Street Patrol in Suma

near Convoy Support Center Scania, Iraq

120 miles south of Baghdad

November 9, 2005

with Charlie Co, 142nd Infantry, Texas National Guard

Soldiers stand in the center of the town of Suma.  They are about 100 yards down the road from the police station.  Beyond the police station is the market they have just driven through.  In the road facing the opposite direction sits a long line of beat up old cars waiting for gas.  The nationwide shortage of gas touches this part of the country as well. In many places people can buy gas without a wait from local fix-it men.  But, depending on who you ask, the fix-it men here were kicked out by the local sheikh, who has an interest in the gas station, or there just isn't any gas.  It�s hard to say.

The soldiers come through here about once a day.  They patrol this whole area regularly.  Its about 12 miles soth of the main base in the area, called Scania, a place where convoys plying the main supply route between Baghdad 110 miles to the north and Kuwait south 225 miles to the south can pull over, refuel and then keep going.  Keeping the area around the main supply route quiet is key to supplying the rest of the US forces in Iraq, so these three humvees in the main street in Suma is, tangentially, helping the guys fighting insurgents in Ramadi, Fallujah, Samarra, Baqqubah or one of the other hot spots that make the news each night.

Here the soldiers seem to be pretty well known and even trusted.  They are actually paying $103,000 to refurbish the school on this street.  In Iraq, with an average annual income of $3,600, the US could probably buy the whole building for less than that, but the US is not in the school-owning business.  So it fixes the windows, paints the walls and cleans up instead.

In some parts of this area soldiers receive blank looks and hostile stares. In this town that's not the case.  There are occasional waves.  Kids come up to a soldier standing beside a humvee and take handouts of candy. This is business as usual in this town, in this part of Iraq.

Suddenly shots ring out to the west, over on the other side of town.  Two, three or four, no one is absolutely sure.  A patrol goes a few blocks into town to take a look but they come back with no further information.  That's common here.  So are the gunshots.  Every Iraqi male is allowed to keep an AK-47 assault rifle in his home, but is not allowed to take it outside.  With everyone owning a gun, and the Iraqis notorious for lighting up for just about any reason, shots happen... a lot.  It�s hardly worth bothering about, and the soldiers hardly bother.

Ten minutes later the soldiers are mounted up and driving off.  Everything here is quiet.  The local Shiite sheikh is pro-American, and like most everyone else in this area, he is not keen on the insurgency getting a hold here.  This is the ideal way to wage a counter-insurgency war - to have a situation where hardly any of the locals is excited about fighting, where very few care to support insurgency or let it get established.  This ideal situation is not so easy to develop, but these soldiers from Texas are surely benefiting from its existence in this town.