I Cogitate

Oct. 02, 2005
U.S. SNIPERS SEE TROUBLE BREWING
By Tom Lasseter
Knight Ridder

AL-MUQDADIYAH, Iraq -- Sgt. Antonio Molina sat on a rooftop in the black of night, scanning the road before him with a high-powered sniper scope, hoping an insurgent would scramble out of a car to lay a bomb and give him a reason to squeeze the trigger.

He and three other 3rd Infantry Division snipers were dropped off two weeks ago at a house on the outskirts of Al-Muqdadiyah, in an Iraqi province that military officials frequently claim is largely pacified. Dozens of infantry soldiers stormed the abandoned structure in a staged raid and left the four men behind. Alone with their rifles, they moved quietly, fearing that an insurgent ambush might catch and kill them before Bradley Fighting Vehicles could respond.

``Some people don't get the gravity of the situation here; people in the `green zone' are always trying to paint a rosy picture,'' said Molina, a 27-year-old sniper from Clearwater, Fla. He was referring to the fortified compound in Baghdad where U.S. officials work. ``These politicians are all about sending people to war but they don't know what it's all about, being over here and getting shot at, walking through swamps, having bombs go off, hearing bullets fly by. They have no idea what that's like.''

Military commanders in Baghdad and Washington say four Iraqi provinces are home to 85 percent of the daily attacks. They claim that a relatively low attack rate in Iraq's 14 other provinces is proof that the insurgency is on its knees.

Al-Muqdadiyah is in one of those 14 provinces, Diyala. Yet five days in the field with a 3rd Infantry Division sniper team suggests that, to those on the ground here, the insurgency is anything but defeated.

Many American troops on the ground in Al-Muqdadiyah expect the violence to continue long after they are gone. They worry that Sunni Muslim insurgents -- from a Sunni population that makes up 40 percent of Diyala -- will simply move from targeting U.S. forces to increasing attacks against Shiite Muslims, who compose 35 percent of the province. Shiites are a majority in Iraq, and they dominate the Baghdad government.

Al-Muqdadiyah is a relative backwater of some 100,000 people. But the guerrilla war there, while gaining little attention, indicates wider instability than military leaders have acknowledged and could plague efforts to put the Iraqi government on its feet.

``As soon as we leave this place they're all going to kill each other,'' Molina said in his barracks recently.

His sniper team commander, Staff Sgt. Donnie Hendricks, agreed: ``It's going to be a civil war.''

Hendricks was quiet for a few moments.

``We go out and kill the bad guys one at a time,'' said Hendricks, 32, who speaks with the soft accent of his native Claremore, Okla., where his high school graduating class had 55 students. ``But we're just whittling down one group so it's easier for the other groups to kill them.'

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