Needles in a Dangerous Haystack

May 16, 2007 — -- Soon after three American soldiers were captured in Iraq last week, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV promised the "American people, and particularly the families of these missing men, that we are doing everything we can to find these brave and courageous soldiers."

But in an area south of Baghdad known as the "triangle of death," where, as one former Navy SEAL put it, "none of the houses are numbered and they all look the same," how does the military actually go about finding what are essentially needles in a dangerous haystack?

Very carefully, experts tell ABCNEWS.com -- car by car, house by house, and booby-trapped hidden room by booby-trapped hidden room.

Aided by manned and drone aircraft, sniffer dogs and intelligence gleaned from interrogations, some 4,000 coalition and Iraqi troops entered their fifth day of scouring the dangerous, predominately Sunni towns south of Baghdad where the men are believed to be held by al Qaeda.

"There is no such thing as a typical search," said Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Each operation depends on very specific tactical conditions."

The Army has provided scant details of the ongoing operation for "two important reasons," said Caldwell. "First, the operations to locate our soldiers are ongoing, and we would not want to do anything that would jeopardize these efforts,and the second is we are still providing the families of our soldiers with all of the information we can."

We know, however, that U.S. and Iraqi forces are conducting house-by-house searches in the towns of Youssifiyah and Mahmudiyah, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, looking for hidden rooms and marking each searched home with a white cloth.

Checkpoints have been established around the city in which soldiers are using dogs to search cars. After searching cars entering and leaving Youssifiyah, soldiers write "searched" on the side of each vehicle they inspected.