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2 Markets, of Varying Security, Highlight Challenge for U.S. Troops in Iraq

By Thom Shanker (The New York Times)

posted on 03/10/08

As Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sits down over the coming days to prepare his formal recommendation to President Bush on future troop levels in Iraq, he will reflect on his visits to two markets.

On a trip … Admiral Mullen first walked the Airport Road market in Dora, a neighborhood of south Baghdad. What had been an area firmly in the grip of insurgent violence is now a showcase for the American strategy of clear, hold and rebuild, with calm purchased by an increase in American and Iraqi troops and by tall concrete blast walls. … But he encountered a far more fragile sense of security a day later at a market here, in the north of Iraq, the region where more than 60 percent of all attacks nationwide now occur as insurgents and terrorists have been pushed from Baghdad and the surrounding belt of villages by the troop increase.

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