1st Lt. Jason Stanley, 26, the fire support officer with Company C, 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, lets Iraqi children look through the scope of his rifle as soldiers patrol the Yarmook neighborhood of Mosul on Wednesday. (Sandra Jontz / S&S)
1st Lt. Jason Stanley, 26, the fire support officer with Company C, 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, lets Iraqi children look through the scope of his rifle as soldiers patrol the Yarmook neighborhood of Mosul on Wednesday. (Sandra Jontz / S&S)
Capt. Scott Cheney, commanding officer of Company C, 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, hands out a card with phone numbers that families can call if they spot suspicious activity. (Sandra Jontz / S&S)
Capt. Jeff Vanantwerp, left, commanding officer of Company A, 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, shares lunch with a restaurant owner as they discuss getting the residents more involved in defense of the neighborhood. (Sandra Jontz / S&S)
A translator reviews documents, multiple photographs, passports and identification cards of three men detained Wednesday night during a raid in the Yarmook neighborhood of Mosul. (Sandra Jontz / S&S)
Soldiers with 3rd Platoon, Company A, 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, kneel in prayer Wednesday morning before heading out on a combat mission. (Sandra Jontz / S&S)
MOSUL, Iraq — Gain the trust of the people, and you’ve won more than half the battle.
At least that’s what soldiers in Mosul say. In an evolving quest to defeat insurgents in Iraq, soldiers must find a balance between hard fighting and soft handshakes.
“We’re out building a rapport with the population and that is turning into intelligence that we use to track down the enemy,” said Capt. Jeff Vanantwerp, commander of Company A, 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade (Stryker Brigade Combat Team).
Over a lunch of piping hot pita bread, roasted chicken, potatoes, eggplant and lamb-topped pizza, Vanantwerp, 29, sat with a restaurant owner to learn of new developments.
“All the men in your neighborhood need to make an agreement that if you ever see foreigners committing a crime, you have to go out and scare them off,” he said through a translator. “And you need to call us.”
The tall, lanky, blond-haired captain has largely gained the residents’ trust, and they sometimes quip that “on the streets, he’s a Mosuli,” the restaurateur said, laughing.
That’s not easy. The roughly 2 million Mosulis don’t take kindly to strangers.
“All the people in the neighborhood know the captain as a good guy,” the owner said. “They are comfortable to have U.S. soldiers search their houses because they know they will not tear things up and take away things.”
While making connections helps, sometimes it’s soldiers’ observations that lead them to insurgents, such as the suspicious behavior of two men driving who caught battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla’s attention Wednesday afternoon.
When soldiers stopped the car and dismounted from their Stryker vehicles, the men were reluctant to get out of the car. When they finally did, a search turned up a machine gun and 500 rounds, two Kalashnikovs with 10 magazines, three ski masks and documents. The men were detained.
“This neighborhood is what we’d like to see the rest of Mosul become,” 2nd Lt. Dave Beaudoin, 23, said of the al-Mansoor area of about 6,000 residents, whose polling place had the highest voter turnout for the Jan. 30 elections. The few bombings and small-arms fire encountered when they first arrived in October have all but stopped, he said.
A “huge success story” for the Deuce Four soldiers is the opening of Yarmook Gardens, a communal recreational area complete with soccer fields, volleyball nets and a billiards room where many of the Yarmook neighborhood children gather.
“Three months ago, if we were to walk here, they’d run and hide,” Capt. Scott Cheney, Company C commander, said as children of all ages swarmed the soldiers.
On Thursday, Cheney checked on a teenage boy jailed by Iraqi police commandos who thought he was involved with a roadside bomb nearly three weeks earlier. The teen had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, Cheney said.
The teen’s family erupted with joy when Cheney told them the teen was well and soon would be released.
The hour-and-a-half it took out of his day will pay off immeasurably, Cheney said, hoping word will spread through the neighborhood.
“You can win or lose a counterinsurgency on the support of the population,” Kurilla said.
