Peace comes to a deadly Iraqi city

ISKANDARIYAH, Iraq

The two sides squared off in a brightly patterned tent big enough to hold about 100 angry Sunni Muslim clan chiefs, the Shi’ite Muslim police chief, two Shi’ite government officials and — overseeing all — one frustrated senior U.S. Army officer.

In the Arab world, such tents are put up for weddings, wakes or tribal gatherings where the local sheik hears grievances. The “sheik” in this case is Lt. Col. Michael Getchell, and the tent is the new battleground for American troops given the job of nation-building, city by city, in an Iraq battered by five years of violence.

It’s uncharted territory for U.S. commanders. Instead of going into battle, they are dishing out cash to businesses to generate jobs, listening to pleas to free relatives in American custody and trying to settle bitter rivalries between Shi’ites and Sunnis. The latter was what Col. Getchell was doing in that tent on the edge of Iskandariyah, a mixed-population city with a complex tribal structure.

“Four or five years ago, we did not know any of this,” said Capt. Michael Penney, a soft-spoken Texan under Col. Getchell’s command who is on his second tour in Iraq. “It’s challenging to adjust. Last time I was here, it was strictly security, chasing the enemy; but the way things are now, I had to adjust or risk failure.”

To see how the U.S. military is handling its new duties, the Associated Press embedded this reporter three times in recent months with a unit that shared a downtown post with Iraqi police in this city of 150,000 people along a busy highway 30 miles south of Baghdad.

Iskandariyah was once one of the country’s bloodiest war fronts. But the violence began to wane in mid-2007 after the U.S. troop surge and the decision by some tribal leaders and insurgents to cooperate with the Americans. For the past year, Col. Getchell’s troops from Fort Campbell, Ky., have struggled to hold the fragile peace together.

So far it’s working, despite occasional flare-ups. But American involvement in almost every aspect of daily life has expanded the vacuum to be filled when U.S. forces leave.

Most of the American troops based here have moved to the edge of the city, and the last soldiers will leave Iskandariyah to head home next month. Some U.S. officers express confidence the calm will survive their departure, but the city’s Sunni and Shi’ite sheiks are far more nervous.

The opposite views are no surprise. While the Iraqis and Americans speak of each other as friends — and exchange hugs and kisses in Arab fashion, they often seem to be talking past each other. The U.S. officers are all about team spirit and getting down to business, while the Iraqis take tribal perspectives, tend to wander around the subject and can be loose with the truth to smear a rival or gain advantage for their clan.

The 120 men of Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 502nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division arrived in Iskandariyah last November. The city is a dusty place of tall date palms and long-slung buildings, home to a state-owned industrial complex that once had 36,000 workers making buses, trucks and agricultural machinery.

Nearly 70 percent of the population is Shi’ite, and the rest is Sunni. Part of Babil province, the city is the gateway to the Shi’ite heartland of southern Iraq and a main crossroad between Baghdad and the Shi’ite shrine city of Karbala, with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims passing through.

Barely a year ago, Iskandariyah was a stronghold of militants on both sides. Residents say sectarian violence was so ferocious that hardly anyone showed up for work at the factories, and streets emptied by early afternoon.

“My predecessor was killed on his way to work here, and he only lived one kilometer away,” said Raad Bahloul Moussa, director of the city’s truck factory. “I used to change cars every month, always buying a different color to escape detection. Now I drive to work in a car with the words ‘Ministry of Industry’ written on its side.”

These days, shoppers throng outdoor food markets, stores remain open well after dark and children go to school regularly. Enrollment in the city’s sole vocational school — partly supported with U.S. funds — swelled from 30 a year ago to 1,270 this past summer.

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