From Occupation to 'Partnership'

Despite Threat of Violence, U.S. Soldiers Prepare to Slip Into the Background

BAQUBAH, Iraq, June 28 -- In the fluorescent glow of warehouse lights, Capt. Travis Van Hecke looked up into the face of a far larger man dressed in a gray caftan. A few others gathered around the pair, providing a running commentary of the encounter between the Army officer from Wisconsin and the shopkeeper from Howadir.

"So do you guys know that June 30 is the transfer of sovereignty?" Van Hecke asked the man, pausing to give his interpreter time to convey the question. "We'll still be here to support the Iraqi police, but the occupation ends. How do they feel about that?"

A crowd emerged from the closet-blackness enveloping the tiny town where Van Hecke had come Sunday evening on a visit in search of intelligence about the anti-American insurgency battering nearby Baqubah. Cigarettes glowed, and Van Hecke's soldiers stood ready against walls overhung by date palms.

"He says if you are still all over this town, day and night, then the problem will still be here," Van Hecke's interpreter said after much chatter from the crowd. "He says you can avoid giving the insurgents an excuse for their doings if you stay away."

The request, made only hours before Monday's surprise transfer of political power from the United States to the interim Iraqi government, underscored the challenges facing U.S. soldiers as they begin adapting to a new mission after months of serving as an occupying force. Over the course of a five-minute ceremony in Baghdad, the country changed governments. But the violence threatening the American project to bring a stable democracy to Iraq continued; while the ceremony was being held in the capital, a roadside bomb exploded near a military convoy in this city 35 miles to the northeast.

The adjustments contemplated by U.S. military commanders over the next six months, a potentially volatile period before Iraqis elect a government, involve changes in tone more than substance. Taken together, commanders say, the changes will turn the 138,000 U.S. troops, the chief guarantors of Iraq's security, into something resembling a police force called in to assist the fledgling Iraqi police and national guard.

But military commanders acknowledge those changes will be difficult to impose on troops fighting a skilled guerrilla insurgency. Nighttime patrols and intelligence gathering by Army units stationed around the country are vital to the counterinsurgency effort, commanders said.

Local Iraqi officials have asked the U.S. troops to cease the provocative military patrols -- known as "reconnaissance by fire" missions because they are intended to draw insurgent attacks -- and remain on two bases outside Baqubah unless needed. U.S. commanders here understand that if they refuse, they could undermine the new government's independence in the eyes of the ordinary Iraqis.

"We firmly believe this is going from a role of partnership and occupation -- but clearly occupation -- to one of partnership and support," said Col. Dana Pittard, commander of the 1st Infantry Division's 3rd Brigade . "To do a major operation, we will have to consult the civic authority. We could still make the kind of errors that push people toward the insurgency."

In Baqubah, an agricultural center battered by insurgents over the past week, Pittard and his officers have been working with local officials on that new relationship, but the meetings with local councils have been shaped by the continuing violence.

Last week, coordinated insurgent attacks on this city and five others in northern and central Iraq killed 100 Iraqis and three U.S. soldiers, two of them here. As the fighting swept through downtown early Thursday, insurgents took up positions in buildings near a decrepit soccer stadium.

Pittard, believing the insurgents had prepared the buildings for a long fight, decided to eliminate them. Before ordering airstrikes, he called a meeting with Abdullah Jabouri, the provincial governor, and asked permission to proceed. Pittard said Jabouri told him that if he could strike the insurgents, he shouldn't worry about damaging the buildings. Within an hour, three 500-pound bombs came down.

Pittard called the collaboration a "model" for the U.S. military's relationship with the local government in the months ahead and said "conflict management" would be one of his chief concerns after the transfer of political power.

But the demise of the occupation authority has also brought financial concerns to commanders, who will be taking on civic responsibilities that were once the authority's purview. The Coalition Provisional Authority's staff members in Baqubah left on Friday, never to return.