Embedded With U.S. Troops in Ramadi

Friday March 24, 2006 9:01 PM
By The Associated Press

AP West Africa Bureau Chief Todd Pitman is in Iraq to embed with U.S. troops in Ramadi.

FRIDAY, March 24, 2 p.m. local

We were picked up Thursday at Baghdad International Airport by our security guards, who inform us there have been a couple ``incidents'' - brief gunfights - that afternoon on the main road we were to travel on to town. Snipers have been firing on the convoys of private security contractors, they say.

It's nothing new. One guy was shot in the neck recently but it's unclear how. Was his window open? Was he standing out of the vehicle in some kind of turret? You try not to envisage these things, but they stick in your mind as you pass all the two and three story villas set a small ways from the roadsides and wonder if somebody is in one of them looking for targets.

We are given flak jackets, and I put on one, then cover it with my black jacket because I don't want to stand out any more than I already do.

We get in our bulletproof vehicle and head onto the highway into the city. As always, it looks absolutely normal, almost. There are thousands of Iraqi civilian vehicles on the streets. Coming the other direction is a line of U.S. military Humvees. U.S. Bradley fighting vehicles are pulling guard duty in a median in the road. It's a quiet drive, and I'm grateful.

I haven't been to the Palestine Hotel, where AP's Baghdad offices are located, in a year. After a suicide bomber rammed through the high blast walls surrounding the hotel complex a few months ago, the place is still a wreck. The hotel itself is completely intact, but wires hang down from the broken walls overhead in the lobby. Plastic sheets hang over shattered windows. Twisted metal and rubble are piled up outside. A lightpost is bent over an angle, probably damaged by the blast.

Journalists and translators already here tell me there are a couple running gunbattles going on in Baghdad. From where we sit though, it's quiet, except for the noise of traffic outside. Soon that will stop, too: there is an 8 p.m. curfew these days.

I go to the window in my hotel room to look out at the beautiful blue-domed mosque on the other side of a roundabout. A couple gunshots ring out in the distance and police in four-wheel drives speed by.

In 2004, the U.S. army cleared a swathe of the bank along the Tigris River which we can see from the hotel balcony. Technically, it was a good idea, but it seemed odd at the time - mortar rounds were landing daily in the park and across the river in the Green Zone. Who would want to picnic there? They cleared it flat, though it is still interspersed with trees, and built curving sidewalks. Today, it appears to be abandoned, desolate. There is a lot of very tall grass you could get lost in.

I see one of the Iraqi reporters here, a good friend, and ask him how things are going. ``It's getting worse not by the day, but by the hour,'' he says, laughing a little bit. The head of AP television here starts ticking off several neighborhoods he says are too dangerous these days even for his brave Iraqi cameramen to go. More than 50 Iraqis have been killed in scattered violence yesterday, the day I arrived.

Today in Baghdad alone, nearly 20 are dead in drive-by shootings, roadside bombings and sectarian violence. Nearly everybody here has a tragic story to tell, of friends and family being killed or kidnapped, of staying in the hotel with us for fear of their own lives. Many have fled to nearby countries.

The reporter - I don't want to name him - hides what he does from people in his neighborhood, who think he is a businessman. He cannot say he's working with Americans - even if it is a news agency.

I've come to Iraq to embed with U.S. troops stationed in Ramadi, and Baghdad is a stopover. I'm hoping to get on a military helicopter flight there tonight.

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