US stepping up bombing in Iraq

The Pentagon announced this week that, far from pulling US troops out of Iraq, it is rushing another few hundred there as reinforcements. It still maintains that it hopes to "draw down" troops soon. But how can the US pull some troops out of Iraq with an insurgency seemingly growing in strength, and yet maintain military pressure? The answer from Knight Ridder's longtime Baghdad correspondent Tom Lasseter: US forces have dramatically increased air strikes in Iraq–a subject that has traditionally received very little press coverage–during the past five months. A review of military data, he writes, "shows that daily bombing runs and jet-missile launches have increased by more than 50 percent in the past five months, compared with the same period last year." Knight Ridder's statistical findings were reviewed and confirmed by US Air Force officials in the region. US warplanes struck at least 22 cities during this period, dropping bombs on 76 days, or about every other day. "There are risks to a strategy that relies more on aerial bombings than ground combat patrols," Lasseter explains in his latest dispatch. "In the town of Samarra, for example, insurgents last month were able to spend several hours rigging explosives in the dome of a Shiite shrine that they later destroyed, in part because American troops patrolled less. "Air strikes also risk civilian casualties, driving a wedge between American forces and Iraqis, Iraqis say." On Mar. 16, the US launched what was termed the largest air assault since the 2003, targeting insurgent strongholds near Samarra. Lasseter spoke with Osama Jadaan al Dulaimi, a tribal leader in the western town of Karabilah, a town near the Syrian border that was hit with bombs or missiles on at least 17 days between October 2005 and February 2006. He said the bombings had created enemies. "The people of Karabilah hate the foreigners who crossed the border and entered their areas and got into a fight with the Americans," al Dulaimi said. "The residents now also hate the American occupiers who demolished their houses with bombs and killed their families... and now the people of Karabilah want to join the resistance against the Americans for what they did." The US military has said repeatedly that it uses precise munitions and targets insurgent locations that are verified by various intelligence sources. Knight Ridder compiled the statistics from about 300 daily press releases provided by the US Central Command's air forces unit. "Stories of American missiles hitting the homes of innocents are passed between Iraqi men at teahouses and during Friday worship services," Lasseter writes. "'Residents worry that their homes will be bombed at any time,' said Hussein Ali Jaafar, who owns a stationery shop in the town of Balad, north of Baghdad, which was targeted by bombs or missiles at least 27 times between October 2005 and February 2006. 'Most of the bombing is unjustified and random. It does not differentiate between militants and innocent people.' "A tribal sheik who lives on the outskirts of the troubled Anbar town of Ramadi, who asked that he be identified as Abu Tahseen instead of by his full name out of fear of possible retribution, said that the strikes create more insurgents than they kill because of the region's tribal dictates of revenge. "'They [the Americans] think: As long as there are resistance fighters operating in this spot, we will wipe it out entirely,' Abu Tahseen said, using the term for insurgents favored by those who are sympathetic to their cause. 'As you know, our nature is a tribal one, and so if one from us is killed, we kill three or four in return.'"