One cold afternoon in this violent northern city, 1st Sgt. Ken Agueda strolled across an overpass with an assault rifle in one hand and two American dollars in the other.
Agueda pressed the money into the hands of a panhandler while his platoon followed him across the bridge. Drivers stared in disbelief at the exposed American soldiers, stripped of the armored vehicles that normally protect U.S. troops from the insurgents seeking to kill them.
Agueda's gesture came on a day his unit was scouting potential polling sites and buildings that could house an Iraqi battalion arriving for the elections. Members of the platoon marched down the street in loose formation, shaking hands with pedestrians, patting children on the head, waving at the startled drivers, while keeping an eye out for drive-by shooters, roadside bombs, snipers and myriad other threats that plague American troops throughout the country.
The unit, the 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment of the 25th Infantry Division, had expected to be headed back to its home base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu by now. Instead it is part of a broad spectrum of manpower and weaponry that the U.S. military has quietly poured into Mosul in advance of the Jan. 30 nationwide elections.
Added firepower
Commanders have raised U.S. troop levels here 50 percent since Jan. 1, from 8,000 to 12,000, doubling the number of battalions from three to six, according to officers involved in the buildup. The growing force includes units that range from light infantry battalions that conduct foot patrols in the heart of the city, to the first tank companies seen in Mosul in over a year. The military has also called in 4,500 additional Iraqi troops, among them a freshly minted brigade known as the Iraqi Intervention Force.
The buildup has dramatically altered the face of Iraq's third-largest city, 220 miles north of Baghdad. Mosul has been convulsed by violence since Nov. 10, when insurgents launched an offensive in an apparent response to the U.S. operations in Fallujah. In a persistent show of force, F-16 fighter jets roar across the sky each day, Apache helicopters circle menacingly above the downtown traffic and 33-ton Bradley Fighting Vehicles patrol the city's streets.
"We're in the middle of the battle of Mosul," said Brig. Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq. "This is a very strongly contested battle. The insurgents want control and we're not going to let them have it."
The buildup reflects Mosul's critical importance to the elections, according to U.S. military officers. With a population of nearly 2 million people, about two-thirds of whom are Sunni Muslims generally hostile to the American occupation, a fragile local government and an 8,000-man police force that all but disintegrated during the November attacks, Mosul will help determine whether the elections are a milestone in the Bush administration's effort to stabilize Iraq or whether that effort ultimately fails.
"There's a lot to lose here if it doesn't go well," said Capt. Patrick M. Roddy Jr., the U.S. liaison to the Iraqi provincial government.
Operation Founding Fathers
The U.S. strategy is aimed at stabilizing the city over the next two weeks, then allowing Iraqi security forces to protect polling sites on election day. The mission, dubbed Operation Founding Fathers, is complex: U.S. soldiers were still scouting potential polling places in Mosul last weekend, evaluating them as much for their vulnerability as for their convenience to Iraqi voters.
During a meeting Sunday with U.S. and Iraqi commanders, Mosul's chief of police, Ahmed Muhammed Ishelif, warned that insurgents had stolen a half-dozen blue-and-white sport-utility vehicles from the depleted Mosul police department and were reportedly planning to use them as car bombs on election day.
Although the U.S. strategy aims to assure peace on election day by routing insurgents beforehand, American officers acknowledge that the operation could instead produce violence that might threaten the election's integrity.
At the end of a simulation exercise Saturday in preparation for the elections, an officer asked Lt. Col. Dave Miller, the 1st Battalion's commander, about a scenario in which a polling site was overrun by insurgents who had either killed the Iraqi security forces or forced them to flee.
In attacking the insurgents, the officer asked, would U.S. forces also be expected to protect the ballots?
"A lot of fighting in the streets is not conducive to voting," Miller responded. Referring to the insurgents as Anti-Iraqi Forces, he added: "Killing a lot of AIF is one thing. But we have to remember whether it's going to create the kind of environment for voting."
'Better than it was yesterday'
Still, officers expressed optimism that their operation was having an effect and that voting would take place in Mosul. Asked about a Jan. 5 assessment by the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq that Ninevah, where Mosul is located, was one of four Iraqi provinces where it was still too dangerous to guarantee voter security, Ham said: "The security situation is better than it was yesterday. It's far better than it was 10 days ago, and certainly it's a world of difference than it was in the middle of November. But there's still a very capable and very dangerous enemy out there."
The military's deployment of the 1-14, a light infantry battalion known as the "Golden Dragons," illustrates how far U.S. commanders are going to ensure peaceful elections and how their decisions affect the lives of American troops.
Since its arrival last January, the battalion has operated in nearly every hot spot in Iraq. It has been sent twice to Mosul and Najaf, as well as to Tall Afar and to Samarra, where it participated in an offensive to retake the city. Soldiers joked that 1-14 stood for "one place, 14 days."
The Golden Dragons entered Iraq in open-air Humvees and literally walked into some of the most perilous corners of the war. Although some have questioned whether troops in Iraq were given adequate armor, Capt. Jim Pangelinan, the 30-year-old commander of the Dragons' Alpha Company, called the debate "laughable." He said the battalion's boots-on-the-ground approach gave soldiers more flexibility and the opportunity to interact directly with Iraqi civilians.
"You can't shake a guy's hand from a tank," said Pangelinan, a West Point graduate from Olney, Md.
'Our road home leads through Mosul'
Slogging through the frigid Iraqi winter in Kirkuk last month, members of the unit were daydreaming of their impending return to Hawaii when they received orders extending their mission by 90 days because of the elections.
Pangelinan, whose company is nicknamed "Reapers," jotted some notes and gathered his men to deliver the bad news. His task was to inform them that instead of going home to Oahu they had been ordered to a cold, restive city where, on Dec. 21, a man who was apparently dressed as an Iraqi soldier walked into a chow hall at a U.S. military base and detonated a bomb, killing 22 people.
"Our road home leads through Mosul," Pangelinan told the soldiers.
Pangelinan braced himself for the reaction. After he asked some sober questions about the mission, his men playfully attacked him, dousing him with water and then piling on top of him.
Drenched and laughing, he felt relieved. "That's when I knew it was okay," he said.
Last Saturday, 42 members of the unit gathered in a vacant lot inside Forward Operating Base Patriot and then, in a spectacle rarely seen in Iraq, marched straight out the front gate into the mean streets of Mosul.
"I'd rather be out here, surrounded by my friends, than riding around in a vehicle that can blow up," said Agueda, 36, the company's senior noncommissioned officer.
The platoon followed Agueda over the bridge, through a park, to an abandoned amusement park. There the soldiers fanned out near a roller coaster frozen in time and kiddie cars decorated with smiling faces.
"Hey there's a tracer round coming from that octopus," someone joked.
Then they walked back to their base.
"My wife told my son that I'm out saving the world," said Sgt. Ira Pula, 30, a hulking Samoan, whose son is 5. "Now he asks me, 'Are you almost finished saving the world?' I tell him, 'Yeah, I'm almost done.' ''