'Gated Communities' for War-Ravaged Baghdad

Hudson's unit spent weeks installing two six-foot-tall, mile-and-a-quarter-long walls along the northern, western and southern borders of southern Ghazaliyah. Another unit blocked the cross streets on the east side with waist-high Jersey barriers.

Under cover of darkness on a recent night, Hudson's soldiers placed 44 barriers at an intersection on the eastern edge of Ghazaliyah, a spot known for bombs and snipers. Tanks and Humvees provided security for the cranes and forklifts being used to build what would be the neighborhood's lone civilian checkpoint.

"They've been doing it in Florida, and the old people seem to like it," joked the platoon's leader, Sgt. 1st Class Charles Schmitt, 37, as he watched his team create the public entrance to the new gated community.

If there were ever a place that defied the tidy and tranquil image suggested by that term, it is Ghazaliyah.

Although the neighborhood used to be mixed, it was also home to many Sunni leaders of former president Saddam Hussein's army. Many fled when they were stripped of their jobs after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, but some stayed.

Their presence provided a foothold for Sunni militants, who found the area a convenient gateway to Iraq's Sunni insurgent heartland to the west. Now southern Ghazaliyah is a base for al-Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni insurgent groups, including the 1920 Revolution Brigades.

These days, dogs nose through a seemingly endless terrain of trash-filled dirt lots. Houses are riddled with bullet holes or marked with black X's, the insurgents' warnings to Shiites to leave or be killed. Businesses have shuttered, and services are intermittent. More than half the houses are abandoned.

The Delta Company of the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment -- Henley's unit -- moved into one of the deserted homes in mid-March, establishing an outpost in a villa with chandeliers and recessed lighting. When they began doing sweeps, roadside bombs exploded often. Firefights and rocket attacks occurred daily. The soldiers found piles of mutilated bodies and empty houses whose interiors were smeared with blood.

But shootouts and explosions have slowed, the soldiers said. They are no longer finding piles of corpses these days -- "just onesies and twosies," according to Sgt. 1st Class Tom Revette, 36. Tips from residents have skyrocketed, leading the troops to weapons caches and wanted men. Before setting up shop, Henley said, the unit had "no viable targets, not one. Since we've been out here, we've got a laundry list."

The outpost's leader, Capt. Darren Fowler, 30, said the raids alone will not keep terrorists out. Walls and technology might, he figures.

So Fowler plans to have soldiers at the entry point use scanners to log the fingerprints and eye patterns of every person who enters southern Ghazaliyah. That will deter insurgents while building a sort of neighborhood census, he said, something counterinsurgency experts say is an essential step in tracking population movements. It will also let soldiers compare the fingerprints of people who enter with fingerprints collected during operations.

"We can pull fingerprints off all the bad stuff they handle and run it through the database," Fowler said in an e-mail. "The soldiers' favorite show to watch is CSI. We actually get some techniques from them."