Further from the river, a few hundred low-lying houses of orange brick and stucco and a modern mosque sprawl along wide boulevards nearly devoid of pedestrian traffic. It was in these nondescript homes, according to U.S. troops, that dozens of the former leader’s bodyguards, cousins and other sympathizers sought refuge with their relatives and planned attacks against the occupying American army.
Indeed, Ouja proved so vital to the insurgency that the U.S. Army’s Fourth Infantry Division, based in Tikrit, employed a drastic remedy last fall: encircling the town with barbed wire and forcing all its male adults to carry identification badges and enter or leave the village through a single gate guarded by U.S. troops. “We decided to turn Ouja into a fishbowl,” says Lt. Col. Steven Russell, 40, who commands the First Battalion of the Fourth ID’s 22d regiment in Tikrit.
It was a controversial experiment. Critics likened the tactic to Israel’s cordoning off of Palestinian areas and Iraqis complained about their treatment at U.S. hands. Russell, however, says that the American strategy was different. “It’s not Vietnam; it’s not Gaza,” he says. “We’re not separating two hostile population groups, and we had soldiers living right in the middle of them.”
Two weeks ago, the trial ended in Ouja. In what Russell deemed a minor victory for Coalition forces, U.S. troops dismantled the barbed-wire encirclement and declared that its roughly 5,000 residents were free to come and go as they wished. Yet even as Saddam’s clansmen celebrated their recovered freedom and distanced themselves from the former dictator, there was no guarantee that the military was likely to repeat that success elsewhere. Two suicide car bombings on consecutive days this week killed more than 100 Iraqis waiting to enlist in the police force and army, and two more U.S. soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb explosion in the Iraqi capital on Wednesday morning.
On Thursday, insurgents in Fallujah fired three rocket-propelled grenades at a convoy carrying Gen. John Abizaid, commander of the U.S. Central Command. And though attacks against U.S. forces have dropped from a peak of 50 a day in November to between 18 and 23 a day in February, deputy chief of operations and Coalition spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt says that the numbers have held steady for the last two months. “We’ve reached a plateau,” says Kimmitt. “We won’t be satisfied until we eliminate the attacks completely.”
Russell, a blond-haired, slender Oklahoman whose battalion is headquartered in Saddam Hussein’s sprawling palace complex on the Tigris River in Tikrit, feels he has made a good start on that. The officer and his troops took Tikrit without much of a fight back in April, but during the summer guerrilla attacks against the U.S. occupation intensified. Between July and September, a total of five U.S. soldiers were killed and more than 90 injured in mortar attacks, roadside explosions and ambushes in and around Tikrit; U.S. military intelligence identified Ouja as a linchpin in the guerrilla campaign. As Russell explains it, the guerrilla fighters weren’t carrying out ambushes from Ouja because they knew that the village’s close identification with Saddam Hussein made it a natural target for U.S. troops. But they did use the town as a venue for clandestine meetings to plan attacks, to hide out from the Coalition and to stash weapons and money.
Russell, who holds a master’s degree in history from the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas says he took his cue from counterinsurgency campaigns that long predated Israel’s. He knew that Napoleon had successfully cordoned off hostile villages in the German Rhineland more than 200 years ago, and that well over a century later the French occupation army had tamped down the Algerian insurgency–briefly–by surrounding the casbahs in Algiers and other cities with barbed wire.
Ouja’s compact size and its concentration of Saddam sympathizers made it relatively simple for U.S. forces to isolate. “We said, ‘Let’s control the place. Let’s monitor every person who moves in or out’,” Russell said. The colonel ordered up more than five miles of barbed wire, enough to entirely cut off Ouja, and alerted Ouja’s tribal leader, Sheikh Mahmoud al-Nidar, of his plan at night at midnight on Oct. 31. “I went to his house and told him, ‘When you wake up it’s going to look a little different’,” said Russell. “I said, ‘We understand that not all of you [are against the occupation], but you must register all the adults in Ouja.’ He said, ‘Including the women?’ I said, ‘We’ll make it all males over the age of 16’.” Russell told the sheikh that he would remove the fence when attacks against Americans dropped off significantly, and he demanded that Mahmoud enlist the support of the population. “Ouja was divided into two camps,” Russell says. “We wanted to turn it into one.”
