Hawai'i troops venture into Kirkuk

Sgt. Ivan Hernandez of Company C, 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, shows a picture of his wife to an Iraqi policeman in Kirkuk. Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser

By William Cole
Advertiser Military Writer

KIRKUK, Iraq — The two-story stucco house with the black marble pillars out front once was a vacation retreat for "Chemical Ali," Saddam Hussein's cousin and the man believed to have ordered chemical attacks on Kurds in 1988.

Police Capt. Dashity Taleb greets Capt. Bill Venable, commander of Company C, during a tour of an Iraqi police station in Venable's sector of responsibility. Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser

Ali Hassan al-Majid, captured in August, held Baath Party bashes in a side yard where women danced on a concrete stage.

Now the house is a police station, a mural on the stage backdrop depicts Kirkuk's multiethnic population, and it just got a visit from the new law in town.

Capt. Bill Venable, 36, the commander of Company C, 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment out of Schofield Barracks, is in charge of reconstruction efforts for 300,000 of Kirkuk's nearly 1 million residents, including Iraqi police forces.

Venable also has more than a dozen schools in the southwest sector, where improvements continue, and will have a budget for small-business loans in the city that is an often conflicting mix of Kurds, Turkmen, Arabs and Assyrians.

Company squad leaders and above recently toured the city by Humvee for the first time with counterparts from the 173rd Airborne Brigade out of Italy, which has been in Kirkuk for more than 10 months and is expected to leave in about a month.

"Welcome, sir, Hawai'i is very beautiful," Iraqi interpreter Naja Kamal said to Venable at Al-Magdad police station.

"I'm really looking forward to working with the people of Kirkuk," Venable replied.

Large, complicated mission

Staff Sgt. Glen Demarcus, of Kailua, left, and Lt. Nick Workman, of Longview, Wash., check out the sights from the back of a 5-ton truck during their tour of Kirkuk. Both soldiers are with the 25th Infantry Division (Light)'s Company C, 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment.

Power lines are seemingly everywhere in Kirkuk; wires are often strung straight from generators to homes. "Everyone in Kirkuk is an electrician," said a U.S. soldier who has spent many months in the northern Iraq town. Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser

Company A, 1-21 will be working out of central Kirkuk and Company B in an eastern portion of the city from "safe houses" — residences that have been fortified with razor wire and sandbags.

Headquarters and Headquarters Company and Company C will remain based at Kirkuk Air Base. Other 25th Infantry Division (Light) forces are based west of Kirkuk, and in Tuz, Mosul and Balad.

Charlie Company's mission will be two-fold: acting as a "quick reaction force" and conducting raids on short notice, and continuing with the reconstruction of Kirkuk.

"I think we're going to be very busy over the next year," Venable said. "We have a large, complicated mission where responsibility for the success of the mission, whether conducting a raid, or coordinating efforts of a police precinct, is taken on by junior officers and NCOs."

On a Humvee tour of Kirkuk, 1st Lt. Tom Anderson with the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry, part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, said "there was basically no law when we got here."

Now there are about a half-dozen police stations, 2,200 police and 1,200 traffic cops — all trained by the Coalition Provisional Authority.

"They're pretty proficient now. They'll call us up and say they found an IED (improvised explosive device or bomb), and we'll go out and defuse it," Anderson, 23, said.

Welcomed by most

Anderson, a West Point graduate and Army Ranger, said based on media reports, "it sounds like there are bombs going off all over the place. But here, 98 percent of the people want us here."

Another 1.5 percent are neutral, and the remainder are against U.S. forces.

"Basically, the bad guys aren't going to attack you guys openly," Anderson told 1st Lt. Josh Grenard, executive officer for Charlie Company.

The recent tour through Kirkuk took soldiers past many shops and fruit and vegetable stands. But, despite the signs of commerce, decay and poverty are evident almost everywhere in the city. "I went to Thailand and there was all kinds of poverty, but I didn't see it at this level," said Charlie Company's Lt. Workman. Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser

U.S. forces return overwhelming firepower. But there are ambushes, including bombs and occasional rocket and mortar attacks.

The convoy of about five Humvees and a 5-ton truck passed shops selling ornamental iron gates; fruit and vegetable stands with tomatoes, bananas and potatoes; and signs advertising Canon office products and hotels.

The city has power up to 75 percent of the time, but no streetlights work, and busy intersections are controlled by police. Rows of concrete bleachers flanking one highway were intended to be filled with people to greet Saddam during the dictator's visits to the city.

About 5,000 Kurds displaced by Saddam as part of an "Arabization" of Kirkuk have returned and live in a concrete soccer stadium capable of seating tens of thousands. Most parts of the city, like the rest of Iraq, exhibit disrepair. A big train station near the air base sits idle, stripped bare by looters.

Lt. Nick Workman from Washington state, Charlie Company's 3rd Platoon leader, said seeing Kirkuk for the first time was an eye-opening experience.

"I was doing a comparison and contrast to what it's like in America," said Workman, 23, who was commissioned an officer in 2002 after going through the ROTC program at Marian College in Wisconsin. "I went to Thailand and there was all kinds of poverty, but I didn't see it at this level. It seems like things (in Iraq) were either destroyed or under construction."

Dashity Taleb, a 39-year-old police officer and former Kurdish Peshmerga fighter from Sulaymaniyah to the east of Kirkuk, said through the interpreter at the Al-Magdad station that conditions are improving in the city.

"He's very happy because the U.S. Army, coalition forces, helped the Iraqi people to fight the Saddam regime and his crimes, and he wants the coalition forces to stay," Kamal said. "The country is good now, (and) day by day, the conditions will be better."

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