BAGHDAD–Pfc. Michael Hoyt of Texas had a simple answer when asked what was so important about the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team that it be sent to the Iraqi capital, the site of heavy sectarian violence.
He rapped his knuckles on the roof of the Stryker vehicle he and his fellow scouts from the 4-14 Cavalry were riding in. The Strykers are a show of force by their mere presence.
Most Baghdad residents, unless they had traveled to Mosul or Rawah in the last few years, had not seen a Stryker vehicle until the 172nd arrived in the city last month. On Thursday, the cavalry made an impression on locals hoping to feel safer in their neighborhoods, some which haven’t seen the presence of multinational forces for months.
A troop of the 4-14 began its morning Thursday on and around Haifa Street, long considered one of the more dangerous main routes in the city. It’s an area of steady traffic, date palms and tall apartment complexes offering any number of vantage points for snipers, the prime source of attacks on coalition forces in Baghdad.
The neighborhood for months has been under the control of the Iraqi security forces, said Capt. Michael Eberhart, commander of this troop, which carries the nickname Assassin Troop.
But now, even many of the Iraqi Army and police are afraid of the violence in the area. Eberhart said his troop’s mission is to determine who’s responsible for the violence and to act as a deterrent. But curbing the ongoing strife between Sunni and Shiite is difficult, he said, because it consists mostly of retaliatory acts.
“It’s just a never-ending cycle,” he said.
Thursday, one of Eberhart’s platoons, headed by 2nd Lt. Mateo Gross and Sgt. 1st Class Curlee Kelley and consisting of four Stryker vehicles, patrolled an area several blocks from Haifa Street accompanied by Iraqi police. The officers joked with the U.S. soldiers as they got out and mingled with the crowd, seemingly at ease with the soldiers nearby. But Gross took charge of questioning local shop owners about the neighborhood violence.
The biggest challenge for the cavalry scouts is gaining the trust and confidence of residents in the area. While in Rawah and Mosul in the last year, soldiers were able to foster communication with residents over longer periods of time to get an idea of which people were dangerous and who could help the soldiers with information about violence.
As Hoyt, the private from Texas, said of Rawah, “We knew the people that blew us up.”
Now, Gross and the other soldiers have to learn a new area in a new town and in a far shorter period of time. And it’s difficult to get a handle on just how much goes on in this area until the soldiers got out to talk with people.
One of the early stops Thursday for this platoon was a visit to the Baghdad Train Station which only recently began running trains carrying commercial goods. A manager responsible for security of the building and tracks detailed several instances of violence around the station over the last several months, including the deaths of some of his security guards. Gross questioned the man, who said he believes the deaths were due more with the guards’ association with the station and cooperation with coalition forces than with the fact they were Shiite.
But Gross said he thinks the ethnicity likely played at least a small role in the deaths. “I think a lot of it has a sectarian twist to it,” he said after the meeting.
Later in the afternoon, Gross directed his platoon to an area off Haifa Street deemed safe enough to patrol on foot. The platoon stopped at a small marketplace near a large apartment complex. The building towers over the few shops selling fruits, vegetables, candy and clothing. Parents had gathered to meet their children getting out of school for the day.
Here, Gross said, is a neighborhood where residents seem to be paying little attention to their neighbor’s ethnicity and living in relative peace with one another. As a Christian woman spoke with soldiers, she was choosing vegetables from a non-Christian shop keeper. Gross said that the city of 7 million has many areas like this where the sectarian violence has not torn neighbors apart.
The threat of attack was not far from the soldiers’ minds, however. While wandering among the shops, Gross acknowledged that the looming apartment building offered several vantage points for possible snipers.
“But you’ve got to get out of the truck once in a while or you’re never going to get the area established,” he said.
At another stop, Gross and the other soldiers visited with a clothing store owner, real estate agent and goldsmith. The goldsmith is forthcoming about thieves in the area who became more bold as the presence of coalition and Iraqi forces dwindled in the last months. He, for one, tells the soldiers he’s glad to see them in the neighborhood.
“If we see you guys around, we feel safe,” the goldsmith said.