The two sides of Fallujah: One returns to normal life, the other fights on

[thedrifter]

The two sides of Fallujah: One returns to normal life, the other fights on

By: DARRIN MORTENSON - Staff Writer

FALLUJAH, Iraq ---- On Friday, the unofficial end of a loosely enforced cease-fire, Fallujah seemed to be turning two faces toward the U.S. forces amassed along its borders.

Reports from the south indicate that life on that side of the embattled city is returning to its normal rhythms. Shops were reopening and newly trained Iraqi forces ---- all but a few of whom deserted their posts during the worst of the fighting three weeks ago ---- were returning to work and patrolling the streets.

But in the north, where some of the most intense battles have been fought and where fighters described as insurgents remain entrenched and intransigent, Fallujah is a war zone.


Marines were attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and fired on with small arms as humvees ferried supplies and troops from position to position. Mortar rounds, apparently fired by rebels, crashed into neighborhoods inside and outside the massive cordon around the town.

Marine snipers again picked out targets at will and mortarmen fired rounds into neighborhoods where the troops had received fire.

Military officials say that few, if any, in this section of the city are considered "friendly."

"The indications and the warnings are that this northwest corner is different than the rest of the city," Maj. Joseph "JR" Clearfield, the plans and operations officer for Camp Pendleton's 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, said Friday. "There is definitely something going on there that does not seem to be happening anywhere else."

Near the northwest corner ---- south of Marine positions in the neighborhoods inside Fallujah's rail line and east of Marine positions along a huge 's' turn in the Euphrates River ---- lies the Jolan: the old heart of Fallujah where officials say they believe the most die-hard insurgents are entrenched.

Some say it could be a nightmare to rout them.

The streets are cramped and irregular, cluttered with a confusing maze of brick and concrete buildings.

While military officials estimate that 200,000 of the city's 280,000 residents remain in Fallujah, the Jolan is still thought to be the most densely populated section of the city, said Col. John Toolan, commander of the 1st Marine Regiment.

Depending on whom one speaks to, and when, there are thought to be anywhere between 100 and 1,000 fighters of varying degrees of commitment to their cause moving freely and preparing elaborate defenses to stall and snare the advancing Marines.

So far in the conflict, they've used effective urban ambushes and have lured troops into traps with small groups of hit-and-run fighters. Generally described as "rebels," they have also planted bombs in buildings, alleyways and streets, some employing drums of petrol and other fuel to extend the damage.

Privately, some officials guess that most of the fighters are just locals defending their city against the attacking Americans. Most of those are expected to give up and run in the face of overwhelming American firepower, if they haven't already.

But higher up on the Marines' target list is the small core of foreign fighters and dedicated jihadists whom military sources say they would probably have to fight another day if they were allowed to escape the Americans' noose in Fallujah.

"We don't really know what's left there," Clearfield said. "We could be looking at (lots) of casualties, or we could walk right in. We just don't know, so we've got to be ready for anything."

Although the last few days have been relatively quiet for feisty Fallujah, Marines earlier in the week got a taste of what could be in store for them in Jolan.

Probing the houses and buildings just a block or two ahead (south) of their lines just before dawn Wednesday, a Marine patrol stumbled into what it estimated was a force of 30 rebels who fought with ferocity and coordination, calling in mortars and rockets from other quarters of the city.

The Marines battled for almost six hours, finally quieting the force with 500-pound bombs dropped from jet fighter-bombers.

Field commanders say insurgents can expect more of the same devastating firepower if the Marines move in for the kill. Toolan said that there is no way the rebels can prevail.

"They just want to create as much chaos as they can so the coalition forces have too many frying pans in the fire," Toolan said Friday after two Iraqi boys were wounded, apparently by shrapnel from mortar rounds fired by insurgents. "But we're not going to fall for that here."

After weeks of fighting, military officials recently gave regional and local leaders until Friday to force insurgents to turn over their heavy weapons and turn in the killers of four American security contractors whose bodies were mutilated and dragged through the streets.

But after only receiving limited cooperation and collecting mostly old and worthless weapons by Thursday, American generals from Washington to Baghdad to Fallujah worded their final warnings in the same stern words: The city had "days, not weeks" to cooperate.

U.S. military leaders in the field Friday held out little hope that a political solution could be reached to avert more bloodshed.

"It's getting extremely frustrating," said Toolan, who controls a task force of three of the five infantry battalions that now surround Fallujah.

He said the Iraqi leaders who are trying to foster cooperation in the city were "sort of in a state of despair" Friday.

"They can't seem to convince those people that it's in their best interest" to give the insurgents up, he said, adding that the insurgents are doomed if they don't surrender.

"They're not going to succeed," Toolan said. "It's only going to lead to more conflict, and I don't think anyone really wants to see that."

