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.

Todd Bowers, an Army sergeant who served two tours in Iraq knows something about searching houses in the "triangle of death."

"In Fallujah in 2004, when we sieged the city, we literally went through every single house and every nook and cranny twice," he told ABCNEWS.com. "Urban environments are extremely high risk."

A house in a typical Iraqi city is its own small fortress, Bowers said. The walls which traditionally kept outsiders from viewing the women who lived there become for insurgents "the textbook-perfect defensive perimeter."

"We had tremendous problems with houses that had insurgents bunkered down inside," he said. "We would come through the door and there would be five guys behind sandbags with machine guns just waiting to surprise us."

Many houses have hidden rooms and soldiers have been instructed to look for hidden chambers under floor boards or behind false walls.

In one house in Fallujah, Bowers and his team removed a large safe and discovered a secret room in which insurgents had kept the bodies of two missing Iraqis they had killed.

"Urban combat is extremely violent. It requires lots of strategic planning and thinking," he said.

The military has set up checkpoints and cordoned off a large area around the towns in which the soldiers are believed to be held.

Typically, troops then close in from the furthest edges of the cordon into the center, searching houses along the way, said Gary Purssui, operations manager for Centurion Risk Assessment, a British security firm aiding coalition forces in Iraq and which, in the past, has consulted ABC News.

"The Army has a plan of action -- a crisis management plan -- to handle these sorts of situations. This is a rare case but there must be a plan in place," he said.

"One would assume by now they've dropped a curfew and a cordon. It's only going to get more difficult now. Most private firms use tracking devices and they might have had them as well," Purssui said.

A Pentagon official would not confirm that the three missing soldiers had tracking devices, but said some troops do carry global positioning devices that allow the military to hone in on their location.

Cordesman, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said despite the military's wealth of technology, finding the kidnapped soldiers will require old-fashioned intelligence work -- gathering information through interviewing and interrogating local people.

"When it comes to finding military personnel in civilian areas, it has to be done with human intelligence. We don't what know kind of intelligence the people have on the ground. The quality of intel dictates the quality of the search -- the better the intel, the better the search," he said.

A former Navy SEAL, who now works for the private security firm Blackwater, protecting American dignitaries and politicians in Iraq and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said endemic problems with intelligence gathering can slow the search and rescue of the missing men.

"Information changes by the minute. The biggest frustrations come when [intelligence] changes at the last minute and an operation has to be called off. So many people have a hand in the information that it is generally not always reliable … There is always a concern that there isn't enough intel to find people that are missing," the former SEAL said.

The soldiers could easily be dressed in local garb and moved between safehouses to conceal their identities and make knowing their locations difficult, he said.

Cordesman warned that the longer it takes to find the soldiers, the worse their chances for survival.

"People can be moved around very quickly. We don't know how large or how quickly a security perimeter was established," said Cordesman. "Normally soldiers can be counted on to be held as bargaining chips … However, some movements in Iraq are more than willing to execute people, make videos and create media attention … These people don't operate according to the rules we're used to."

The three missing soldiers were stationed in two Humvees outside of Baghdad near the Sunni town of Mahmudiyah. In the same attack which led to their capture, four other American soldiers and their Iraqi translator were killed.

The Army has not released the names of the missing and killed soldiers, or the name of the unit in which they served.

Though it has yet to prove it has the soldiers, an al Qaeda-related group, called the Islamic State of Iraq, took credit Monday for capturing the soldiers and called on the United States to end the search.

The group claims the attack was in retaliation for the alleged rape of a local teenager by American troops last year.