`Fear took over'

At one point he noticed Iraqi soldiers in their armored Humvees pulling away in panic.

"I tried to halt the Iraqi army trucks to stop the trucks to give us cover," he said. "The driver gives me this dumb look."

The U.S. military is ramping up its training program to add 30,000 Iraqi troops by mid-2007 to make up for soldiers who have abandoned their posts or died. The new recruits are also intended to supplement the small number of Iraqi troops willing to travel away from their home bases despite dangerous conditions or the possibility of being ordered to fight against members of their own sect.

Most soldiers in the 9th division, for example, are Shiites, and U.S. and Iraqi officers said they doubted the troops would obey if ordered to fight in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad such as Sadr City.

"In August, when we started Operation Together Forward to secure Baghdad, we called on a bunch of units to assist," said U.S. Army Col. Douglass S. Heckman, the commander for the 9th Division Military Transition Team. "This division was the only one that moved into the operation. The others balked."

But Friday's battle suggested that even Iraq's best trained and equipped division is far from having the ability to operate independently. Heckman said attrition and liberal leave policies meant that only 68% of the 9th division is even on duty at any given time.

Another American advisor complained that the division had only 65% of the weapons and other equipment that it had been allocated by the U.S.

"And it's not just my guys," said the advisor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "As I look across the division MiTT teams, they all tell me the same thing. Some of them have 50% of their equipment, some have 75%, but it's the same thing all over Iraq."

Despite efforts to get more financial support from the Iraqi Defense Ministry, the division stays operational only with help from the U.S. military, which provides everything from food to batteries.

Iraqi unit well regarded

Still, the division had conducted a number of successful joint U.S. and Iraqi operations north of Baghdad, officials say, and is well regarded by American commanders. The U.S. military believed the unit was ready to conduct the latest operation with minimal American ground support.

The operation was proposed by the Iraqi Defense Ministry and approved by U.S. Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq, only hours before it was carried out.