Trench being built to protect Iraq city

KARBALA, Iraq – A now-dead plan to ring Baghdad with a trench to keep out insurgents has found new life in Karbala, a predominately Shiite Muslim city 50 miles south of the capital.

Iraqi construction crews this month will begin digging a 12-mile-long trench to the west and south of the city of 1.4 million residents to help prevent car bombs and protect two holy Shiite shrines.

U.S. and Iraqi officials shelved plans announced last year for a bigger trench to surround Baghdad. Instead, they’ve focused on conducting military operations in the provinces and raiding car-bomb shops.

The Karbala trench will create a 10-foot-deep crescent, buttressing approaches from the Sunni Muslim stronghold of Ramadi, about 70 miles northwest of Karbala, to the main highway running south to Najaf. Police towers will punctuate the trench, which will funnel traffic to checkpoints outside the city center.

Local officials think the trench will offer another layer of protection from insurgents, even though it won’t surround the city.

“Farms on the other sides of the city will prevent terrorists” from entering, said Abdul Aal al-Yasiry, the president of the Karbala Governorate Council. He added that the trench will allow the city to concentrate guards in towers and checkpoints, rather than patrolling miles of open desert.

Residents welcome any plan to make Karbala safer.

“If the trench will prevent car bombs, let them make a thousand trenches,” said Haider Abdul Razzaq, 39, who runs a hotel for pilgrims. “But I’m afraid the trench wouldn’t stop the terrorists from their plans to kill civilians if they couldn’t reach the shrines.”

On March 6, two suicide bombers killed at least 90 Shiite pilgrims in Hillah by exploding themselves in a crowd that was heading to a holy Shiite shrine in Karbala. Scores of others have died in such attacks on pilgrims.

The shrine is the burial ground of the Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad, said to have died in a battle for control of Islam in 680. The battle was one of the key historical events that led to the violent Sunni-Shiite split, which has claimed thousands of Iraqi lives over the past year.

Anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr last week called off a July 5 march to a twice-bombed shrine in Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, because the government couldn’t guarantee security along the hostile, Sunni-held main roads leading to the site.

“The trench will do something to protect the city from the car bombs that come from the neighboring cities like Ramadi,” said Maitham Hamid, 36, of Karbala. “But I’m wondering whether they can stop the car bombs that are made inside the city.”