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thedrifter
03-11-06, 07:51 AM
U.S. soldiers connect with residents in small Iraqi town
- John Koopman, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, March 11, 2006

Diyara, Iraq -- The elderly mother is beside herself with grief. Her son was kidnapped a year ago. She's heard nothing about him since.

It's hard to tell her age. She wears all-black robes and a black scarf over her head, showing only her face from mid-forehead down. Her face is puffy and lined.

She speaks in Arabic, hands gesturing wildly, and little moans escape between sentences.

"She says, 'I die a little every day,' " an interpreter explains.

Soldiers with Alpha Company of the Army's 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, out of Fort Hood, Texas, were passing through the region on a routine meet-and-greet, looking for information without offending the locals when they came upon the woman's farmhouse. The mother and her other son greeted the soldiers in the doorway to the big, squared-off structure and invited them in.

It's rare for American soldiers to speak to an Iraqi woman in situations like this. Normally, the women stay in the back, or outside, while the men do the talking. But this woman has no time for such traditions. If the U.S. Army can help find her son, she'll do whatever is necessary.

Unfortunately, there's not much to go on. She gives them her son's name and a brief description of what happened. He had been driving to a local job, and some men stopped his car. They made him get out, and they took him away.

The family heard a rumor he was in jail in Basra. Someone who had been held there said he'd seen the son, although the tipster didn't have the son's name quite right.

Now, the family was hoping the Americans could drive them to Basra to check it out.

Staff Sgt. Logan Griffith, a psychological operations specialist with the unit, explained that the U.S. Army doesn't have the resources to drive the people that far. But he said he would check the name against lists of detainees in Basra and get back to the mother.

"This is a sad fact about Iraq -- almost everyone has a family member who is missing," Griffith said, as the unit pulled out.

Diyara, a town of approximately 1,000 people before a car bomb struck the local market late last year, lies in a lush agricultural area about 30 miles south of Baghdad. In Saddam Hussein's time, it was a place where generals and Baath Party officials came to retire.

There's a Sunni part and a Shiite part of the region, which for the most part has experienced relative calm. That is until the local market was destroyed in November, driving away many of the residents, who lost their sole source of income.

On Wednesday, five unexploded mortar rounds dropped into the middle of town. Twenty minutes later, a nearby Iraqi army checkpoint was hit by rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun fire from a car. Iraqi soldiers returned fire, prompting the car to speed away. Spotted a short time later by a passing U.S. patrol, the attackers jumped out of the vehicle and took off on foot.

The Americans and the Iraqi Security Forces work well together here, said Capt. Dave Zaino, commander of Alpha Company. Any time there is a need to chase down insurgents or go on an operation, they try to do it together.

"It's a joint effort; that's the exit strategy," he said. "This is our piece of that."

As the conflict in Iraq approaches its three-year anniversary this month, tactics and procedures are changing. U.S. soldiers and Marines try not to muscle their way through an area the way they used to, knocking down doors and kicking people's belongings aside looking for weapons.

Today, the favored approach is softer. Soldiers still go through homes and stables, but quietly. They smile. Offer a "Salaam Alaikum." Try not to be too intimidating.

Approaching one farmhouse, the men move through the tall grass silently, fanning out around the fringe, setting up security and looking for signs of weapons.

"What's up, dude?" one soldier asks a sweet-faced calf tied to a stake in a yard.

The soldiers approach a scared-looking young boy, maybe 14 or 15.

"He says he is afraid of Americans with guns," the interpreter explains to Griffith.

"Tell him there's nothing to be afraid of," Griffith responds. "The Americans are here to help the people of Iraq."

The boy offers a nervous smile and nods.

The troops found nothing.

The next day, Capt. Ben Simms goes to Diyara for his weekly meeting with the local imam.

The imam, a Sunni, is a gentle man in his 30s. Tall and balding with a full, short beard and kind eyes, he laughs easily. But he prefers not to be identified. He serves Arabic cola to the American soldiers who take off their heavy body armor and helmets in the imam's sparely decorated house. They lean their rifles against the wall.

The main topic of discussion is, as usual, water. Diyara is at the hind end of a canal system, which means the water is nearly stagnant by the time it gets here. The salinity in the water is hard to filter out, said Capt. Keith Burns, who heads the Army's civil affairs unit in the area.

Simms tells the imam that the U.S. Army is finalizing a contract to build a water pumping station in the town, so the people will finally get better, fresher water to their homes.

"The people here have had bad water even in the Saddam regime," the imam said through an interpreter. "People have been dreaming about it. This will be a good thing for them."

The imam likes that the Americans get things done. He's concerned that these kinds of projects will go away once the people have to rely on the bureaucracy in Baghdad.

The imam says that Sunnis and Shiites get along here. The town is largely Sunni, but he says he has members of both sects in his mosque. Reportedly, Sunnis and Shiites guarded each others mosques during the bloody sectarian violence that swept parts of the country in the aftermath of the Shiite mosque bombing in Samarra last month.

"The people who make violence do not fight for religious reasons," said the imam. "They do it for the money. They are cowards because they don't fight face to face. They don't care who they hurt."

After about 45 minutes with the imam, the soldiers say goodbye. Outside, Iraqi kids swarm the soldiers, seeking sweets, money, pens, sunglasses.

They literally hang off of Sgt. 1st Class Michael Taylor's arms and legs after he produced a whole bag of candy.

"The children know who are the fighters and who are the civil affairs soldiers," the imam said, laughing.

E-mail John Koopman at jkoopman@sfchronicle.com.

Ellie