Published: February 19, 2009
As Major General Mark Hertling prepared to take on a 15-month command of coalition forces across northern Iraq, the best intelligence, military assessments and political analysis led him to believe his division's mission would be 70 percent reconstruction and development, and just 30 percent combat operations.
But the enemy was different than anticipated. Hertling and the First Armored Division arrived in the autumn of 2007, confronted by a sharp rise in terrorist and insurgent violence that, for months at a time, resulted in the north of Iraq's suffering the majority of all attacks nationwide.
It was not just bombs hidden along the roads that claimed the lives of soldiers. Entire houses were booby-trapped. Explosives were packed into cars, even bicycles. And terrorist networks, pushed north by successes of the additional American "surge" forces flowing into Baghdad and of the Awakening alliance with tribal sheiks in Anbar Province, fielded a new and unexpected weapon: women in suicide vests.
Because Hertling had fewer troops than might be needed, he and his team had to find other ways to build their fighting strength. Their decisions — analyzed in an after-action review by commanders here this month — offer lessons to the Obama administration as it prepares for further reductions of American troops. The analysis suggests that there may indeed be ways for the American military to do more with less, as will be required in the months ahead.
Commanders found that it was possible to leave some zones of northern Iraq more or less uncovered, to focus their forces elsewhere in a series of combat and reconstruction missions. So frequently did fighting forces and civil affairs personnel move that commanders dubbed their battlefield locator map "the Dancing Icons."
With conventional troops spread thinly across the north, commanders also relied heavily on Special Operations forces to carry out missions against top insurgent and terrorist leaders.
To promote better coordination, a newly minted general, Brigadier General Tony Thomas, an Army Ranger who had just completed a Special Operations tour, was appointed deputy commander of the First Armored Division just a month before deployment. He was assigned to a command post in Mosul, a city of two million, where he assisted in commanding a small American force and helped coordinate with American Special Operations units and the Iraqi Army and police.
At different times, one to three American battalions were assigned to the city then, compared with 24 battalions in Baghdad during the surge.
The American forces also relied more and more on Iraqi Army troops in the north, whose numbers more than tripled, to 63,000, during the division's tour. Some in the division acknowledged that at times the Iraqis had carried out missions that seemed aimed at supporting policies of the Shiite government in Baghdad over the interests of local Sunni leaders.
The division also sought to promote better ties between provincial leaders and the central government, persuading some cabinet members to leave Baghdad for the first time so that they could meet regional leaders in the provincial capitals.
It was the battle against female suicide bombers in the north that truly tested the American forces. It had been all but impossible to detect an explosive vest hidden under a woman's loose-fitting abaya; in a traditional Muslim society, women cannot be searched by men, and the all-male Iraqi security forces were bound by tradition.
One answer was to counter the idea that the bombings were justified under religious tenets. The Americans wanted to get the word out that at least some of the women who had carried out the attacks were coerced — although some were widows of terrorists and some appeared driven by outrage over the deaths of husbands, brothers and fathers.
The division headquarters organized a women's conference in Erbil, where Hertling challenged the participants to break with old ways and "provide me a list of brave women who would want to go into the police force."
With a list of volunteers in hand, Hertling went to the police commander in Diyala Province, the focus of the female suicide bombers. With great reluctance, the commander agreed that women could enter training. A first class of 27 policewomen graduated within weeks. Today more than 60 women across Diyala are police officers, assigned to markets and other public locations to search for female bombers.
Commanders also sought to enlist Iraqis in trying to deter women from participating in the attacks.
A breakthrough came when Rania, a 15-year-old, was captured before her explosive vest could be detonated at a checkpoint. She told interrogators that she had been given juice that made her queasy and dizzy, and that she was wrapped in the vest before being pushed toward a checkpoint. Her debriefing allowed Americans and Iraqis to understand how at least some of these women were recruited.
American commanders wanted to spread the word that Rania and others appeared not to have been willing bombers, and that the killing of innocent Iraqis could not be defended as an approved religious act. But they wanted to do so without American fingerprints that might undermine the message.
American officers convened sessions with Iraqi politicians, activists and journalists in which the terrorist threats were discussed. They provided information about the suicide bombers, including details of Rania's debriefing. They suggested ways to promote a public debate.
But the commanders said that unlike in the early years of the war, when the American military wrote and produced information campaigns in the Iraqi news media — and even paid off local reporters — the content of this discussion was left to the Iraqis.
"We tried to get at the motivations of those who might become suicide bombers," said Colonel Darryl Williams, who ran the division's unit that analyzed the effects of combat and noncombat operations. "We supplied suggestions, information. But we had no control over editorial content."
The Iraqi news media leapt on the story; a female radio host in northern Iraq broadcast discussions on Rania's case that became one of the most popular shows on regional radio.
By the time the First Armored Division turned over command of northern Iraq to Iraqi forces in December, instances of female suicide bombers in the region had dropped significantly, although the threat has not disappeared.
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