Mideast edition, Sunday, February 17, 2008

SALMAN PAK, Iraq — U.S. troops Friday launched a concerted move into one of the few areas south of Baghdad that the military believes still holds Sunni insurgents.

The troops, from the 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, also began their move into a new home — a still bare-bones combat outpost southeast of Salman Pak.

The outpost, known as COP Carver, will give the battalion a steady presence in the area and access to what has been troublesome countryside, including a peninsula on the Tigris River that was a former stronghold of the Iraqi Republican Guard, said Lt. Col. Jack Marr, commander of the 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment.

The battalion had received reports of al-Qaida fighters fleeing ahead of the advance and is hoping to cut off their retreat, Marr said.

“I’m tired of pushing them,” he said. “I want to contain them and destroy them.”

The reports appeared to be true as the battalion’s Company B began patrols Friday. A woman told soldiers that both her husband and sister had been kidnapped and killed by al-Qaida about two weeks ago, but that the fighters had since left.

A group of village men led soldiers to a cluster of abandoned buildings in a wheat field where they said militants had taken refuge. But as they gestured toward the palm-lined horizon, they said the fighters had fled into marshes.

The soldiers found two sleeping pads inside one of the buildings and, nearby, some “crush wire” that can be used to detonate improvised explosive devices.

The area around Salman Pak, like the city itself, has been a persistent trouble spot for the battalion, which had not established a permanent presence until now, Marr said. A battalion from the Republic of Georgia took over control of an area further north earlier in the week, allowing the U.S. battalion to push south.

By noon, Company B had returned to the construction zone at COP Carver, a bombed-out complex littered with rubble and the odd broken helmet. Three days after construction started, the COP featured a makeshift headquarters in one of the few standing buildings, several dozen living tents and wooden latrines. Hot dinners were being flown in by helicopter.

The outpost is named after Pvt. Cody Carver, 19, of Haskell, Okla., one of three soldiers killed in an Oct. 30 attack in Salman Pak and the youngest of the 10 battalion soldiers killed during the past year.

The outpost that bears his name is the second Company B has helped build. The battalion, part of the Fort Benning, Ga.-based 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, arrived in Iraq as part of the U.S. troops “surge” and is scheduled to leave in just over two months.

As the troops moved into their new home, the company’s officers assumed what have become familiar rhythms. By 2 p.m., the company commander was meeting with an assemblage of local tribal leaders to discuss contracts for work on the outpost and for security checkpoints in the area, administered under the “Sons of Iraq” program that pays local sheiks to form armed security groups.

The commander, Capt. Rich Thompson, 37, of West Palm Beach, Fla., said he had been working with sheiks in the area for about a month to set up a framework of contacts and security checkpoints.

“They’ve cleared a lot of the area already,” he said. “We can’t get support to them fast enough.”

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