Marines scour a ghost town
Offensive against insurgent stronghold finds deserted homes -- and booby traps
- Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, October 2, 2005

Sada, Iraq -- The door of the old, white deep-freezer was wide open. Inside lay a rusty propane tank. Wires ran from it to a large battery, which, in turn, was connected to a round black switch.

The contraption stood in the kitchen of a one-story house, abandoned, apparently, not very long before. The owners had forgotten to turn off the sprinkler before they left, and a small puddle of water had gathered in their vegetable patch.

"Well, look at this!" U.S. Marine Staff Sgt. Crescencio Gonzalez said, staring at the contraption. "An IED!" he said, using the military term for improvised explosive devices -- homemade bombs.

In an effort to drive insurgents out of the key area in western Iraq on the border with Syria, Marines from the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment attached to the 2nd Regimental Combat Team swept Saturday into the town of Sada, which had been under control of fighters linked to al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for months.

The push into Sada marked the beginning of Operation Iron Fist, the fourth large U.S. offensive since May in the area of Anbar province near the porous Syrian border. A force of about 1,000 U.S. Marines, soldiers and sailors is trying to reclaim Sada and four other border towns on the Euphrates River in western Iraq that insurgents also control, in time for the Oct. 15 referendum on the nation's first post-Saddam Hussein constitution. U.S. military officials said that at least eight insurgents were killed nearby in a series of firefights.

Each time the Marines approached Sada over the past several weeks, some of the 500 or so insurgents believed to be in the region lobbed mortars and rockets at them from inside the town. Saturday was no exception. When the 3rd Battalion's Lima Company pulled up to the eastern edge of town at sunrise, Marines were greeted by a mortar round that landed about 200 yards short of their vehicles.

But when the Marines actually entered Sada, it was a ghost town. Most of the residents, forewarned by the Americans of the impending assault and afraid of being caught in the crossfire, had fled. So had the militants, who across the region have left towns under assault, only to move back after the Americans withdraw.

On Saturday, the Marines found empty sandstone houses, date palms heavy with sweet fruit, blankets drying on fences. They also found strange booby traps.

"Sometimes when (the Americans plan an assault), the residents can leave and insurgents may come and booby trap any house," said Gonzalez, a 30-year-old Texan.

Marines pushed through Sada on foot, accompanied by several armored amphibious vehicles, tanks and a truck Marine engineers call Cougar, which carried bomb-sniffing dogs, mine-sweeping equipment and explosives.

The Marines moved house to house, farm to farm, in small units, crouching beneath mud brick walls, their M-16s at the ready. They broke down flimsy metal doors that wouldn't open, often blowing away locks with shotgun rounds, and searched every house, flipping through family photo albums, rummaging through closets, lifting up mattresses and looking under beds.

In one empty house, a pewter dish containing meat with tomato sauce spilled on the floor when a Marine opened the refrigerator door. Staff Sgt. Michael Chambers, 28, from Illinois, leaned over a dresser holding bed linens.

"Ho, ho, ho! There you are, buddy! We found us some goodies," Chambers said, pulling out a Kalashnikov assault rifle and three extra clips.

In another house, a Marine dropped a china cup, and it smashed on the concrete living room floor.

"Careful!" Chambers called from the foyer. "Don't go breaking their s -- ."

In another house, Lance Cpl. Norman Anderson, from Baltimore, found a plastic toy gun. He held it up, pretending it was real, and the other Marines laughed.

Most of the houses they entered had been recently vacated, still smelling of food. In one, a large half-eaten pot of rice and vegetables was on the stove.

"They just picked up and left," one Marine remarked, staring at the pot.

On the porch of a house in the eastern part of Sada, a family cowered and watched the Americans move by, a splash of color in the otherwise deserted, dusty town. A baby cried, and her high-pitched voice was starkly human in a town filled with the squeal of tank tracks and the roar of helicopters. The only other loud human voice was the recorded message transmitted from a U.S. personnel carrier that advised the remaining residents, in Arabic, to cooperate with the Americans. The message echoed off the sandstone walls.

Many residents had put up white flags on their rooftops before they fled, but the Marines said these signs of peaceful intentions were misleading.

"They wave the white flags, they walk into their houses, and then they're opening up rounds," said Navy medic Derek Zachary, 25, from Texas. Somewhere, a mortar boomed.

Throughout the day, insurgents continued to lob mortars at the U.S. troops from the vicinity of eastern Karabila, the town immediately east of Sada, said Capt. Richard Pitchford, commander of the 3rd Battalion's Lima Company. No Marines were hurt.

Also, Marines detained two men they suspected of assisting the insurgency. Pitchford refused to specify what these men were suspected of doing.

"I thought it went well today," Pitchford said. He said he was not aware that any civilians had been wounded or killed Saturday, although news reports quoted doctors as saying at least 10 local civilians, including three children, were killed as they fled Sada.

Near a ditch strewn with garbage and sheep droppings, Marine engineers found and detonated two roadside bombs, made of rigged 155mm rounds, sending a black cloud of smoke over the green stream of sewage that ran through the middle of the ditch.

A few minutes later, in the living room of a two-story house with a satellite antenna on the roof, they found a propane tank rigged to a satellite phone receiver -- another booby trap. The engineers blew up the device, and the house sagged as its southern wall collapsed, leaving behind a caved-in carcass.

"If they had, like, an Iridium (satellite) phone, which they do, they could have detonated it," remarked Sgt. Neil Fucci, 21, a Marine engineer from Barstow.

In the yard of another house, the Marines found an old Chevrolet Caprice with a dry gas tank. The trunk of the sedan had been raised very high, leading the Marines to believe it was a car bomb in the making. They towed the car out of the yard, then blew it up.

"I know it doesn't have any charge in it, but it's a perfect vehicle for a VBIED" -- a vehicle-borne IED, said Cpl. Anthony Hill, 20, from Tulsa. "It's been prepped, like, to hold heavy rounds. It's a car that's set up to get as close to a checkpoint as possible and blow up the Marines."

Maha Ramadhan, a teenage girl who lived in the house where the Chevrolet was parked, denied that anyone had been preparing to turn the car into a car bomb. Ramadhan, whose mother and siblings decided to stay in Sada when most residents fled, said her uncle used the car to carry produce.

In the house where the Marines had found the propane tank inside the freezer, they carefully stuck a long metal tube packed with 10 pounds of explosives into the freezer beside the propane tank, and set the detonator to blow up in one minute.

The house exploded in a cloud of gray dust, spewing pieces of rock and concrete. Strips of electric wire and splinters of glass flew everywhere.

A minute later, when the dust settled, the house was no more than a giant pile of rocks and concrete. The Marines watched water run from a blasted water tank that used to sit on the rooftop. In the backyard, the sprinkler continued to water the vegetable patch.

E-mail Anna Badkhen at abadkhen@sfchronicle.com.

Ellie