Baghdad in 2007 and the Surge

Why were two helicopters circling a residential district at mid-morning on a Thursday? The answer is in the eighteen months before, and in what the American army had just decided to do about Baghdad.

The city before the surge

By 2006 Baghdad was in the middle of a sectarian war. Bombings in markets, death squads operating at night, bodies found in the morning, and whole neighbourhoods emptying as families fled to areas where their own community was the majority.

How American units were operating

American forces were largely operating from large fortified bases, driving out to patrol and driving back. The practical effect was that they were visible, vulnerable on the roads, and absent from the streets at the times when most of the killing happened.

What the surge actually changed

Announced in January 2007, it sent roughly twenty thousand additional troops, most of them into Baghdad. The number is the part people remember and the smaller part of the change.

The reasoning was that you cannot protect a population you visit. The cost was accepted openly: more soldiers in more places meant more soldiers being shot at.

The part people forget about the surge

The extra troops are the number everyone remembers and the smaller half of the change. The method changed too: hold ground from outposts inside neighbourhoods rather than patrol from large bases. More soldiers, in more places, deliberately more exposed.

What it meant in a district like this one

An infantry company living in or near the neighbourhood it was responsible for, patrolling on foot, taking small-arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire on a regular basis, and losing people.

What it meant for air support

The unit at the centre of this story was having exactly that year. In the days before 12 July there had been repeated contact in the area and the company had taken casualties.

The consequence for air support is direct. Helicopters overhead were responding to units in contact, arriving with a picture already shaped by what the ground was reporting, and looking for armed men in a district where armed men had been shooting all week.

The numbers that year

Exact figures vary by source and by what is being counted. Why the counts differ is worth understanding before quoting any of them.

Fighting a war inside a city that is still running

One detail of 2007 is easy to miss from a distance. Baghdad was not evacuated. Several million people were living there, going to work, taking children to school, opening shops, all the way through the worst of it.

Where the consequences landed

That produces a specific military problem with no clean solution. A patrol moving through a market has civilians in every direction. An aircraft supporting that patrol is looking at a street where an armed fighter and a man carrying a length of pipe occupy the same few pixels. Every rule about distinguishing civilians from combatants was written for exactly this and is hardest to apply exactly here.

It also means the consequences of any error land immediately on people who had nothing to do with it. In open country a mistaken burst of fire hits the people it was aimed at. On a residential street at half past ten in the morning it reaches whoever is walking past.

Did it work?

Violence did fall from late 2007, substantially. The disagreement is about why, and there are at least three candidate explanations that all have evidence behind them.

• The surge itself: more troops, holding ground, protecting populations.
• The Sunni Awakening: tribal groups in Anbar and elsewhere turning against the insurgency, which began before the surge.
• Sectarian cleansing completing: by 2008 many mixed neighbourhoods had separated, leaving fewer people to kill and fewer front lines.

Most serious accounts credit some combination. The third explanation is the least comfortable and the hardest to dismiss.

Why Baghdad in 2007 matters without excusing anything

Nothing on this page makes the deaths of 12 July 2007 more acceptable. A frightened unit and a violent month do not change what the law required of a crew before firing, and they say nothing at all about the decision to fire on a van collecting a wounded man.

What the setting does explain is how the day was possible. A strategy that put infantry into a dense neighbourhood during the worst year of a sectarian war, supported from the air by crews watching through a narrow grey sight, produces a high volume of split-second identifications made under pressure by people who have been shot at all month. Most of them are never recorded. This one was, which is the only unusual thing about it. The morning itself is here.