BAGHDAD, Iraq - Just after dawn, the soldiers crawled silently over the wall surrounding the Iraqi home, knocked lightly on the front door and then shot through the locks and entered the marbled foyer with weapons drawn.
"Slow and smooth, gents, slow and smooth!" Sgt. 1st Class Richard Clinton screamed to the platoon of soldiers rushing into the house behind him. "Clear every room. And be goddamn careful about what you shoot."
In a mission called Operation White House because of the appearance of the home they were entering, troops of the 101st Airborne Division on Wednesday stormed the residence of Samir Abd Al-Aziz Al-Najim, the central Baath Party chairman for Baghdad. He has been dubbed the "Four of Clubs," after the playing card that bears his likeness in the deck of cards issued to allied forces searching for the 55 Iraqis on the military's most-wanted list.
The richly ornamented home appeared to have been recently abandoned, the packing job rushed and messy. In the living room, a large clock with a picture of Saddam Hussein on its face still kept time.
The operation, which had been planned in detail over the previous 18 hours, was not without incident. Two neighbors - a father and his teenage son carrying guns - heard the soldiers next door and rushed into the street to fend off what they apparently believed to be looters. When soldiers fired warning shots at their feet, the men returned fire and were shot by several soldiers.
Severely wounded, the father and son retreated into their home, a trail of blood behind them, women's screams and wails audible on the street. The U.S. soldiers hurried an interpreter to the house; he shouted for the men to come out, promising them medical attention. The father, clutching an arm torn to shreds by gun fire, emerged carrying a white flag, weeping and mumbling incoherently what appeared to be the few bits of English he knew: "Why?" "Saddam Hussein." "Son." "Dying." "America." "Why?"
The pair were rushed for treatment to the Baghdad International Airport, where the U.S. military has set up a surgical field hospital. Both were expected to recover.
Wednesday's early-morning raid marked another new phase of military activity in the Iraqi capital. With bombings largely over, the city occupied and gunfights in the streets less and less frequent, soldiers are turning their attention to rooting out any remaining Saddam loyalists.
Informants have begun coming forward almost daily with tips on the whereabouts of high-ranking Baath Party members and military officers, and more raids are certain to follow. But U.S. commanders are treating the raids as anything but routine, painstakingly preparing for them despite the commonly held belief that most key officials by now have melted into the Iraqi landscape, fleeing their well-appointed homes and probably the country.
"We will do this operation - and any that follow - with detailed precision," Maj. Dave Beachman, the executive officer of the 3rd Battalion of the 187th Infantry Regiment, told his soldiers just hours before they lined up outside Al-Najim's house in Wednesday's early-morning light. "Every chess piece has to be in place."
The quest for Al-Najim - No. 43 on the most-wanted list - began Tuesday when a man who identified himself as a former military officer approached U.S. soldiers with a tip. Al-Najim, the informant said, lived in a home nearby.
The informant was candid about his motive for coming forward: revenge. He said Al-Najim had turned against him years before, beaten him, stolen his car and wealth and then had him kicked out of the army. He lifted his tunic and showed the soldiers his scars.
Although the informant, who requested anonymity, wanted Al-Najim detained, he was terrified at the consequences his coming forward might have. Asked whether he would lead soldiers to the house, he balked, trembling as he spoke.
The soldiers persuaded the informant to show them Al-Najim's house, telling him they would dress him as an American soldier, complete with desert camouflage, Kevlar helmet, sand goggles and a bulletproof vest. They would drive him past Al-Najim's home in a crowded Humvee, taking a circuitous route.
After identifying Al-Najim's house - a modern, well-kept, two-story structure that filled half a city block - the battalion's top commander, Lt. Col. Lee Fetterman, began planning Wednesday's sunrise raid. Soldiers making routine patrols through the neighborhood, known as Al-Jihad, took digital photographs of the property.
The plan for the raid came together throughout the day Tuesday. The unit assigned to carry out the mission - the 2nd platoon of the battalion's Charlie Company - was picked because it had conducted similar missions last year in Afghanistan.
"You wouldn't know it by looking at them," Fetterman said, surveying the platoon's soldiers, most of whom were under the age of 22. "But they may be some of the most experienced soldiers we have for doing this kind of operation in a combat zone."
The planning continued deep into the night around a mahogany dining room table in the Mauritanian Embassy, which the 101st has been occupying in south central Baghdad. The battalion's officers discussed details as small as who should knock on the front door.
"I don't want to tell you how to do your jobs," Fetterman told his men. "But the guy who knocks on that door should be one hell of a big man."
In addition to the 30 soldiers who would enter the house, two platoons in gun-mounted vehicles would cordon off the neighborhood so no one could sneak out a back door or window and escape.
When the planning session ended and everyone went to catch a few hours of sleep before the 4 a.m. launch of the mission, Clinton, a bear of a soldier who had been chosen to knock on the door, and Sgt. 1st Class Hugh Harmon, the platoon's top sergeant, stood outside the darkened embassy and talked logistics. They planned to bring C-4 explosive in case they couldn't get the door open. They debated how tall a ladder they would need based on photographs of the house's outside wall.