While the infantry officers say they have not yet received orders to attack, many spent Friday gathered around maps filling in the final details of their offensive plans.

"Nothing yet," Clearfield said Friday of his battalion's orders. "But I'm definitely still going ahead planning the offensive while we have the time. We'll have something ready."

Staff writer Darrin Mortenson and staff photographer Hayne Palmour are reporting from Iraq, where they are with Camp Pendleton Marines. Their coverage is collected at www.nctimes.com/military/iraq.

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/200...1_144_23_04.txt

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Once hostile Iraqis turn hospitable
By Ron Harris
Of the Post-Dispatch
04/22/2004

HUSAYBAH, Iraq - As Marines commemorated the lives of five of their fallen comrades Thursday, some say that they may have turned a corner in their relationship with residents of the troublesome city of Husaybah.

Marines say formerly truculent residents have begun waving and greeting them cordially, just days after some of the fiercest fighting and after Marines conducted harsh door-to-door searches of homes.

Meanwhile, Marines say that Iraqi police and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps are showing new signs of cooperation after being less than fully willing to help Marines bring order and stability to the region.

"It's a significant change in the right direction," said Capt. Dominique Neal, the new Lima Company commander. "I was surprised. I thought they'd be more fearful than anything. I think the amount of force that we displayed over the past few days definitely has changed their outlook."

Neal was recently promoted to replace Capt. Richard Gannon, the company commander who was slain along with four other Marines on Saturday during a daylong battle. Also killed were Cpl. Christopher Gibson, Lance Cpl. Ruben Valdez, Lance Cpl. Michael Smith and Lance Cpl. Gary F. VanLeuven.

Unlike Fallujah, where Marines have been locked in a standoff with Iraqi insurgents over the past few days, Marines in Husaybah have never lost control of the western city of 100,000, just 300 yards from the Syrian border.

After Saturday's fighting, in which 12 Marines were injured and scores of Iraqis were slain, Marines began a fierce, two-day search of homes in the area, usually kicking in the same doors upon which they previously would have knocked.

"One thing that I do know is that the Iraqi people respond to who they think is the strongest," said Neal, 29, of San Francisco. "They saw the velvet glove when we first came in, and then we took off the glove and showed them the iron fist."

Lima Company 1st Sgt. Daniel Calderon said that during his patrols, he noticed a different attitude from the populace.

"You could tell people were friendlier," said Calderon, of Jacksonville, Fla.

And Sgt. Wilson E. Champion, who had just come back from the most recent patrol, said he saw a similar shift in attitudes.

"The first few days, I think everybody was scared," said Champion, 23, of Jupiter, Fla. "But a lot of patrols are coming back and saying people are starting to be friendly again. Maybe it's because they know that we're not kidding."

Iraqi police were reportedly patrolling in areas in which they normally were not seen. Lima Company Staff Sgt. Matthew St. Pierre was so surprised that he stopped one police officer and asked to see his credentials.

"I couldn't believe it," said St. Pierre, of Vallejo, Calif. "Usually these guys are nowhere to be found. This guy had just graduated from our police academy. He was so proud that he ran home and got his diploma to show me."

When Marines found an unexploded roadside bomb during a patrol earlier this week, they set up a perimeter around the device, and to their surprise, members of the police and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps set up an outer perimeter to help safely guide cars and pedestrians around the site.

Meanwhile, Iraqi police continued to pick up bodies of dead Iraqi insurgents who had been killed in fighting Saturday and Sunday. Many of them had come to the area from Fallujah and Ramadi. The police chief for the region of Al Qaim, an area about the size of Bermuda, said the bodies of a large number of the Iraqis killed in the fighting were still unclaimed Thursday. Apparently, they were not from the region and did not have relatives or friends in the area, he said.

Many residents, particularly women, children and families, have been fleeing the area recently, concerned about renewed fighting.

Marines, however, said they believe they had struck a blow to the heart of the local insurgency. They said they found dozens of weapons caches and even an Iraqi woman who was hiding Iraqi fighters in her home and providing a safe house for them to store weapons.

"We found at least one terrorist there, and we found AK-47s, and Russian machine guns," Neal said. "Two houses from a mosque, we found another cache, two rocket-propelled grenade launchers and multiple rocket-propelled grenade rounds."

While Marines are pleased with the new reception, they remain wary, Calderon said.

"Every time it calms down, the Marines get a little nervous," he said, "because things have a tendency to brew up again."

Reporter Ron Harris
E-mail: ronharris6852@hotmail.com
Phone: 314-340-8214

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/ne...urn+hospitable+


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Marines Warn of Battle in Fallouja
U.S. officials say time is running out on the tenuous cease-fire. Few Iraqis have complied with the requirement to turn in their weapons.

