TAJI, Iraq — Thursday night found the soldiers of Troop A, 2nd Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment on yet another patrol along dark roads just outside Taji. The soldiers stopped and searched three trucks on the road after the area’s 10 p.m. curfew and then did what cavalry scouts do best: Watch and wait for the enemy to appear.

The patrols are indeed a crucial part of the battle against roadside bombs that claimed more American casualties in the area just last week. But this is an engineer’s war as much as a foot soldier’s, and squadron leaders are turning to bulldozers and road graders as much as to the scout tactics they’ve spent so much time perfecting.

The roads just north of the Baghdad gates have historically seen many roadside bombs, said Troop A’s commander, Capt. Matthew Clark. Americans had success when Iraqis fed up with deaths in their community began helping the Americans fight roadside bombs. But on many of these roads, insurgents can slip in unseen through empty fields and hide their bombs in one of the numerous piles of trash that litter the area.

“We believe they’re so good it only takes a few minutes for them to pull over to the side of the road, get out, drop it and go,” he said.

Where insurgents once spent vulnerable minutes burying bombs in holes, they now just drop off pre-made EFPs, or explosively formed penetrators — a particularly vicious form of roadside bomb that shoots a piece of molten metal deadly enough to kill soldiers in the heaviest tank.

That’s where engineering comes in. Soldiers rework the roads to make it harder to plant a roadside bomb and easier to see those that are planted. The result is a deadly game of spy versus spy:

Insurgents placed a bomb in a niche between dirt-filled baskets used to fortify buildings. So the Americans erected large cement walls that don’t have any gaps where someone can plant a bomb.

Soldiers cut down trees along the side of the road after attackers planted bombs in them and used the trees to hide from Iraqi checkpoints. “As you take down trees, it makes the environment less beautiful,” Clark conceded. “However, it saves lives.”

The day after Thursday’s patrol, crews were out bulldozing debris from the road where last week’s deadly bomb exploded.

“The intent I was given is to get this to look like a pool table,” said Capt. Joseph Byrnes, a 66th Engineering Company officer who was supervising the work. “If we have a completely flat surface, then they can’t emplace and conceal a block that we know is an EFP.”

But the attackers can be just as dynamic as the Americans. In the first 2½ months that Troop A controlled this road, nearly all the bombs exploded north of where an Iraqi checkpoint now sits. Once that was built, the attacks moved south of the checkpoint. The response? Build another checkpoint to control that area.

Those checkpoints also need American supervision to ensure that Iraqi army soldiers are inspecting suspicious vehicles. One of the semis that the Americans stopped Thursday night had been parked within sight of a checkpoint. The driver was clean, but the Americans sternly told the two soldiers watching the road from a tank that they should have checked out the truck themselves.

Still, the Americans have seen improvement since they began their work. Clark estimates that the roads in his area had two to three bombs a week when his unit got here. February, though, had just two bombs all month, and March had the same number as of Friday.

“It’s a lot of slow, patient, persistent work that pays off,” he said.

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