Thursday, November 18, 2004
Destruction and reconstruction are going on simultaneously in various parts of Iraq.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A car carrying explosives ripped into a U.S. convoy Wednesday in northern Iraq, killing at least 10 people, and U.S. troops fought persistent pockets of rebels in Fallujah, a city wrecked by more than a week of fighting and where the first steps toward reconstruction were taken.
Two dozen members of the 1st Marine Engineering Group crunched over gravel, charred shell casings and broken glass, rifles outward and bounding down a war-torn street that was once a commercial strip in Fallujah.
They duck-walked past the sounds of a nearby gunfight as it floated through eerily empty streets.
One gravelly voice broke the silence in a lull: "Does the word apocalyptic apply?"
The men were reservists, with accents from places like Boston and Chicago and central Pennsylvania, and hair tinged with gray. Their regular jobs were in electrical, plumbing and building trades; their house-to-house military skills raw compared with the soldiers half their age who took the town.
But the Navy Seabees, Marine and Army civil engineers running through Fallujah weren't there to take the town. They were there to repair it.
Plenty of fighting
Black smoke billowed over Fallujah, once home to about 200,000 people, as U.S. forces faced insurgents staging hit-and-run raids on patrols moving through the city's dense warrens. Military commanders had no estimates on the number of rebels still fighting, but the staccato bursts of gunfire and thunder from tank rounds in the city's center countered Iraqi and U.S. claims over the weekend that fighting there had largely ended.
U.S. commanders say they hold the entire city but acknowledge that rebels have moved back into areas believed to have been secured. While the entrances to the city are blocked, the fighters may be plying old paths into Fallujah or crossing the Euphrates River, whose palm-shrouded banks skirt the city.
In Baiji, an oil refinery town north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said a car bomb barreled toward a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and detonated, wounding three soldiers. The military had no count of civilian casualties, but news agencies, quoting hospital officials, reported that at least 10 people were killed in the blast and shooting that ensued.
Insurgents in Baiji, a town that has long been unstable, have tried to target the oil refinery and other installations and establish a greater presence in the streets.
One man's story
Abu Saad said he remembers the night Americans came to Fallujah. He hunkered in the little room at the back of his house in the center of the city, where he prayed that the bombs would not find him. He and his father, brother and nephew tried to drown the sound of the artillery with their prayers. "Dear God," he chanted over and over, "please protect us."
Describing their ordeal Wednesday, Saad, 31, recalled how the first night blurred into day, and then into a second night. Dawn broke four times while they hid. During daylight, they fasted in observance of the holy month of Ramadan. At night, he rushed to the kitchen to cook a pot of chicken and then whisked it back to his hiding place, where he and his relatives pulled the meat off the bones with their fingers and listened to the sound of their city falling around them.
After four days, Saad heard voices outside, then the smash of the front door being broken down. In the back room, Iraqi security forces found Saad and his relatives, alive, blinking in the light, relieved and praising God.
As the Iraqi soldiers led Saad out of his home, assuring him that he would be protected, he got a first glimpse of the rubble that was once his neighborhood. Stunned by the sight of crumbled concrete, damaged mosques and shops blistered by bullets and artillery shells during fighting between U.S. forces and insurgents, Saad said he felt his heart break.
"This is the city of the mosques," he said Wednesday at a yellow-brick school near his house. "I felt sad after I saw the city, the buildings. I feel sad even talking about it."
Abu Saad said he sent his mother and family out of the city before the fighting, but his elderly father refused to leave. "I couldn't leave him," said Saad. "I knew God would protect me."
The Iraqi army is responsible for running the food and water distribution points, and Wednesday, a soldier who gave his name as Sgt. Habeeb said the civilians generally have been happy to see the Iraqi forces.
"It's very, very important what we're doing," Habeeb said. "It's making a difference."
Though the hardest, most time-sensitive rebuilding work will be done by American military specialists, most of the rest -- road and building repairs, stringing wire, rebuilding homes -- will be contracted out to locals.
On Wednesday, scouts sent to determine the extent of battle damage and other necessary repairs skirted a burbling lake of sewage that stretched two blocks and seemed to feed off a mysterious clean-water source. They found an almost perfectly intact well water pumping station. They despaired over a rat's nest of electrical connections that could easily produce power but seemed unlikely to transmit it reliably to homes and businesses.
And not inconsequentially, the military engineers and civil affairs specialists moved their offices into Fallujah, even though the many residents who left have yet to return and the city still crackles with gunfire.
"When the people begin returning, they'll be able to come right here," said Marine Lt. Col David Dysart of the 4th Civil Affairs Group, who was setting up shop.