NYT : Iraqis Plan to Ring Baghdad With Trenches

Iraqis Plan to Ring Baghdad With Trenches

By EDWARD WONG | September 15, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 15 — The Iraqi government plans to seal off Baghdad next month by ringing it with a series of trenches and setting up dozens of traffic checkpoints to control movement in and out of the city of seven million people, an Interior Ministry spokesman said today.

The effort is one of the most ambitious security projects in recent memory, with cars expected to be funneled through 28 checkpoints along the main arteries snaking out from the capital. Smaller roads would be closed off. The trenches would run across farmland or other open areas to prevent cars from evading the checkpoints, said the ministry spokesman, Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf.

“We’re going to build a trench around Baghdad so we can control the exits and entrances so people will be searched properly,” he said in a telephone interview. “The idea is to get the cars to go through the 28 checkpoints that we set up.”

American military officials said they were familiar with the plan, which has been in the works for weeks. Studies are still being conducted to determine how traffic patterns will be affected. If the outer perimeter proved effective, then perhaps some checkpoints now being operated inside the city could be taken down, easing the traffic congestion that plagues Baghdad everyday, officials said.

Over the summer, American commanders made Baghdad the focus of military efforts in Iraq because the sectarian conflict raging in the capital threatens to plunge Iraq into all-out civil war. A security plan promoted in June by American officials and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki involved setting up traffic checkpoints throughout Baghdad, but it did little to dampen sectarian violence, which reached a peak in July.

Last month, the Americans and Iraqi government began a new tactic, flooding troubled neighborhoods with thousands of troops and doing searches block-by-block, then leaving battalions behind to try to win the confidence of residents.

That sweep began in southern and western Baghdad and is now moving into eastern neighborhoods controlled by the Mahdi Army, a powerful militia that answers to the firebrand Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

The wide cordon to be erected around the city is critical to the new security plan and will be completed within weeks, General Khalaf said.

It is unclear whether such a project could actually work given the size of Baghdad, whose circumference is about 60 miles. With so much terrain, insurgents and militiamen might find areas that are unconstrained by the trenches and checkpoints. On the main roads, traffic could be snarled for miles, especially in the final days of the upcoming fasting month of Ramadan, when people travel to celebrate with their families.

The American military and Iraqi government have set up similar perimeters around troubled cities that are much smaller than the capital.

The most prominent example is Falluja, the insurgent stronghold in western Iraq that had 300,000 residents before a Marine-led siege in November 2004. Since then, the American military and Iraqi security forces have run the city as a mini police state, with people who want to enter required to show identification cards at checkpoints on the main roads . The travelers are occasionally patted down and their cars searched.

The American military built dirt berms with limited entry points around the volatile town of Samarra in the north and Rawah in the western desert.

The second-ranking American commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, stressed in an interview the importance of securing Baghdad. “I’ll be perfectly clear with you, our main effort right now is Baghdad,” he said. “It’s our focus.”

The Baghdad morgue has reported that at least 1,535 Iraqis died violently in the capital in August, a 17 percent drop from July but still much higher than virtually all other months. American military officials have disputed the morgue’s numbers, saying military data shows that the “murder” rate dropped by 52 percent from July to August. But officials have acknowledged that that metric does not include deaths from bombings and rocket or mortar attacks.

There has been a surge in the number of Iraqis killed execution-style in the last few days. Seven bodies were found today in four different parts of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said. An American soldier was killed by a roadside bomb south of Baghdad today, and another soldier was killed Thursday night by a bomb northwest of Baghdad, the military said. A soldier was missing after an attack in Baghdad on Thursday in which a suicide car bomber killed two soldiers and wounded 30 others. In Anbar Province, an American Marine died in combat.

On the political front, a senior Shiite cleric rejected any immediate move to create autonomous regions in Iraq, further threatening a contentious proposal by a powerful Shiite politician to establish a legal process for partition.

The cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad al-Yacoubi, a fundamentalist Shiite, said he believed in “maintaining the unity of the country” and that autonomous regions cannot be formed without “preparing the proper conditions,” according to a written statement released on Thursday by the ayatollah’s office in the holy city of Najaf.

An official in the cleric’s political group, the Fadhila Party, said in an interview on today that the ayatollah believes Iraq should have better security as well as stronger political and social foundations before regions move toward autonomy. “These foundations so far are absent,” said the official, Basim Sharif.

The strong stand against autonomy by Ayatollah Yacoubi further calls into question the viability of a proposal for a mechanism to carve up Iraq that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Parliament’s Shiite bloc, tried to put to the Parliament earlier this month. Mr. Hakim has long been a strong proponent of creating a nine-province autonomous region in the south that would be ruled by religious Shiites and would include the country’s main oil fields, near Basra.

But Mr. Hakim’s call to have Parliament vote on a proposed mechanism came much sooner than virtually anyone had anticipated, taking legislators by surprise when they returned from their August break. The main Sunni Arab bloc quickly denounced the proposal, saying the Constitution’s measures on autonomy must be reviewed and possibly amended first. Members of the secular bloc led by Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister, also voiced their opposition.

Sunni Arabs generally oppose carving up Iraq because their provinces have little oil.

The bloc answering to Moktada al-Sadr, the fundamentalist Shiite cleric, later came out against any immediate move toward autonomy. Mr. Sadr and Mr. Hakim are bitter rivals, both struggling for dominance in the new Iraq, and both commanders of powerful militias. Their private armies have skirmished in the south and in Baghdad several times since the American invasion.

Ayatollah Yacoubi is close to Mr. Sadr, and their united stand against Mr. Hakim could be enough to block any serious consideration of autonomy for now. Ayatollah Yacoubi came out with his statement after meeting on Thursday with Shiite politicians, including representatives of Mr. Hakim.

Mr. Hakim’s strongest ally on this issue is the main Kurdish bloc — the Kurds have had a northern autonomous region since 1991, when the American military established a no-flight zone over Iraqi Kurdistan.

Mr. Sharif, the Fadhila Party official, said the ayatollah could decide to support Mr. Hakim if Mr. Hakim’s proposed legislation included language saying Iraq would not break up into autonomous regions anytime soon.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Khalid W. Hassan and Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi in Baghdad and an Iraqi employee in Najaf.