Insurgent-held Samarra will fall one way or another, U.S. general says

By Jim Krane

TIKRIT, Iraq One way or another, the U.S. Army and its Iraqi allies will seize the insurgent-held city of Samarra before January’s general election, the U.S. Army commander responsible for the city said Wednesday.

Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who leads the Army’s 1st Infantry Division, said he’s confident a combination of diplomacy, U.S. aid and Army intimidation will persuade the city’s 500 insurgents to give up.

If not, Batiste said, the Germany-based 1st Infantry will assault ancient Samarra, a former Islamic capital whose warren-like center lies in the shadow of a spiral-shaped 9th century minaret.

’’It’ll be a quick fight and the enemy is going to die fast,’’ Batiste said in an interview at his headquarters in a grandiose palace complex built by Saddam Hussein in Tikrit. ’’The message for the people of Samarra is: peacefully or not, this is going to be solved.’’

Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, has been the biggest flashpoint in a tough swath of north-central Iraq controlled by the 1st Infantry Division.

Several recent signs give hope to a negotiated solution.

The general said he and division leaders spoke Tuesday with tribal leaders from the city and its surroundings. He said those leaders, who also have met with interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, have been leaning on the guerrillas. In turn, some leaders of the insurgency already have brought their troops to heel.

Allawi and U.S. ground commander Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz also have said they are optimistic that Samarra will be relinquished without a repeat of April’s disastrous siege of Fallujah or August’s brutal assault on Najaf. Thousands of Iraqis were killed in those operations and city blocks were blasted to rubble.

’’The sheiks and the imams and city leadership are all very interested in calm,’’ said Lt. Col. Jim Stockmoe, the 1st Infantry’s intelligence officer, adding they had sometimes been able to keep the insurgents from attacking U.S. forces.’’

Batiste declined to outline the full terms of a deal he is offering the insurgents, but said they would be free to leave the city or to remain inside it as long as they stopped fighting.

’’I don’t care where they go,’’ he said. ’’They’ve got to stand down and stop fighting.’’

Batiste said his stance includes four nonnegotiable demands. Fighters must stop their attacks. U.S. and Iraqi forces must get unimpeded access to the city. The mayor and city council must be allowed to resume their duties. And the police and Iraqi National Guard be permitted to control day-to-day security there.

Agreement means Samarra will receive tens of millions of dollars in U.S. reconstruction aid to create jobs repairing the crumbling city, he said.

A hundred or so hardcore guerrillas, including some 40 foreigners Saudis, Yemenis, Sudanese and Jordanians are the biggest obstacle to Batiste’s initiative, Stockmoe said.

’’There’s not a lot you can do but kill them. You can’t change their minds,’’ Stockmoe said.

In addition, there are 300 to 600 part-time fighters in Samarra that Stockmoe described as unemployed opportunists who might be coaxed away from the fight.

’’If we don’t provoke those folks, they can be turned,’’ he said. ’’They’ll get the jobs if we go in and start working.’’

The Iraqi military unit that will be tapped to maintain order in Samarra is the 202nd Battalion of the Iraqi National Guard, a unit that deserted in disarray during the insurgent uprising in April.

The 202nd is being reconstituted under a new commander, Lt. Col. Ali Khalaf Abdullah, who will oversee a unit dominated by new soldiers. Only a few current troops belonged to the disintegrated unit. The 600-member unit is supposed to finish basic training in the middle of this month.

In rebuilding the 202nd, the U.S. military sought advice from tribal sheiks around Samarra and staffed the battalion with members of tribes key to brokering a peace accord in the city, Batiste said.

’’We’ve gone out to the local sheiks and found out how we had to man this battalion. They all own a piece of this battalion,’’ the general said. Saddam himself turned to Iraqi sheiks in a similar bid to bring the country’s Arab clans behind the government, as did Iraq’s previous colonial rulers, the British and Turks.

The 1st Infantry also is outfitting the Iraqi troops with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

The division’s goal is to place its entire area of operations under control of Iraqi government forces by year’s end, said Lt. Col. Wayne Grigsby, the 1st Infantry’s operations officer.

The division is scheduled to return to Germany in January and February. The 1st Infantry will be replaced by the 42nd Infantry Division of the New York State Army National Guard, the so-called Rainbow Division, Stockmoe said. The 42nd Infantry has already sent leaders to Iraq to prepare for its rotation here. (AP)

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