HADITHA, IRAQ – If Americans recognize the name of this city at all, they most likely recall it as the scene of an alleged “massacre” of Iraq civilians by U.S. troops.
Never mind that charges against seven of the eight Marines involved were dismissed after military judicial proceedings. (The last case is pending.) And never mind that the evidence on which initial sensational news reports of the alleged 2005 atrocity were based turned out to be more than a little thin.
It is the massacre image that endures – which is unfortunate. Because what has happened in this city in recent years should stand instead as a symbol of American and Iraqi success – a fragile and tenuous success perhaps, but a success nonetheless.
Certainly this district of 100,000 primarily Sunni Muslim people on the Euphrates River 150 miles northwest of Baghdad – an area that includes the river towns of Barwanah, Haqlaniya and others – has seen more than its share of misery.
In 2004, insurgents had effectively taken over the city, imposing a Taliban-style rule and publicly executing every Iraqi cop they could find. In later years, American troops fought a daily urban battle to take it back.
The last time I was here, in 2006, embedded with the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, the city was an active war zone; hardly a day went by that the Marines weren’t the targets of mortars, IEDs, sniper fire. Shops were shuttered, schools were closed, streets largely deserted.
There was no law, or order. When civil affairs Marines I was with in Barwanah held an “open house” to sign up Iraqi police recruits, they had hoped to get 200 guys. Two Iraqis showed up – and one of them was the “village idiot.” The other, who was not an idiot, decided he didn’t want to be the only Iraqi cop in Barwanah.
But things are different now. Partly as a result of the so-called Anbar Awakening, the revolt of local sheiks and other leaders against the insurgents, and equally as a result of hard slogging and slugging by Marines and U.S. Army soldiers, compared with a few years ago Haditha and other towns in this area are like a different world.
Schools are open, shops and markets are bustling, the streets are crowded. There’s a major project to install curbs and sidewalks – sidewalks, in a place where a few years ago people hardly dared venture out of their homes.
In front of one shop I saw mannequins dressed in tight, Western-style women’s jeans – a display that would have been a death sentence for the shop owner just a few years ago. (Iraqi women may wear Western clothes at home, but not on the street; this is still an Islamic country.) At a florist shop – a florist shop! in Haditha! – I watched a young Marine on patrol admiring the flowers.
“Before, there was no business,” an Iraqi guy who runs a cell phone store told me through an interpreter. “It was too dangerous. Now it’s OK.”
And there is law and order here. From zero cops a few years ago there are now several hundred Iraqi police – known as “I.P.s,” they are paid about $500 a month, good money here – plus Iraqi army soldiers and other security forces. In Haditha, for now, at this moment, the insurgents have been soundly defeated.
As for the American “massacre,” none of the Iraqis I spoke with seemed very familiar with the story. Perhaps they were just being polite, but clearly it was a much bigger story in America than it was here. One Iraqi security cop told me through an interpreter that “the past is the past. We are working together now.”
“It’s been a hard fight, and it’s not completely over,” says Col. Patrick Malay, the combat veteran commander of Camp Pendleton-based Marine Regimental Combat Team 5, whose 5,000 Marines, sailors and U.S. Army soldiers are spread across western al-Anbar province. “But the Iraqis are winning. They’re standing up and taking their country back.”
True, Haditha and western Anbar aren’t completely fixed. There are tribal rivalries, some corruption, mysteries and tensions below the surface. But there’s also progress.
Of course, you won’t see much about that in the news media. Apparently, alleged American military “massacres” are much more interesting than actual American military successes; there hasn’t been another embedded U.S. reporter here in months.
Again, that’s unfortunate. Because in Haditha and elsewhere in western Anbar, the news media – and the American public – are missing a hell of a story.
CONTACT THE WRITER GordonDillow@gmail.com You can see more of Dillow’s columns and photos from Iraq at www.ocregister.com.
