Fort Carson soldiers vulnerable while building wall

Fort Carson soldiers working on the wall in eastern Baghdad know they'll be attacked every day.

The job, now half-done, would separate the southwest quarter of Sadr City from the rest of the Shiite enclave. Soldiers in Fort Carson's 3rd Brigade Combat Team have labored day and night placing 12-foot-tall, 7-ton concrete barriers one after another along a road bisecting the neighborhood.

Great pains are taken to secure the area around the wall builders with tanks, infantry and aircraft.

That has drawn Shiite fighters like moths to a lamplight, the brigade's operations officer, Lt. Col. John Digiambattista, said in a telephone interview Tuesday from Iraq.

"The wall is visible," he said. "They know where it begins and where it ends.

"The enemy knows where to find us, and any small group that wants to engage Americans can make their way there."

The brigade has been in combat 38 straight days, including a four-hour battle last week that left 28 insurgents dead and six Americans wounded.

The wall would funnel residents through guarded checkpoints and has inflamed insurgents because it cuts them off from a prosperous portion of Sadr City.

It also denies insurgents easy spots for launching rockets into the fortified Green Zone, the seat of the Iraqi government that lies across the Tigris River.

Troops used the same tactic last year to wrest mostly Sunni neighborhoods in western Baghdad from insurgents. In neighborhoods like Ameriyah, near Baghdad's airport, people traveling into the walled city are searched for weapons by armed guards.

The wall started going up in Sadr City as Shiite militiamen launched attacks on American and Iraqi forces in response to the Iraqi government's offensive on militias in the southern city of Basra.

On Tuesday, soldiers building the wall faced sniper fire from a building, which was hit by a Hellfire missile, Digiambattista said.

The Sadr City fighting came after months of calm in eastern Baghdad and forced the Fort Carson troops to park their Humvees in exchange for heavily armored tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Troops from the 3,600-soldier brigade have moved into a series of austere combat outposts on the fringes of Sadr City, rotating back to bigger camps for showers and to recover from the stress of combat.

Digiambattista said the enemies they're fighting represent splinter groups from the militia run by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a powerful civic and spiritual leader who holds sway over the neighborhood named for his father, another Shiite imam.

The Shiite factions taking on 3rd Brigade soldiers have been relatively careful. Digiambattista said they've refrained from widespread sectarian violence in favor of aiming their attacks almost solely at American and Iraqi troops.

After driving the insurgents out of the newly walled city block by block, the Fort Carson soldiers plan on following up with programs to improve water and electrical services and reopen businesses.

The goal, Digiambattista said, is to have a secure enclave within Sadr City.

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