BAQOUBA, Iraq – Thick groves of soaring date palms – ideal launching pads for roadside bombs and mortars – hug a highway where insurgents have struck at American convoys and Iraqi security forces again and again.
In past conflicts, the U.S. military probably would have turned such trees into stumps. In combating communist guerrillas in Vietnam, Americans stripped away green cover like this by spraying herbicides.
But in an effort to win hearts and minds in Iraq, U.S. troops are leaving the date palms alone.
“If you went in and destroyed palm groves, you’d be doing the same thing as Saddam Hussein. We don’t want to stoop to that level,” said Capt. Michael Adams, who’s involved with the aerial spraying of date palms, but this time with pesticides.
“Losing a palm tree is like losing a member of the family to most Iraqi farmers,” said Adams, of Medford, Ore.
Dates could again become a big asset to the economy of Iraq, once ranked the world’s top producer and exporter of the fruit, which is regarded as a national symbol with deep religious and historic roots.
But the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein’s draining of vast southern marshes, U.N. sanctions and the most recent conflict have led to the industry’s decline.
Farron Ahmed Hussein, a senior official in the Ministry of Agriculture in Baghdad, said production this year was expected to hover around 600,000 tons. No accurate statistics are available for 2003, when U.S. forces invaded.
“This is rather low due to the bad security situation, the difficulties of moving from place to place and other obstacles,” Ahmed Hussein said in an interview.
But he said that with more crop dusting, fertilizer application and improvement of date palm culture, Iraq had the potential for boosting output to 1 million tons, thus regaining the world’s No. 1 spot.
Before the war, up to 580,000 families were employed in date production, said Ahmed Hussein, who heads the National Project for Propagation and Improvement of Date Palm Culture.
The strong historical and religious bonds that Iraqis have with the fruit have been exploited by U.S. troops.
“There is among trees one that is pre-eminently blessed, as is the Muslim among men: it is the date palm,” the Prophet Muhammad is recorded as saying. The tree is mentioned in the Quran about 700 times, and the earliest evidence of its cultivation 6,000 years ago was discovered in what is now Iraq.
“We don’t destroy date palms, but they’re used as bargaining chips,” said Col. Dana Pittard, whose 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division troops operate in Diyala, a largely agricultural province just north of Baghdad.
When roadside bombings intensified along a six-mile stretch of highway near this provincial capital earlier in the year, the brigade threatened a sheik. “Our souls are tied to the palms,” he reportedly pleaded, protesting he was powerless to stop the attacks.
The local leader was warned that if the bombings continued, groves along the highway would be cut down, 30-foot swaths at a time.
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