Trained for War, 12 Green Berets Keep the Peace in an Iraqi Town

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/18/in.../18OPS.html?th

Trained for War, 12 Green Berets Keep the Peace in an Iraqi Town
By JAMES DAO


IWANIYA, Iraq, April 17 ? They were trained in the art of war and came to Iraq to fight. But now that the regime has been toppled, Army Special Forces soldiers in Diwaniya have found themselves on an entirely different and, in many ways, more difficult mission.

They are trying to rebuild the city.

It is a battle against chaos instead of bullets. The Green Berets have had to wade into angry crowds. They have mediated between rival tribes locked in blood feuds. They have tried to hold together the city's thin threads of social order, not always with success.

Today, a man was killed when the bodyguards of a sheik from another city fired into a crowd of 200 men who were protesting the sheik's presence at a community meeting. Soldiers arrested 16 of the bodyguards and detained the sheik, drawing loud applause from the crowd. But it was a setback for the team, which had worked closely with the sheik, a leader of the Jabour tribe.

"Just when things looked like they were going good, we have a power struggle in town," said the Special Forces team leader, a 32-year-old captain. Rules imposed by the military bar identification of the leader, or any members of his team.

There is a crisis like this almost every day. The team has become the de facto center of Diwaniya's government, which has all but ceased to function. It is a role the Green Berets have played before, in villages and towns in Vietnam and elsewhere.

Each morning, tribal leaders, businessmen and regular citizens in Diwaniya stream into the compound to complain about the spotty electricity, the rampant looting, the lack of jobs and commerce. They come because several of the Green Berets speak Arabic, though none are fluent. But they come also because there is nowhere else to turn.

The 12-man team is doing what it can. In the last week, it has started a police force, recruited a city manager, located offices for a municipal government and begun holding meetings where community leaders discuss Diwaniya's problems. The goal is to create an administrative council consisting of tribal leaders, government bureaucrats and academics that can take control of Diwaniya, a city of more than 400,000 people 120 miles south of Baghdad.

"Ten days ago, we were taking mortar fire at a bridge outside town," said the team sergeant, a 12-year Special Forces veteran who has become a favorite of the locals. "Who would have guessed we would have come this far? Each day is a baby step forward."

But the problems facing Diwaniya are immense. Though it was not a major battleground and not severely damaged by American bombs, Diwaniya has ground to a halt. Businessmen have kept their shops shuttered. Government workers are staying home. The sewer treatment plant is not operating. Fuel supplies are low. Television and radio are silent. Only the phones seem to work.

After decades of having their lives directed by an iron-fisted government, many Iraqis, including some of Diwaniya's most prominent families, do not seem ready to take control of their city's destiny.

"The Iraqis want us to secure every business, turn on every light, solve all their problems," the team leader said. "But I tell them: `We are only 12. You must start to do it yourselves.' "

One thing has made their work easier: the city has welcomed them as heroes. Working with the leaders of three major tribes and a former Iraqi Army colonel who defected before the war, the Green Berets were able to pinpoint fedayeen and Baath Party headquarters inside Diwaniya and the nearby town of Hamza.

During 24 hours of airstrikes that started on April 8, American warplanes obliterated nine targets with satellite-guided 500-pound bombs, including a building where more than a dozen Baath officials were meeting.

Unlike other southern Iraqi cities where the paramilitaries stood and fought, in Diwaniya they turned and fled, or melted back into the populace. On April 10, the tribal sheiks led a parade of their own fighters, accompanied by the Green Berets and a squad of marines, into Hamza and Diwaniya. Over loudspeakers, the opposition leaders declared the cities free and the Americans their friends.

Within minutes, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people poured into the streets. They hung from windows and rooftops shouting "welcome" and "Bush good." They wept and kissed the soldiers' hands.

"It was the most gratifying day in my career," the team sergeant said.

Then the hard part began.


The team's first priority was security. Looters roamed free, stripping government offices, warehouses and universities of everything down to the ceiling tiles and water pipes. Even bath tubs were not spared.

Following classic Special Forces doctrine, the team began organizing a municipal police force to patrol the streets and enforce a curfew. The sheiks provided the recruits, and the Americans provided rifles and green arm bands in lieu of uniforms.

Many of the recruits were teenagers with only wisps of facial hair and no experience with guns. On the first day, eight of the 50 recruits quit. On the third day, five of them shot at an American Army patrol they mistook for looters. They were handcuffed and disarmed, barely escaping with their lives.

Nervous and trigger-happy, the police recruits often call the Green Berets for backup. On Tuesday, the soldiers answered one of those calls to find a group of officers encircled by a mob of fist-pumping men outside one of the city's five banks.

"Ali Babba!" the mob shouted at the police officers, accusing them of being Baathists who were planning to loot the vault.

A leader of the police force urged the Special Forces team to shoot over the heads of the mob and arrest its leaders. But the team sergeant counseled calm.

Flashing a toothy smile and speaking in Arabic, the sergeant waded into the throng, imploring people to go home. "Bad things happen when so many people come together," he told them.

The crowd fell back for a few minutes, but then began inching forward menacingly. Suddenly, the sergeant leaped onto his Humvee and swung a .50-caliber machine gun ? until then unmanned ? toward the crowd. People ran screaming. The threat of a riot seemed to pass.

After a 90-minute standoff, a security detail from the 82nd Airborne arrived to replace the police officers outside the bank. When the Special Forces soldiers mounted their Humvees to depart, the crowd cheered and flashed thumbs up.

"It's crazy, isn't it?" the team sergeant said. "The only ones they consider honest brokers are the Americans."

Now the Green Berets are trying to convince the Iraqis they can run the city by themselves.

The soldiers have asked a former professor at the medical college who speaks excellent English to serve as the town manager. They have also tried to organize a governing council of former city bureaucrats and tribal leaders. But as today's near-riot outside the town hall meeting demonstrated, some people in the city are objecting to the Americans' selection of council members.

The Green Berets say that former Baath Party officials in Diwaniya may be trying to inflame passions against the sheiks who have helped the American forces. But they acknowledge that they are wading into tribal rivalries that have no easy solutions, and have asked tribal and religious leaders from Diwaniya to attend the next council meeting.

"I understand you want the people of Diwaniya to be responsible for Diwaniya," the team sergeant told one of the protesters today. "But we can't do everything in one day. If we left now, you'd kill each other. For 35 years, you've had a chance to get it right. Give us a month."

In their spare time, the Green Berets share stories about their girlfriends and wives, their motorcycles and trucks. They talk about past wars: Kosovo, Somalia and Afghanistan. Almost all have won Bronze Stars for exceptional deeds in battle.

But there are no medals or commendations for rebuilding cities, they note with dismay. And although several soldiers said Diwaniya has been one of the most satisfying experiences of their careers, they also express frustration with the tedium of reconstruction. This is not what we do, they often mutter.

"Big green rolls through," said the assistant operations sergeant, referring to the Third Infantry Division, which raced north to Baghdad. "And we get left with this."

Nongovernmental aid groups, Army Civil Affairs teams and the United States Agency for International Development will arrive in Diwaniya to oversee larger-scale reconstruction projects. But that could be weeks, even months away.

"We train to take down governments, but I've never been schooled in building one back up," the captain who leads the team said. "This is new territory."