It was late afternoon as Major Joel Hagy made a delivery to a private health clinic less than five minutes drive from his base on the outskirts of Sadr City, Baghdad’s violent eastern Shia slum.
Even though the area around the clinic was thought to be quiet, it required three armoured Humvees and a dozen soldiers, three with machine guns, to bring just four cardboard boxes of medicine.
A crowd of children gathered and the soldiers gleefully threw into the air packets of chocolates, toys and dolls.
To the major and his soldiers from the 1st battalion of the 12th US Cavalry the short visit represents what they regard as a successful reconstruction programme. ”In the areas that we frequent the most with either food or water or medicine there are fewer mortars launched at us,” said Major Hagy. ”There is a very palpable change.”
But his brief hospital visit also reveals the yawning gap between what the United States and the Iraqi government are providing and the obvious and vast needs of Iraqis in this benighted and violent area, one of the poorest sectors of the capital.
Monday may mark a turning point.
The militia loyal to the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr which has fought running battles with the US military in Sadr City for months, tentatively began handing in its weapons as part of a new ceasefire deal.
In return the Iraqi government has pledged compensation for relatives of the dead and injured and a vast reconstruction programme. If the new ceasefire is to hold, it will rely heavily on the speed and quality of US-led rebuilding projects.
Other projects, stalled by the fighting, should restart in Sadr City, including a $20-million sewage repair programme to deal with the open sewers that run through the streets of the slum, and a new street cleaning operation.
Few of the aid agencies left in Iraq have been able to operate here, so it is the US military that takes the lead.
”Did we turn north-east Baghdad into Cleveland in the last 18 months? No,” said Hagy, speaking days before the latest ceasefire was agreed.
”Did we make improvements? Yes.”
Muhammad Hussein (29) who runs the clinic, was pleased with the delivery, but also uncomfortable at accepting donations so publicly from the US military.
”We are grateful for what they bring,” he said. ”But the conditions around us are not so good.” Most of his patients are children suffering from gastroenteritis, because of the appalling sewage and contaminated water supplies in the area.
He is too scared to speak freely about al-Sadr, the Shia cleric whose Mehdi militia has battled against the far better armed and better trained US cavalry. Some of the troops also find the situation odd. ”One day I am feeding them, at night I am shooting them,” said one of the soldiers delivering the medicine.
When the battalion arrived in March, Sadr City was so peaceful they brought no tanks and were scoffed at by other soldiers on the base for even bringing Bradley armoured vehicles.
Most soldiers then patrolled in Humvees with the doors removed. Then in the first week of April, al-Sadr led a rebellion across southern Iraq and in eastern Baghdad. Negotiations ended the fighting in May, and then the cleric launched another uprising in August and again a ceasefire was negotiated.
Gradually attacks on US troops in Sadr City increased once again until the most recent ceasefire deal this weekend. The fighting added to the delays that have held back any serious signs of rebuilding.
It had reached the point where the cleric’s militia ran its own courts, schools and police force and the regular Iraqi police were either too intimidated to resist or sympathetic to the cleric.
The cavalry’s camp, Forward Operating Base Eagle, came under mortar attack almost daily, several dozen soldiers were injured or killed and many of the tanks and Bradleys bore the marks of street combat.
Several soldiers spoke openly of their frustration and aggression. ”We may ask you to close your eyes sometimes because to save lives we’ve got to do things we are not proud of,” said one young soldier.
”We don’t really know who we are fighting. We are just trying to do our best,” said Private First Class Matt Sparks, who joined the army last year and was sent to Iraq straight from basic training. ”There are people who don’t want to fight. Some of them are coming forward and telling us things to find those people [the militia]. But a lot are so scared they sit at home and do nothing … They are not helping us get rid of these people.”
In frank moments, officers admitted they were struggling to win the sympathy of the Iraqis in the area and that reconstruction was seriously hampered.
”Their propaganda machine is obviously a lot better than ours,” said Captain Arne Gibbs, the battalion intelligence officer. Bureaucracy and ”money issues” were in part to blame for the slow pace of rebuilding, he said. But attacks on the troops also had a huge impact. ”There are only so many hours in the day,” he said.
”We either try to secure the area or build a sewage line. It is one or the other.” Attempts to co-opt more moderate clerics have worked only ”to a limited degree”.
In Friday sermons from the local mosques the Iraqi government and the US military come in for stinging criticism. Electricity shortages, poor healthcare and sanitation and limited fresh water are all blamed on the US military.
Al-Sadr expertly built a thuggish movement hungry for power on the back of the delays in reconstruction. At the same time the chronic sanitation and infrastructure problems have undermined the power of more moderate figures.
Councillors from Sadr City who have chosen, at huge risk, to work with the US are frustrated. ”If the Americans had listened to us right from the beginning this wouldn’t have happened,” said Siham Hattab Hamdan, an English literature professor from Sadr City who sits on the district, city and provincial councils.
She hopes the new street cleaning operation, which has employed many young men from al-Sadr’s militia, may mark a small step towards calming the violence. ”We have to do this because we cannot live like this for another year. Things will become worse not better.” – Guardian Unlimited Â