KHAN DARI (Iraq): Iraqi children skip joyously toward the US military convoy. They smile and wave and yell “thank you” with thumbs up.

“The kids are great — until they start throwing rocks,” said Sergeant Marvin Foster, waving back on the streets of Khan Dari, some 30 km west of Baghdad. “If you don’t wave, you get a rock.”

US military commanders say they are winning friends and eliminating enemies in towns like Khan Dari in a Sunni Muslim triangle from Baghdad to the north and west.

But the troops cannot always determine whether the civilians they came to free from Saddam Hussein are friendly or hostile. A stone may suddenly come flying from an apparently genial crowd, or a rocket-propelled grenade from behind a market stall.

Khan Dari is located halfway between Baghdad and Falluja, where anti-American sentiment is fierce.

Falluja was hardly touched during the war. But on April 18, US soldiers of the 82nd Airborne fired on an unruly crowd and killed 15 protesters. Two days later they killed two more. That touched off calls for revenge, setting up a cycle of ambushes and attacks on US troops who responded with tough neighbourhood searches and detentions of suspects.

The US military blames the violence on Saddam loyalists, as well as Muslim militants and armed criminals, but admits its own initial tactics gave the wrong impression.

To regain lost ground, the Americans went to mosques to try to befriend sheiks and imams who influence their followers. But US soldiers in combat gear cannot simply drive up to a mosque and ask to speak with the sheikh. Cautiously, they took weeks to identify the 46 mosques in town by name, and contact has been established with only 30 of those. Another 79 in outlying areas are still known only by number.

“It’s going to take more time,” Watson said. For now Watson counts about 10 of those 30 mosques as firmly in the US camp, and two coded as “red” or “no-go terrain”.

Even then allegiances are uncertain, as illustrated by the case of Sheikh Laith Khalil, a young preacher who had been under “observation” because of his anti-American rhetoric. At American urging, some other sheiks agreed to talk to him, to see if he might moderate his tone.

“A week later we revisited the place, and there was a 180-degree difference. It was all ‘support the coalition, they are here to help’. The mosque was downgraded from red to amber,” Watson said. Two days later, a bomb exploded at a building next to Khalil’s mosque. The sheikh and eight other people died.Angry townspeople were quick to blame a US air strike. The Americans flatly denied any role and said someone was making a bomb inside the building. Angry protests raged for days.

The sheik’s death left unanswered whether he was coming around to the American side.

“We were never able to get a sense of the man’s character,” Watson said.

Sergeant Foster’s field artillery unit, which helped capture Baghdad, has since become a humanitarian mission.

Every day his soldiers haul 3,000 gallons of drinking water into the dusty, littered streets of Khan Dari, filling barrels and buckets of thirsty villagers.

Trained in high-intensity warfare, Foster now finds himself at the pump, trying to impose order on the chaotic queue. Little girls like to charm their way to the front. Suddenly AK-47 gunfire crackles from a rooftop.

Company commander Captain Matthew Payne leads a team through the streets looking for the gunman, but comes back empty-handed.

“Nobody will tell you who it was,” Payne said. “A couple of days ago we took an RPG round and I know everyone there knew who it was. Of course they didn’t tell us.”

The soldiers then move across town to the propane station, where cooking gas is distributed for a nominal price. Foster’s Humvee vehicle leads the convoy into an open field in front of the propane station. Forty metres (yards) behind him, a Bradley fighting vehicle triggers an anti-tank mine.

There is a powerful explosion. For several seconds a dust cloud blinds the Americans and clods of earth rain down on their convoy. Casualties are surprisingly light. The driver of the Bradley hurt his back and is taken away on a stretcher.

Later, when soldiers can laugh about driving over a mine and living to tell the tale, Specialist Leo May admits to being confused by the debris pelting the Humvee after the explosion.

“I thought they were throwing rocks,” he says.—Reuters