Over 60 Days, Troops Suppressed an Uprising

But Success in South Left Murky Outcome

NAJAF, Iraq -- After a year in Iraq, Lt. Jon Silk and the rest of the Army's 1st Armored Division had tickets home. But before dawn on April 5, he and his platoon rumbled toward this southern city of shrines and cemeteries, headed into war.

Over the next 60 days, more than 5,000 troops from the division engaged in the most sustained urban combat operation of the now 15-month occupation. In desert cities that once welcomed American troops, they battled a Shiite uprising that threatened to upset the June 30 transition to an Iraqi interim government. Their orders were stark: Smash the uprising, and capture or kill its leader, the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr.

Silk soon found himself in a swirl of continuous combat, the kind of close fighting that the military had expected, but mostly avoided, during the 2003 invasion. Pinned down while pushing across a narrow bridge to retake the city of Kut, he watched four soldiers in his 15-man platoon fall wounded. "It was insane the amount of fire we were taking," he said later.

By the time the uprising was over, silenced in a cease-fire June 4, the U.S. military success appeared decisive. While 19 U.S. soldiers had been killed in combat and scores wounded, military officials estimate that 1,500 insurgents were killed. Sadr's militiamen had been driven from positions many had died defending.

But like much of the occupation, the battle for the Shiite holy cities yielded a more ambiguous political outcome. Sadr remains at large; U.S.-sponsored polls show him to be one of Iraq's most popular figures. Hundreds of his militiamen escaped, perhaps to fight another day.

The mixed messages echo in the experiences of soldiers from the 1st AD, as the division is known, who next month will leave an Iraq more violent than it was when they arrived 15 months ago. The battles revealed lessons about their enemy and themselves, and about the unpredictable winds of history in Iraq.

"This was what we expected when we first got here, not at the end," said Sgt. Jacob Garcia, 34, of Corpus Christi, Tex. "The fighting should have gone from heavy to light."

This is an account of the 60-day campaign as it was seen by dozens of the soldiers who fought in key battles from April 8 through June 4 and by the commanders who guided them. It is also drawn from a tour of the area. Many of the battles took place in four cities -- Kut, Karbala, Najaf and Kufa. The soldiers were led by four lieutenant colonels, all in their early forties, each seasoned by a year in the country.

The uprising began April 4, when U.S. troops in an east Baghdad slum moved to disarm members of Sadr's militia, known as the Mahdi Army, who were protecting the young cleric from arrest for allegedly sponsoring the killing of another Shiite leader. A 10-hour gun battle ensued that killed nine U.S. soldiers and wounded 51 others.

The uprising quickly spread south. Although a third of the 1st AD's 38,000 troops and much of its equipment had been packed up for a scheduled rotation back to Germany, those orders were canceled.

Within hours, elements of the division's 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment and 2nd Brigade were rolling south toward Kut, where Sadr militiamen had driven off Ukrainian troops and seized the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA.

The Bridge, Kut: April 8-11

Capt. Mike Wall's Bravo Company rolled into Kut near midday on April 8 and confronted a daunting landscape for a tank commander. The Tigris River slices the city in half. On the other bank sat the seized CPA compound. But it looked doubtful whether the narrow bridges knitting the two sides together could support a 70-ton M1 Abrams tank.

That evening, Lt. Col. T.C. Williams, the 42-year-old battalion commander from Potomac, Md., devised a plan for Wall's company. The tanks would roll 20 miles north to a secure Tigris crossing, then hook south toward the CPA headquarters in darkness. The ploy worked: Caught off guard by the 45-mile looping attack, Sadr's men abandoned the building with little resistance.

To retake all of Kut, however, U.S. forces needed to control another bridge a quarter-mile south of the CPA compound, and then join up with Wall's company. The 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment's "Killer Troop" led by Capt. Jon Dunn pushed across the span after midnight on Good Friday.

Sgt. Luis Savina, 29, was in the lead platoon as it crossed the bridge into a traffic circle overlooked by an Iraqi police station. The police had fled or joined the insurgents, and as the soldiers arrived, rocket-propelled grenades from the militia hammered their unarmored Humvees. Insurgents trained floodlights on his soldiers from the police station, washing out their night-vision goggles. The Americans shot out the lights. New ones came on.