By Tony Perry and Patrick J. McDonnell, Times Staff Writers


FALLOUJA, Iraq ? U.S. Marines encircling this volatile city west of Baghdad plan to storm into town within days if insurgents do not comply with a cease-fire agreement and relinquish their heavy arms, the top Marine general in Iraq warned Thursday.

Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said that only a paltry amount of outdated, mostly useless weaponry had been turned in since the accord was reached Monday between U.S. officials and a group of Iraqi intermediaries.

It was junk," Conway said of the pile of mostly inoperative weapons turned over to Marines at two checkpoints. "Things I wouldn't ask my Marines to begin to fire."

Military officials now question whether the Iraqi negotiators hold sufficient clout with the insurgents. Meanwhile, the Marines are growing impatient as the fighters continue to engage them in skirmishes at the edge of the city.

U.S. officials in Baghdad stressed that further delays could result in a new battle, likely to cost the lives of many insurgents, Marines and civilians. At a news briefing, authorities showed photographs of the rusted and broken grenades, dud rockets, useless guns and other weapons that had been turned in.

"We are in a mode now of days, not weeks," cautioned Dan Senor, chief spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq.

Fallouja has taken on symbolic importance here, a fact that has contributed to the lack of an easy solution. From the U.S. perspective, cracking down on insurgents and gaining control of the city is a key step toward pacifying the mostly Sunni Muslim region of central and western Iraq ? the so-called Sunni Triangle, where resistance to U.S. occupation has been the fiercest.

After a bloody month during which casualties in Iraq soared ? about 100 U.S. troops have died since March 31 ? the Bush administration is eager for a victory in Fallouja, and to ease fears about the impending hand-over of power to an interim Iraqi government.

"If Fallouja can become safe, all of Iraq can become safe," said Sheik Takee Khayre Alrane, a member of the U.S.-backed Fallouja Town Council. "If not, people will say we surrendered Fallouja to the terrorists."

For the insurgents who want to drive the U.S. out of Iraq, Fallouja has become the embodiment of their fight, a rallying cry that has drawn unknown numbers of new recruits into the guerrilla war against the U.S.-led occupation and Washington's blueprint for a Western-style democratic government in the country.

Between 1,000 and 2,000 Iraqi and foreign fighters are believed to be gathered in the city, though officials stress that the numbers are rough estimates.

As for the Iraqi public, the level of civilian casualties in the last three weeks ? and the prospect of more deaths ? has eroded support, even among moderates, for the U.S.-led effort.

The Marine offensive in Fallouja began April 5 after four U.S. civilian security contractors were slain there in March and their bodies mutilated ? an act that U.S. officials believed called for a swift and decisive response.

The negotiations aimed at breaking the deadlock do not involve the insurgents directly. U.S. authorities are talking with a group of national officials from Baghdad, Fallouja town leaders and Sunni Muslim clerics who are thought to have influence with the fighters ? an assumption questioned Thursday by Conway.

"When we entered negotiations with prominent people around the city, we had every hope that they could argue reasonably for a peaceful solution," the general told reporters. "That said, we are somewhat questioning if they represent the people of Fallouja, because it is our estimate that the people of Fallouja have not responded well to the agreement."

Iraqis on the negotiating team have countered that proof of their influence is the fact that attacks on U.S. forces fell after Sunni clerics and others became involved in the discussions.

But the cease-fire has been tenuous from the start. Much of the Marines' impatience stems from the fact that the fighters have mounted numerous rocket and mortar attacks on U.S. encampments in recent days.

On Wednesday, Marines fought a five-hour battle in the northwestern part of the city after a patrol was attacked. Three troops were wounded in the fight; at least 36 insurgents were killed and dozens more are thought to have been wounded, Marine officials said.

After encircling the city nearly three weeks ago, Marines engaged in heavy fighting with the insurgents. The U.S. established footholds in four sections of the city, but insurgents still hold sway in much of its core, a densely populated warren of streets and alleys where house-to-house fighting would be likely during a renewed battle.

Many Iraqis, including moderates, have expressed outrage at what they call the excessive number of civilian casualties in Fallouja. During the early battles, Arab-language television showed graphic images of the casualties. U.S. officials say an estimate of 600 civilian deaths is highly exaggerated.

Many Falloujans blame the Marines, not the insurgents, for the deaths of civilians, said Saadalah Mahdi, president of the Fallouja Town Council.

"The outsiders [insurgents] are a small group, but when the coalition forces fight them, innocent people ? women, children, the elderly ? are dying," said Mahdi, a lawyer and head of a human rights organization. "When families see members die, that turns them to help the terrorists."

On Thursday, the Iraqi Health Ministry said at least 219 Iraqis had died in fighting in the area of Fallouja and nearby Ramadi between April 5 and April 22. The dead included 24 women and 28 children, it said. Nearly 700 people were injured, it said.

