Where is sadr city

A military statement said an explosion took place in Sadr City but gave no details. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. It was the second attack to hit Sadr City and the third to target a busy market this year in Baghdad. In April four people were killed and 20 wounded in a car bomb attack in the same neighbourhood. Up on the roof, the soldiers were frantically trying to signal their location, using smoke grenades, electronic signaling equipment, even ripping off the sleeves of their uniforms to start a fire.

Out on the streets of Sadr City, the multiple rescue teams attempting to reach the pinned down platoon came under fierce attack and incurred heavy casualties. Troy Denomy, the commander of Charlie Company, recalled.

Charlie Company passed by the alleyway, but with the antennas shot off the lead Bradley fighting vehicles, the Bradleys were unable to hear the radio calls to stop. Eventually, a tank company came up the adjoining road. Watching the tanks rolling by, SFC Swope frantically called into the radio for them to stop. The platoon leader, Lt. Aguero, in a last-ditch effort, ran down the alley waving his flashlight in the dark.

The tank company commander saw the light, and stopped, bringing the power and might needed to push back the enemy fighters and get the platoon out. In addition to Sgt. Eddie Chen, the gunner with the pinned-down platoon, seven other soldiers were killed that evening: Spc. Robert Arsiaga, Spc. Ahmed Cason, Spc. Israel Garza, Spc. Stephen Hiller, Cpl. Forest Jostes, Sgt. Michael Mitchell and Spc. Casey Sheehan. When they called him, he was adamant that he was not coming.

Then all hell broke loose—not just in Thawra District but all around Baghdad, and especially in Sadr City. They also attacked many joint security stations, ISF checkpoints, and police stations around Sadr City. The ISF, police, and Sons of Iraq manning these locations mostly collapsed or joined forces with the insurgents. By the time the Basra offensive commenced as planned on March 25, JAM forces had cleared the Iraqi Army and police from Sadr City, overrun half of the checkpoints that surrounded Sadr City, and increased their rocket attacks against the Green Zone.

The Americans defended and reinforced where they could and began to receive reports on the size and magnitude of the attacks. The mission was simple: stop the rockets and restore government control in Sadr City.

Importantly, he did not change the standing order preventing coalition ground forces from going inside of Sadr City itself.

US units would have to fight an enemy who maintained a real physical safe heaven. John Hort, which had deployed to Iraq three months earlier and was responsible for the area around Sadr City. The two main units that would conduct the majority of the fighting were the 1st Battalion, 68th Armored Regiment CAB , a combined arms battalion commanded by Lt. Dan Barnett. The combat during the uprising was fierce. Instead of insurgents fleeing when threatened with battle, they found JAM militants ready to fight, laying in hasty defenses, and attempting to mass against coalition forces.

US platoons had to call in attack helicopters for support after finding themselves trapped by large groups of enemy fighters bunkered in multi-story buildings. Soldiers in one unit had 75— JAM fighters try to overrun them as they attempted to secure buildings around a soccer field that was being used as a rocket launching site.

Luckily, Army attack helicopter teams were able to support the platoon and push the enemy back. An Iraqi National Police member provides security at a checkpoint on March 31, Credit: 1st Sgt. Adrian Cadiz. They had parked these vehicles at Camp Taji, a large US base about a forty-five—minute drive away. Prior to the start of the battle, the battalion had traveled in up-armored High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles HMMWVs , which were more appropriate to population-centric counterinsurgency operations.

Patrols were organized at the company level to best use their equipment for the situation and urban environment. For example, patrols consisted of one Bradley and two tanks or two Bradleys and one tank, with dismounted infantry in hunter-killer teams designed more for major urban fighting, rather than counterinsurgency.

Prior to the battle, CAB had made numerous changes to the normal task organization of a battalion within a heavy brigade combat team HBCT , which facilitated a quick transition to small-unit mixed armor and infantry teams.

Normally these companies trained and deployed together, but are also designed to be capable of further task organizing to any variation the mission may require. Each company was therefore reorganized into three platoons; either one armor and two mechanized infantry platoons or two armor and one mechanized infantry platoon. Some companies were further stretched to four platoons.

But what it also did was create diverse teams of infantry and armor soldiers. Thus when CAB converted back to armor and mechanized infantry teams, the command and personnel relationships were already well established. This course of action would have been a very destructive, high-risk operation. But the plan was shelved when ISF reinforcements arrived and quickly pushed into many of those locations so that at least the original checkpoints on the major routes into Sadr City were re-established.

The mission was successful at pushing JAM back into Sadr City and even allowing for the return of some civilian activity that had ceased during initial days of the battle. But enemy forces maintained their sanctuary and showed their ability to attack at times of their choosing. Many of these were theater-level assets pushed all the way down to the brigade level. Previously, these would be considered division-level and above capabilities.

Just identifying personnel to watch the different television feeds from the drones was a challenge. Even with the most advanced capabilities available, stopping the rockets still required ground maneuver to seize rocket points of origin POO. The US and ISF units conducted combined cordon-and-search operations on the neighborhoods immediately south of Sadr City that were within the maximum range of the enemy millimeter rockets, taking advantage of securing key terrain that provided observation and fields of fire over the relatively level terrain.

They occupied one of the few five-story building in the area immediately southwest of Sadr city, the Jamila neighborhood, establishing a patrol base with snipers on the roof. The building gave the snipers the ability to overwatch multiple POO sites and engage any positively identified combatants. JAM fighters could easily slip and in and out of Sadr City, attack coalition forces, and then retreat back into their sanctuary.

