orig. at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62607-2003Jun15?language=printer
------------- Hunt in N. Iraq For al Qaeda Is Hit and Miss Troops Rely on Sketchy Sources
By Sharon Waxman Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, June 16, 2003; Page A18
KIRKUK, Iraq, June 15 -- The word came at 11:15 a.m. -- al Qaeda suspect in the southeast sector of the city.
At the Kirkuk air base, headquarters for the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo weighed his options.
Orders had come from Central Command to move this weekend against anyone suspected of posing a threat to U.S. forces, an operation across Iraq called Desert Scorpion. Saturday night, Caraccilo's men had picked up 13 former military and intelligence officials and members of deposed president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, detaining them at the air base.
But in northern Iraq -- particularly near the Iranian border, where an al Qaeda-linked guerrilla group called Ansar al-Islam had been based until the war -- U.S. forces are particularly concerned with tracking down suspected al Qaeda operatives. The effort has so far proved frustrating.
On Thursday, U.S. soldiers raided a home being used as a mosque in a Kirkuk neighborhood and arrested 74 people who were subsequently described by U.S. Central Command as al Qaeda sympathizers. In fact, the men, aged 18 to 60, were questioned for a couple of hours and released. "They weren't al Qaeda sympathizers," said Army Capt. Trish Cawdrey, charged with military intelligence in Kirkuk.
The men said they had gathered for a religious meeting, and the raid had turned up a single book about Osama bin Laden's life and philosophies, one commonly available in any Iraqi bookstore.
"The ideas in the book were not of a kinetic nature," Cawdrey said. "There was no linkage to al Qaeda or terrorism. Great Satan is not part of the book. . . . It's been reported incorrectly, even on the military channel."
An Army officer who declined to give his name said that in this often tense, multi-ethnic region, it is hard to know how seriously to take reports of al Qaeda activity. "When we receive information from people on the street, they know what the buzzwords are to get U.S. soldiers' attention. They know 'al Qaeda,' they know 'Saddam Fedayeen,' " the officer said.
Such complications have led officers working here to "raise the threshold for sourcing," Caraccilo said. But today, Caraccilo decided the new information seemed solid and potentially important.
A Kurdish informant working with local police said an Iraqi named Mohamed Ali Ramadan had been trying to recruit him for a cell of Ansar al-Islam and had already recruited up to 150 other Kirkuk residents. This morning the informant called to say Ramadan had shown up at a house in his neighborhood.
Caraccilo decided to move, fast. He set the operation time for 2 p.m. and predicted, "It'll be over in about five minutes."
Capt. Marty Richards huddled with two other officers to plan the raid, plotting an approach on an eight-foot-high satellite photo of Kirkuk taped to the wall of their briefing room. At 12:40 p.m. came the call: "Mount up!"
As officers quickly piled into two Humvees and an armored personnel carrier, Caraccilo jumped into a white SUV and rumbled off into the city center.
The vehicles gathered at the former Baath Party headquarters in southeastern Kirkuk, which now houses U.S. soldiers. As they set out from there, Caraccilo, now ensconced in one of the lead Humvees, called to Maj. Andrew Rohling in the back seat: "This guy's armed. I don't know what his reaction's going to be. I just want to go through the documents. We need to look for a list [of recruits]. If he's been recruiting, there's got to be a list."
Two helicopters appeared on the horizon, circling toward the house. The pilots radioed to confirm that Ramadan's car, a white Land Cruiser from the nearby city of Sulaymaniyah, was parked there. A half-dozen trucks and jeeps with about 100 soldiers in full body armor fell in behind the lead Humvees. It was 1:40 p.m.
"Scared?" Caraccilo shouted at his troops. They say he always tells them they have to be scared, to stay on their toes. Soldiers in the next jeep gave him the thumbs up: Scared. Caraccilo's driver, Spec. David Tanaka, 22, nodded. "I'm always scared," he said.
They screeched to a halt at the targeted house. A plan had been laid to blast open the front gate, but troops found it unlocked. A man stood in the garden, wondering what the noise was about. The soldiers pulled him into the alley and cuffed him with plastic bands. He turned out to be Kamil Raouf Mohamed, occupant of the house and another suspect.
The troops quickly entered the house and apprehended someone who matched Mohamed Ali Ramadan's description, a short man with a beard and one drooping eye. They cuffed him, too, and made him crouch against an outer wall.
Women and children in the home erupted in panic and hysteria. Mohamed's elderly mother ran into the alley, shrieked and lay on the ground as if in a seizure. Two soldiers carried her back into the house as she continued moaning. Five children, all of whom appeared to be younger than 6 or 7, cowered behind their mothers in the garden. A baby slept through the entire operation on a rug in a front room.
"Put all the women and children in one room!" Rohling ordered.
The soldiers had already begun to tear through the house, searching for evidence. They threw clothes on the floor, upended slats supporting a mattress.
Fahima Hamid, Mohamed's wife, was angry. "You are not Muslim. Why are you doing this to us? We didn't do anything," she hissed in Kurdish.
An Army intelligence officer, along with an Arabic-Kurdish-English translator and a Kirkuk policeman, found a handgun and an assault rifle in the oven -- neither weapon is uncommon or illegal here. Then, in a children's notebook, they found an empty pack of cigarettes with a matchbox inside. In the matchbox was a detonator for an explosive device.
The soldiers also found tiny address books and scrutinized them for clues, but no list of recruits turned up.
Capt. Mike Adamski, an intelligence officer charged with sorting out the documents, said a notebook he found in Mohamed's pocket appeared to contain listings for "a lot of political offices in Iran or near the border. Our initial assessment is this looks like a lot of Iranian phone numbers."
The suspects remained crouched in the garden and the alley, bidden not to talk. But Fahima Hamid claimed to know nothing of her husband's work or his visiting friend. "My husband was a pesh merga," she said, referring to the Kurdish fighters. "He's a day laborer."
Told that the Army believed her husband had ties to al Qaeda, she wailed: "Noooo, no. Al Qaeda is finished. Ansar al-Islam is finished too."
It was 2:45 p.m. "Rolling!" shouted Rohling. The Humvees set off with the suspects.
Caraccilo said he was satisfied; the tip panned out, two men were in custody, no one was hurt.
"If someone tells us to go out and get a couple of guys, like this, it's a success," he said. "Whether or not they turn out to be Osama bin Laden or terrorists, it's not our job to know."
He turned to Rohling in the back seat: "By the way, happy Father's Day."
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