MUQDADIYA: When Major Mark Borowski plunged with Iraqi troops into a date palm grove notorious as an insurgent hideout, he did something a US officer would not have done a year ago — almost nothing. Borowski’s hands-off approach during the dawn sweep by hundreds of Iraqi soldiers marked the changing role of US troops as they shift the burden of fighting insurgents onto under-equipped, barely trained Iraqi troops and police.

The brigade-size raid through dusty streets and a maze of towering palm trees, irrigation ditches and thickets at Buhriz, a town about 50 km (35 miles) north of Baghdad, was judged by US officers to have been a success.

“I was pretty happy, this is a complex mission,” Borowski, a battalion operations officer in the 3rd Infantry Division, told Reuters. “You saw the terrain. It was like the land that time forgot back there.”

US aircraft and artillery were available for support. But most of the few US troops on the ground stayed close to their Humvees as Iraqi soldiers kicked down gates, searched through brush and bashed open the doors of uninhabited huts.

Buhriz is one of the stubborn insurgent redoubts in Diyala, a mixed Shia and Sunni province of 1.8 million people north of Baghdad. US forces in the province, like elsewhere in Iraq, are trying to steadily shift more of the burden of fighting insurgents to Iraqi forces.

US and Iraqi troops said challenges included having to pull soldiers out of action for even a few weeks of training, a shortage of Iraqi non-commissioned officers, fostering initiative and equipping soldiers who often lack even boots.

“Our mantra has got to be transition,” said Colonel Steven Salazar, head of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade, which oversees the western part of Diyala province.

During a later training session at the vast US base at Muqdadiya, Iraqi soldiers on a two-week course sweated under the midday sun as instructors drilled half a dozen units on putting up a quick road checkpoint.

Squad after squad jumped off a truck, uncoiled barbed wire, put up signs and posted guards, AK-47 rifles at the ready.

“This is all new for us. We can’t get it all in 14 days,” Captain Raeth Katfan, an officer with Iraq’s 204th Battalion, said of the course.

A former lieutenant in Saddam Hussein’s army, dissolved after the US invasion in 2003, Katfan said the Americans were emphasising respect for civilians and initiative by officers.

Sergeant Major Shakar Mahmood Hussein, a trainer, added: “Before you needed an order to be able to do anything. Now, the leader feels like a leader.”

Iraqi troops, many of them veterans left jobless when Saddam’s regiments were dissolved but later rehired by the new army, badly lack equipment including ammunition, body armour, helmets, weapons, uniforms and radios, soldiers say.

Several of the troops in training wore tennis shoes. None had helmets. Few had the same uniforms and equipment.

US and Iraqi officers said the shortage was due to the lack of supply from the Defence Ministry.

During the Buhriz raid, officers with the Iraqi 205th Brigade, whose performance has been praised by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, lacked GPS equipment and compasses and relied on hand-held radios.

Troops did not have bolt cutters or shovels and used discarded iron bars and rusty axes to smash open doors and gates.

Company commanders also balked at coordinating pickup of munition stashes, Borowski said.

But despite the difficulties, the raid netted a heap of munitions, including an anti-aircraft gun and an army motorcycle with sidecar that a US soldier rode down Buhriz’s main street.

Several suspects were detained. Iraqi commander Brigadier General Haad Ibrahim al-Tamimi was pleased with the result.

“With the help of the US and relying on our soldiers we have driven the criminals out of here,” he said.—Reuters