A Different Street Fight in Iraq

Soon after the groundbreaking ceremony ended, a group of tribal sheiks strode up to Chiarelli. One complained that they were not formally invited to the event. "We think this means you don't respect us," Ismael Dona said.

About 10,000 neighborhood residents belong to the tribes and generally follow what the sheiks say. Chiarelli, the 54-year-old son of a butcher in Seattle who was a lifelong union member, realized immediately he was looking at what amounted to a wildcat strike before the job had even begun.

"Not at all, and this is the first of many ceremonies," Chiarelli bellowed good-naturedly about not respecting the sheiks. "How about some pictures?"

With that, the group walked over to a set of souvenir shovels and dug into the dirt for a second groundbreaking. The sheiks were appeased for the moment, but their long-term interests revolve around which tribe will secure the bulk of the 1,200 jobs on the project to lay seven miles of pipe and renovate a pump station to rid the streets of standing green slime.

"That's the next fight," Lanza said. "Who gets the work."

The people in the surrounding neighborhood, many of whom Chiarelli places among the fence-sitters, remain skeptical of the project. "Any possible improvements in basic services will help the Americans," said Ismael Saeed Abdul Rahman, a 50-year-old electrical engineer with a graduate degree, who has remained ambivalent about the occupation. "The Americans should have done it from the beginning, when they were welcomed."

Chiarelli said U.S. civilian officials have moved too slowly to free up public works money and failed to ask the Iraqis to draw up their own wish lists, as his senior officers have done and compiled in an inch-thick binder he flips through during meals.

He said he believes U.S. civilian officials focused too intently on satisfying the Iraqis who already support them -- a group he estimates at 55 percent of the population -- rather than reaching out to those who still might.

Referring to the insurgents, he said, "This is their worst nightmare -- our delivering on promises to these places." Of the fence-sitters, he added, "They don't believe me. They think this should have been done a year ago."

In seeking to minimize conflict with any Iraqi, even those among the 5 percent he says "we'll probably have to hunt down and capture or kill," Chiarelli has experimented with solutions short of war.

Last week, on the edge of the Shiite slum of Sadr City, a stronghold of an anti-occupation militia, Chiarelli's officers tried out a law enforcement technique imported from urban American: the weapons buyback.

The program, which pays Iraqis for weapons they turn in, was part of a truce arranged between Chiarelli's officers and sheiks from the neighborhood. The sheiks would rein in the militia, led by cleric Moqtada Sadr, and U.S. forces would cut down on patrols. Chiarelli's idea was to allow his soldiers back in the neighborhood to continue public works projects, but first he had to stop the shooting. The gun buyback was an incentive.

For days, men, women and children lined up outside a sports stadium on the neighborhood's dusty edge. They clutched burlap sacks filled with AK-47s, each selling for $200. Little girls held artillery rounds. A donkey cart dragged in a worn antiaircraft gun.

"If they keep this going a few more days, maybe I'd bring them a chemical weapon," said Khadar Hassan, 35 and unemployed, holding a sack full of assault rifles. "I have 35 more of these at home."

Capt. Kevin Baird, a 29-year-old from Nashville, watched the flow of weapons burn through his budget with an air of amusement and amazement. By the end of six days, he had collected 800 AK-47s and half that many rocket-propelled grenade rounds -- each one of which, he said, would likely have killed a soldier or crippled a vehicle.

"We knew everyone had an AK-47, but the tank rounds, artillery rounds, we had no idea," said Baird, surveying piles of munitions cluttering the stadium tunnels. "This is stuff they had just laying around the house. It's made a dent, maybe only a small dent, but there are now that many fewer guns that will shoot at us down the road."

The larger truce collapsed over the weekend after stepped-up attacks on U.S. soldiers, and Chiarelli's troops have been fighting intensely in the neighborhood ever since. Chiarelli said fighting continued because the sheiks could not control the fighters.

Chiarelli's intelligence officers have shown him a map of Sadr City that reinforces his belief that public services are key to defeating the insurgency. The map transposes information on unemployment, sewer capacity and electrical service with the number of guerrilla cells and attacks on U.S. troops. The areas where unemployment is highest and public services most feeble are the same areas where the insurgents are most active recruiting in mosques and schools, and attacking his soldiers.

"It's a classic insurgency -- you go to the have-nots," Chiarelli said. "This 40 percent could easily flip over to follow Moqtada. Someone else will fill the void."

Special correspondent Huda Ahmed Lazim contributed to this report.