FORT CARSON, Colo.—Putting 30,000 more U.S. soldiers in Iraq this summer has been key in quieting the western neighborhoods of Baghdad and is helping establish a “fragile” mood of stability and reconciliation, according to Col. Jeff Bannister, a Fort Carson brigade commander whose troops are finishing 15 months of hard fighting in the Iraqi capital.
Bannister leads the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. He conducted a live-camera press conference Friday from his headquarters in western Baghdad. The brigade, which has lost 41 soldiers killed in the past year’s fighting, is just beginning to return home this month with all of the soldiers due to be back at Fort Carson by Jan. 18.
Noting that daily attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians have dropped to just a few per day—down from 60 or 70 a day in January—Bannister said the calm is encouraging but not guaranteed. The brigade only suffered 10 wounded soldiers in October, its lowest casualty count since arriving in Iraq.
“This is a fragile situation,” Bannister said, adding that Iraqi civilians are also hopeful that more security is coming. “We need to build an irreversible momentum, hold onto what we’ve got, and get the tentacles of government services to the people.”
Electricity, sewage, schools and other basic services are still sporadic. Bannister said he believes public confidence is growing, however.
“When we first got here, the adults would never look at us as we passed, but the children always waved to us,” he said. “Now everyone waves when we’re out.”
Bannister said the 2nd Brigade personally has experienced the change in U.S. strategy in Iraq. Last winter, it was focusing on training Iraqi police and troops and fighting insurgents in difficult areas, such as Ramadi and Baghdad. Last summer, President Bush ordered a surge of 30,000 additional troops to Iraq—most focused on Baghdad—which allowed the 2nd Brigade to concentrate more troops in a smaller area of the capital.
Bannister said the 2nd Brigade took Iraqi soldiers with them everywhere, bringing even more combat force into dangerous neighborhoods. Other steps were taken as well, such as erecting concrete barricades around 13 important market areas in western Baghdad, to prevent shoppers from being easy targets for car bombs.
“We’ve had two or three months now of relative security in these areas and Iraqis are now begging us to take down some of our barriers, let things go back to normal, but we can’t rush this,” he said.
Another major factor in calming Baghdad was the call from Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, last August for his militias to have a cease-fire with the new Iraqi government. Al-Sadr controls many of the Shiite militias that have attacked Sunni Iraqis in the past two years after the Golden Mosque, a Shiite shrine in Samarra, was bombed and virtually destroyed. Bannister said al-Sadr’s recent cooperation is one of the major reasons there have been fewer attacks on U.S. personnel and civilians in recent months.
“He is one of the (major) accelerants for the improving situation,” Bannister confirmed, but added that al-Sadr’s ability to disrupt the peace has also been weakened by the U.S. surge, which spread more troops across Baghdad on a daily basis.
“We’ve taken a lot of bad guys out of the picture, a lot of lower-level (militia) commanders,” he said.
While crediting the U.S. surge as the biggest reason for the recent calm in west Baghdad, Bannister also said future stability depends on reconciliation between Shiite and Sunni Iraqis. He noted that the 2nd Brigade made seven difficult combat missions into one Shiite neighborhood this year without rooting out all of the insurgents and calming the area.
“Military action alone clearly wasn’t getting the job done,” he recounted. But the situation improved when there was a concerted effort by some Iraqi citizens to get neighborhood councils to work with Iraqi and U.S. officials in identifying insurgents. As part of the effort, more services, such as electricity and sewage repairs, were brought into the area.
That cooperation spread to a nearby neighborhood as well, where more al-Qaida fighters were identified by locals and either killed or driven out of the area, according to Bannister.
“Now we have a Sunni neighborhood council working with a district council that is largely Shiite,” he said. “These are people who were shooting rockets and mortars at each other a year ago and now they are cooperating, barriers are coming down.”
Bannister said that once the 2nd Brigade is back at Fort Carson, it will be “reflagged” as the 4th Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, which will be based at the Mountain Post. The brigade has tentatively been scheduled to redeploy—to Afghanistan—sometime in 2009.