While coalition forces were prohibited from going inside Sadr City, they maintained an impressive capability to see inside the city and strike when necessary. Persistent observation of all open areas in the city was aided by everything from balloons equipped with modern cameras and positioned just outside the city to loitering drones.

The strike capabilities previously mentioned gave coalition forces the ability to strike any JAM forces that came into the open from their concrete sanctuaries.

Not only were the vehicles not survivable, but their width especially when fitted with RPG cages due to their vulnerability limited them to driving on the main roads, making their potential locations predictable and susceptible to ambush. The total US forces numbered around three thousand, with an additional few thousand ISF depending on the phase of the operation.

Credit: Master Sgt. Christina Bhatti. One of the first coalition responses was to use concrete barriers to seal the individual routes leading out of Sadr City to the southwest, increase patrols of these areas, conduct ambushes on known firing points, and secure key terrain by, among other things, reinforcing ISF checkpoints.

These initial efforts were troop-intensive and not fully effective in stopping the flows of fighters, weapons, and rocket launches. By this time, the areas bounded by Routes Grizzlies, Gold, Predator, and Pluto were mostly secured, but the effort was troop-intensive and JAM could still infiltrate in and launch rockets as well as plant IEDs and conduct other types of attacks.

On April 15, Operation Gold Wall was started. The desired purpose of the wall was different than that of previous walls built. Instead of protecting populations by keeping insurgents out of areas, the Gold Wall would be built to affect JAM while keeping them in Sadr City. Like medieval siege engines, the units formed each night in massive convoys consisting of a tank in the lead, flatbed trucks with concrete barriers, a civilian or military crane, Bradleys, and other vehicles.

The construction of the wall was heavily contested from the beginning. Because of these IEDs, the concrete-laying patrols had to first do a deliberate breach into the battle area.

Streets were lined with trash, each pile a possible IED hiding spot. Combat engineers started by doing route clearance, but the normal procedures required them to stop at each suspected IED location, conduct a detailed search of the area, and, if an IED was present, neutralize the bomb preferably done by attached explosive ordnance disposal teams and try to render it safe for collection so that it could be exploited for evidence. The process could take hours for a single device.

Some patrols would encounter twenty IEDs on a single street. US forces adapted with convoys developing new and faster methods. Tanks began to fire millimeter canister rounds in essence, shotgun-type rounds that, once fired, open into hundreds of tiny pieces down streets from their main guns. The canister rounds blew the trash off the streets and, in many cases, exploded IEDs lying in wait for the patrol.

If an IED was found, they would also shoot at them with millimeter cannons and 7. Once a patrol reached the site where the walls would be emplaced, the tanks, Bradleys, and infantry established overwatch positions for the crane and team of soldiers that would guide the massive concrete walls into place. Initially, JAM heavily targeted these patrols from within the city. This revealed their locations, though, and they were easily engaged.

Snipers would also shoot at the crane cable or the lone soldier that was forced to climb a ladder to unhook each concrete wall. Special operations forces snipers were extremely useful in a counter-sniper role. One instance that required a concrete-penetrating option was when a JAM sniper occupied and fortified one of the few five-story buildings north of the Gold Wall was being constructed and at a key intersection where he was able to engage the wall-building team.

But for the duration of the Battle of Sadr City, coalition forces used fewer than three mortar or artillery fire missions because of the risk of collateral damage, the prospect of injuring civilians, and the potential political ramifications both locally for the government of Iraq and internationally for political support to the coalition forces. Engineers from 3rd BCT, 4th Infantry Division use a crane in the southern portion of Sadr City to place barriers along the road to help increase security in the area on April 20, The wall construction went slowly.

At first, the wall was only constructed at night to take advantage of the American night-vision advantage. But when these forces would return to their bases after the nighttime construction operations, JAM emplaced more IEDs on the routes to the wall construction area. A decision was quickly made to transition to twenty-four—hour operations, rotating CAB and SCR every thirteen hours to give each patrol both daylight and nighttime hours. The number of concrete barriers that could be emplaced in a single shift varied greatly, depending on the enemy situation, number of tractor trailer vehicles to transport concrete from staging areas, and other factors.

A bad night might not see a single barrier emplaced; during the most productive thirteen-hour shift, were laid. The logistical planning and execution of each barrier emplacement is an impressive case study in of itself. The number of personnel, vehicles, and refined tactics to safely emplace an average of over seventy barriers in a single shift is a lesson that must be captured for any similar future operations.

A concrete holding area had to be constructed near Route Gold with a continuous flow of barriers and activity. Production at Iraqi concrete batching sites had to be increased. Each operation included a route clearance team to clear the route up to the wall; a security team for the holding area; a holding area team that included a crane, flatbed tractor trailers, and even two armored forklifts that in some cases transported walls all the way down to the wall site using already cleared routes; and a building site team the main effort responsible for IED clearing around the site and construction of the wall that included a crane, emplacement crew, and combined-arms team.

By so doing, they gave up one of the biggest advantages of being an urban fighter: remaining hidden by the city. While the decision regarding where to place the wall was based primarily on the maximum range of rockets targeting the Green Zone, one of the surprising effects the wall had on the enemy was cutting them off from their financial support.

JAM extorted residents, merchants, and customers around the market area. The group also sold its own goods and weapons in the market. Coalition forces were not fully aware of the consequent effects on JAM finances before they started constructing the wall. It also would prevent their access to the Jamila Market and the population south of the wall. As JAM members fought the wall, they continuously diminished their resources.