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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
U.S. Troops Told to Use Tougher Tactics
Weeding Out Militiamen From Civilians Is Goal
In an effort to help find Iraqi militia among citizens, U.S. Army troops stop and search vehicles and drivers on a road that leads out of Nasiriyah. (Tim Sloan -- AFP)
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By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 1, 2003; Page A01
Girding against Iraqi attackers who have blurred the line between what's military and what's civilian, U.S. commanders have instructed troops to assume the worst and employ a range of tougher tactics aimed at weeding out and hunting down Iraqi militia, defense officials said yesterday.
Drivers and passengers at checkpoints will be ordered out of vehicles with their hands raised and will be searched. Cars and trucks will no longer be permitted to cross through U.S. and British convoys. Any vehicle blocking traffic will be rolled over. And if civilians with hands in their pockets approach troops and fail to respond, first to a shouted command and then to a warning shot, they will be killed, the officials said.
Drawing on lessons from the British experience in Northern Ireland and the American experience in Vietnam, U.S. forces also have begun house-to-house searches for paramilitary hideouts and are conducting commando raids and airstrikes to pick off senior military and political leaders. Drone reconnaissance aircraft have been pressed into service to spot convoys of civilian vehicles in which paramilitary members may be traveling, as strike aircraft maneuver above, ready to attack in response to any sightings.
"Everyone is now seen as a combatant until proven otherwise," a Pentagon official said, detailing some of the new measures.
The Pentagon has not issued new "rules of engagement" to cover this increasingly aggressive behavior by U.S. troops, according to several senior officials. Rather, the moves appear to reflect what one official called a "tightening" of existing rules by commanders who had applied them "pretty flexibly" at the outset of the war.
Officials acknowledged that the shift in tactics runs the risk of alienating and even killing greater numbers of Iraqi civilians. It also could slow plans by civil affairs teams to reach out to Iraqis -- part of the U.S. campaign to win the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people -- and could risk further inflaming anti-American sentiment elsewhere in the Arab world.
"You'll see acts of kindness, medical care and the like, but the large-scale aid effort will have to wait," one defense official said.
But officials defended the toughened measures as necessary on a battlefield where, they said, paramilitaries have been disguising themselves as villagers, staging suicide attacks, feigning surrender and coercing others into fighting. Trying to put the changed posture of U.S. forces in the best light, one senior administration official said it could benefit the Iraqis in the long run by speeding the end of the government in Baghdad.
"Winning decisively and quickly also helps you with hearts and minds," the official said. "It's better than dragging things out and having people fear they're in the crossfire of our forces and Iraqi death squads."
U.S. commanders have admitted confronting stiffer-than-expected resistance from Saddam's Fedayeen, Baath Party enforcers and other militants outside the regular army who have killed, wounded and captured U.S. troops.
Some of the new U.S. measures are defensive, precipitated by a suicide bombing Saturday at a checkpoint near Najaf, where four U.S. soldiers died when an Iraqi in a taxi motioned for help, then blew himself up.
Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, briefing reporters at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar yesterday, said checkpoints have been pushed farther from U.S. troop locations. He cited an incident Sunday involving the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force that illustrates the hardened attitude and changed procedures for dealing with suspicious Iraqis.
"During daylight hours, two vehicles rapidly approached the Marine checkpoint at a high rate of speed," he said. "When they failed to stop, having been signaled by a Psychological Operations loudspeaker team present at the site, they were taken under fire by the checkpoint. The lead vehicle, a sedan, immediately halted, and the second vehicle, a truck, rear-ended it. An adult male, an adult female, and two children exited the sedan.
"Two Iraqi soldiers exited the truck with weapons and one of the soldiers shot and killed the adult female," Brooks went on. "After a brief firefight, both Iraqi soldiers and the three surviving civilians lay wounded. As the Marines approached, one of the wounded soldiers pulled out a weapon and was killed on the spot. The Marines evacuated the remaining wounded, and upon searching the truck found 120 millimeter mortars, and mortar ammunition."
Lt. Col. Rick Long, a spokesman, said Marine commanders issued guidance to units yesterday with the following instructions for tightening checkpoint security: Ensure that approaching vehicles are stopped at a safe enough distance to protect Marines. Have explosives-detection dog teams on hand. Look out for individuals exhibiting such suspicious behavior as wearing heavy clothing in hot weather. Don't be fooled by potentially benign-looking vehicles.
"It's a higher level of security," Long said, adding that the new procedures "may require additional personnel."
According to U.S. officials, Iraqi militia soldiers have continued pouring into southern Iraq from Baghdad and other points north, often riding in convoys of civilian trucks. One official said these routes are now being monitored by U.S. reconnaissance drone aircraft, whose video pictures have enabled Apache helicopters and warplanes to attack. The official likened the tactics to those employed in Afghanistan by Special Operation forces, who called in airstrikes against traveling groups of suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
In other offensive action, U.S. and British troops have been seeking to flush out paramilitary fighters street by street in Najaf and two other southern cities -- Basra and Nasiriyah -- looking for Iraqi safe houses and potential snatch-and-grab operations against officials of President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. In less populated areas, Marines also are reportedly going from farm to farm and village to village in search of Iraqi militia fighters.
Signaling a further shift to unconventional warfare, U.S. forces in the past few days have started rounding up Iraqi men in civilian clothing suspected of being involved with paramilitary squads, raising the possibility that some may be shipped to the detention center at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Marines patrolling Nasiriyah and other areas of heavy fighting have already detained more than 300 men in civilian clothing.
Military lawyers are having to draft new criteria to guide troops in deciding which Iraqis to take into custody. U.S. officials also said the question of whether any would be sent to Guantanamo -- where several hundred prisoners captured during the war in Afghanistan and regarded as "unlawful combatants" are being held -- has not been decided.
"The Iraqi regime's endorsement of terrorist tactics on the battlefield and on the streets of the United States and United Kingdom is nothing less than state-sponsored terrorism," said Jim Wilkinson, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command. "But no determination has been made on whether any of the enemy prisoners of war will be sent to Guantanamo."
Brooks, asked how the new security measures were likely to affect the general tenor of relations between U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, said U.S. forces remain "primarily focused on protecting civilian populations, not destroying them. We'll continue with that."
Correspondent Peter Baker in southern Iraq, and staff reporters Jonathan Weisman and Dana Priest contributed to this report.
?2003 The Washington Post Company
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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