It wasn’t an easy battle. The showdown took place in Sheikh Mahmoud al-Nidar’s house, a garish orange-brick villa alongside the Tigris, topped by a jumble of domes and turquoise-painted turrets. A few days after the barbed-wire fence encircled Ouja, the tribal leader gathered all 1,600 men and boys over 16 in the meeting house, known in Arabic as a diwaniyah. “This meeting hall was filled, the corridors were filled, the kitchen was filled, and even the field outside was filled,” said the sheikh’s son, also named Mahmoud. “We set up a loudspeaker so that the people outside could hear.”
The younger Mahmoud, 25, a sharp-faced man with a trim beard and mustache and an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, agreed to speak to me on his father’s behalf when NEWSWEEK visited the town this week. (The 66-year-old tribal leader was in bed with a bad cold, his son said.) We sat on couches in his father’s cavernous guest hall, a hangarlike yellow-painted structure with a high curving roof. Several members of the sheik’s entourage drifted into the room as we talked, sitting on cushioned benches that lined both sides of the room and pouring coffee out of Arabic-style copper urns as Mahmoud described the heated gathering that had taken place four months earlier.
The town was sharply divided and few responded favorably to the sheikh’s initial pleas for unity, he said. People were angry, humiliated. “Imagine if a person, a foreigner, tells you must wear a badge to go in and out of your village,” Mahmoud said. “Imagine that you are searched, forced to step out of the car with your hands up.” According to his son, the sheikh abruptly threatened to resign if people refused to cooperate with the U.S. occupiers and told them, “The resistance is not in your favor. If 10 Americans are killed, they will bring in 1,000. It’s better to be their friends than their enemies.” Eventually, the sheikh won over the hardliners. “It was done according to reason,” the son explained. “The Americans are like a wall, and we realized that it is something we cannot stand against.”
Russell says that the difference began to be felt by early November. A trickle, then a flow, of intelligence about arms and money caches and wanted men reached the troops stationed in Ouja. Several high-profile insurgents, including some of Saddam’s top bodyguards, were forced to abandon their hiding places in Ouja and were flushed out of other villages and captured. On Dec. 13, Saddam himself was nabbed in a septic tank beneath a farmhouse not far from Tikrit, a powerful blow to the morale of the insurgents in the area. For the residents of Ouja, the capture of the dictator, and the humiliating videotaped display of his examination by U.S. Army doctors aroused mixed emotions. There was anger at the American troops for treating Saddam “like an animal,” Mahmoud says; awe at the reach of U.S. intelligence, and disappointment at Saddam’s abject surrender. “Everyone said that he should not be caught in this way. He should have fought and died or stayed hidden. His sons fought for many hours in Mosul, alone, and they died with honor.” Russell calls the capture a “watershed”; almost immediately, he says, attacks against U.S. troops in and around Tikrit dropped from three our four a day to about one, where they remain today.
Mahmoud says he’s delighted that the barbed wire has come down around the village. But it’s hard to gauge just what he and the other people of Saddam’s birthplace really feel about the Americans. Sipping coffee in the diwaniyah, Mahmoud and his entourage profess respect for Colonel Russell–“he’s honest, cooperative, sympathetic,” the sheikh’s son says–and insist in chorus that the American occupation has been good for Iraq. They swear that none of them had anything to do with the resistance. “We’re all simple people,” says one. In the next breath, however, Mahmoud lavishes praise on the captured ex-dictator. “Saddam was a brave man, a man who behaved according to his rights,” Mahmoud told me. “He made mistakes, but nobody could make the Iraqi people behave well except for him.” The American troops may have gotten Ouja’s citizens into line. But it’s no indication that the battle to pacify the rest of Iraq is even close to being won.