Throughout the battle zones of western, central and south-central Iraq, the ministry said, at least 502 Iraqis died in fighting during that period, including 179 in Baghdad. Almost 2,000 were injured. The ministry figures do not differentiate between insurgents and civilians.

U.S. officials said they were unfamiliar with the methodology of the report and declined to comment further.

The Marines acknowledge that they face an uphill battle in winning over the residents of Fallouja.

"We lose the IO [information operations] battle in this city," said Col. John Toolan, commander of the 1st Marine Regiment. "We can't get our word out. They don't believe what we say."

Marine brass wanted a solution that included insurgents voluntarily relinquishing their weapons and Iraqi police and the Civil Defense Corps returning to provide security. Many of those security officers fled the city when the fighting began, and the defection was a major disappointment to U.S. officials, who see police, Defense Corps members and the new Iraqi army as the successors to U.S. troops.

"We know that the sooner we can put an Iraqi face on security, the sooner people [will] gain self-respect and put their own situation back to normal [and] the sooner we can recede off the horizon," Conway said.

In recent days, Marines have been scrambling to reassemble the police force and Civil Defense Corps in Fallouja.

About 350 officers and corps members returned to duty Tuesday and Wednesday, and several hundred waited in a lengthy line Thursday to re-register for duty and thus be restored to the payroll.

Each man was asked whether he would be willing to patrol alongside U.S. troops ? a key goal of the Marines in a city where security forces have for months resisted working in proximity to Americans, fearing retribution from opponents of the occupation. Police and corps members who said they were unwilling to work with U.S. troops were not taken back.

"That's critically important because it's going to require a level of presence of U.S. forces that they're not familiar with," Toolan said. "It's not going to be a return to the status quo."

Law enforcement authorities waiting to be interviewed by the Marines said they were eager to get back to work and arrest the thieves who were stealing from homes and businesses.

But when asked to place the blame for the fighting, they were equivocal.

"The Americans came and the planes killed people," said Nori Hamad, an Iraqi police officer in Fallouja. "We want to protect our town, but too many people are dying."

Added another police officer, Ayad Naji: "Since the Americans came, there is no water, nothing to eat, no electricity. Many children have died because of the airplanes."

Civil corpsman Adil Firah said the Marines were keeping people from fulfilling their religious obligations.

"The Americans shoot at people and we cannot attend mosque," he said. "The thieves come from outside of Fallouja. We can take care of them, without the Americans."

As part of the deal reached Monday, up to 50 families a day were to be allowed to return to the city. More than 60,000 people are believed to have fled during the initial fighting.

After the battle Wednesday, Marines suspended the returns. However, the influx is expected to resume, even though the military is concerned that fighters could sneak into the city posing as relatives of townspeople.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Perry reported from Fallouja and McDonnell from Baghdad.


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...headlines-world


Ellie


__________________

[thedrifter]

Inmates killed by fellow insurgents in mortar attack
Submitted by: I Marine Expeditionary Force
Story Identification Number: 200442313542
Story by Lance Cpl. J.C. Guibord



ABU GHURAYB, Iraq(April 20, 2004) -- Insurgents fired 18 mortar rounds into the Abu Ghurayb prison April 20, killing 14 detainees and wounding nearly 100.

While counter battery was being fired at the attacking enemy, coalition forces treated prisoners in a triage facility at the prison.

"I was inside my room when the explosion blew out the wall of my cell," said Anmar, a wounded prisoner who wouldn't give his last name because of concerns for his safety.

The rounds hit the holding areas for the Iraqi prisoners. The attack did not injure any coalition forces.

Insurgents have targeted the prison before, which houses approximately 5,000 detainees, killing and wounding several inmates on more than one occasion.

U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, Combined Joint Task Force 7 deputy commander of operations, explained the attackers might have been gunning for their countrymen to start a revolt, or to prevent them from speaking to interrogators.

"Our guys scratch their heads and say, why would they be shelling their own people, killing their own people?" Kimmitt said hours after the attack.

The Iraqi prisoners didn't know whether to feel happy their brethren were aiming at coalition forces, tired of being included in the attacks.

"I have no problem with the people who did this, they were aiming at the Americans," said Anmar, a prisoner who said he was earning his teaching degree prior to being detained. "It's fine that it happened this once, but I don't want it anymore. I would ask them to stop because they are hitting us."

One wounded prisoner, who was tied down and gagged for attempting to bite the doctors and nurses that were helping him, felt differently about the attacks.

"I don't want anymore violence," said Hameed, a 30 year-old prisoner. "I want peace. I've always wanted peace."

Hameed, a former insurgent who says he used to be a mechanic, thinks violence will swallow the streets of Iraq if coalition forces leave.

"I do not feel safe inside or outside these walls," said Anmar.

http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2...DE?opendocument


Ellie