the next day," General Dempsey said, "they had disappeared."

It was important, though, to prevent the militiamen, wherever they were encountered, from shooting and escaping to fight another day. "If you drive through an ambush, or get ambushed and seek shelter before returning fire, they will get away from you," the general said. "This is not going to be something where they can get away with shooting and scooting."

Yet another goal was to discredit Mr. Sadr inside Iraq.

Brig. Gen. Mark P. Hertling, a First Armored Division assistant commander whose responsibilities include information operations, said the Americans "advertised" what Mr. Sadr had done on radio and TV and with handbills and posters. The list of accusations included stealing money from shrines and mosques to finance his organization, running an illegal religious court in all the major cities, using amusement parks in Kut, Najaf and Karbala to store weapons, establishing illegal checkpoints to shake down travelers and ruining businesses during pilgrimage periods in Najaf and Karbala.

Commanders wanted their offensive to be seen as "deliberate, patient, sensitive and precise" in its broader goals, in particular that the shrine in Najaf -- the holiest site in Shiite Islam -- would not be violated, General Hertling said. But other mosques would be hit if they were used as snipers' nests or arms depots, and soldiers and the news media accompanying them -- Arabs as well as British and American reporters -- were urged to document those militia violations of the laws of war.

On the battlefield, though, "we wanted to be seen as rapid, overwhelming, lethal and relentless," General Hertling said. Reporters were brought on missions for that reason, too.

The militia uprisings were set off in April after L. Paul Bremer III decided to crack down on Mr. Sadr by shutting down a popular Baghdad newspaper, Al Hawza, which American officials said had become a mouthpiece for Mr. Sadr's incendiary criticisms of the Americans. But Mr. Bremer's order caught American commanders by surprise.

A few days later, allied forces arrested a cleric who was a senior aide to Mr. Sadr, Mustafa al-Yaqubi. Within 24 hours, Mr. Sadr decided to escalate his fight, and Sadr militiamen were rampaging all across south-central Iraq.

The scale of the uprising caught Americans by surprise, but General Dempsey argued that the timing turned out to hurt Mr. Sadr in the end. "The enemy made a strategic error in timing its uprising when it did," he said. "If he had waited two more weeks, I was gone. First Armored would have been home. The American military never runs out of options. Other forces would have taken the mission. But these options all had a greater degree of risk."

General Dempsey lost soldiers during the Sadr campaign, soldiers who might otherwise be home alive if the division's tour had not been extended.

Asked what he would say to those families, General Dempsey replied, "I don't think they would expect me to say anything different than I would have to the family of a soldier who was killed in our first week here."

At the beginning of the uprising, commanders thought there were perhaps 200 hard-core militiamen in Kut and the same number in Diwaniya; that number is now down to under a dozen in each city. In Karbala, there were perhaps 750 armed Sadr supporters at the start, and there is no remaining evidence of the militia today. In the twin cities of Najaf and Kufa, commanders estimated about 2,000 militiamen at the start of the insurgency. Today, there are estimated to be 150 to 200 remaining, mostly inside the shrine in Najaf. They are contained, at least for now, though it is not clear whether they could regroup, since Mr. Sadr remains at large, and the arrest warrant against him was never executed.

In April and May, "Moktada al-Sadr could move with impunity, he and his militia, in virtually any of those places," General Dempsey said. "Now he moves with impunity around the holy shrine in Najaf, and that's it."