Clinton mentioned that he had been practicing for the mission by kicking in doors and clearing rooms when soldiers took over the embassy earlier that afternoon. "I had to check if I still had it in me, brother," said Clinton, who hadn't kicked in a door since Afghanistan. "And let me reassure you, I do."
Fetterman, a usually relaxed commander who jokes with his soldiers and rarely loses his temper, retired for the night with a stern speech to the men who would be performing the following day's mission:
"There very likely may be women and children inside that house," he said. "I want to make sure that every guy out there knows that the cause of doing the wrong thing tomorrow is living the rest of his life knowing he shot a 4-year-old."
The convoy rolled out of the embassy just after 5 a.m.
Baghdad's streets were silent, and perhaps the only person who saw the American soldiers moving through the darkened neighborhood was a man who slept on a sidewalk under a gray wool blanket. He lifted his head to see what was happening and then curled back up as though the heavily armed vehicles in front of him were as normal a sight as the sunrise.
The affluent neighborhood where Al-Najim lived has palm trees along the sidewalks. Electronics stores, with names like Sony and Panasonic, dot Highway 10, the main thoroughfare through the area. Some homes are palatial.
The soldiers stopped a block short of the targeted home. They lined up and then moved down the street, not quite walking, not quite running. Without a pause, two soldiers propped a ladder up to the 6-foot wall. One by one, like armed ants, the men ascended the ladder and then jumped into the garden below. Clinton was already knocking on the door, and its lock had been shot through before the final man cleared the ladder.
The house was dark. The soldiers cleared it room by room; the door to each of the dozen rooms was locked, and the soldiers shot though them, filling the house with the smell of gunpowder.
Just when the soldiers on the top floor had ensured there was no one hiding in the home, gunfire sounded from downstairs, outside the back door. The clatter of automatic weapons - the teenage boy from next door was shooting an AK-47, and the soldiers responded with M-4 machine guns - bounced through the neighborhood.
"They're hit, they're hit!" a soldier yelled as the father and son disappeared back into their home. "Get a medic up here!"
When the father, an engineer who identified himself as Najam Aboud, was coaxed outside, he cared little about his injuries - the severe arm wound and another in the upper thigh. "Son, son!" he cried.
"It's OK. OK. OK," the medic told him.
The son was treated by a second medic and carried out of the house a few minutes later, blood-soaked from wounds to the feet, leg and abdomen. His mother, who rushed between husband and son, wept but remained calm. In broken English, she told Fetterman that the house they had raided belonged to a cousin of Saddam and the leader of the Baath Party. She referred to him as the city's "mayor."
"Gone," she said. "Go three days, four days."
Then, while climbing into the armored Humvee taking her husband and son away for medical treatment, she turned to Fetterman with one last piece of information. The house across the street, she said, belonged to an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service, the Iraqi equivalent of the CIA.
Within moments, the soldiers had regrouped outside the newly identified home. An interpreter spoke over a loudspeaker on a Humvee, asking the men of the house to come out, unarmed, or soldiers would come in.
A man in his mid-30s emerged immediately. He had nothing in his pockets but a wad of Iraqi money, a currency almost useless because of skyrocketing postwar inflation. In good English, he told the soldiers he had no weapons in his house except an AK-47 "for protection." But when soldiers searched his house, with the man's permission, they found about 10 weapons.
The man then said he was a gun dealer when soldiers said they were detaining him and another man at the home for questioning. His wife, mother and young son sobbed while soldiers led him from the house. The American soldiers later debated among themselves whether the man was really a party loyalist or whether he was just a wrongly accused father who happened to own some guns.
Late Wednesday afternoon, the analysis grew even murkier. As an evidence team searched Al-Najim's home, they found a photograph showing the Baath Party chairman standing with his arm around the man detained from across the street. On the wall above them was a framed picture of Saddam Hussein.
"See how complicated this all gets to unravel?" Fetterman said. "Who's a bad guy? Who's good? Who knows?"
Even as the rest of the world begins to view the war in Iraq as largely over, it is clear that it will take weeks or even months to sort through the information U.S. forces are receiving as they patrol the streets of Baghdad.
On Wednesday, in Zone 37 - the neighborhood Fetterman's battalion has been assigned to - the tips were constant. One former Iraqi general - retired, he said, since 1996 - admitted being one of the officers who held American POWs during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and told Fetterman that on April 6 the government had ordered a dusk curfew for Baghdad.
The general, who identified himself as Ibrahim Abd Al-Tilb, said the curfew had been imposed because Saddam and some of his top loyalists had secured vehicles with Red Cross markings and had used them to escape the city. Al-Tilb said he saw the group leave. Another man who identified himself as a chemical engineer who had been assigned by the government to work on a project to produce deadly sarin gas also approached soldiers, offering to lead them to the laboratory where he had worked. He said there would be evidence there to prove a thriving weapons-of-mass-destruction program in Iraq.
Yet another citizen came forward to identify top government officials, offering to lead soldiers to their homes.
Back at the Mauritanian Embassy, Fetterman, who had spent months searching for Taliban loyalists in Afghanistan and finding few, leaned back in a gold-upholstered wingback chair. Several of his soldiers stopped by to ask whether there was any word on when they might get to return home to Ft. Campbell, Ky.
"It could be a while," he said gravely. "This could take a while."
© 2003, Chicago Tribune.
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