Fallujah: Mission Accomplished

[David]

AP


Iraq's national security adviser Qassem Dawoud said Saturday the massive military operation to retake Fallujah "is accomplished" with about 1,000 insurgents killed and 200 captured.

"The Al-Fajr operation in Iraq is accomplished," he said. "What is left is evil pockets which we are dealing with now. The number of terrorists and Saddam loyalists killed has reached more than 1,000. As for the detainees, the number is 200 people." The U.S. military has said 22 of its troops have been killed in the Fallujah operation.

Dawoud added that Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Fallujah leader Abdullah al-Janabi "have escaped.''

He also said about 90 percent of Fallujah's residents evacuated the city before the Monday start of the mass ground assault.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials said they hoped an attack launched Saturday would be the final major one on Fallujah, to be followed by a house-to-house clearing operation to search for boobytraps, weapons and guerrillas hiding in the rubble.

Backed by tanks and artillery fire, U.S. troops started the attack against insurgent holdouts in southern Fallujah, hoping to finish off resistance in what had been the major guerrilla bastion of central Iraq.

In the northern city of Mosul, a car bomb exploded as a convoy of Iraqi National Guards passed by in the eastern part of the city, witnesses said. An armed uprising in sympathy with Fallujah's insurgents has left 10 Iraqi National Guards and one American soldier dead since Thursday, the U.S. military said.

In other developments:


More than 70 U.S. soldiers from Iraq were flown Saturday to a military hospital in Germany, most of them from Fallujah, officials said. The 73 new patients at the U.S. military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center pushed the number of arrivals this week to 412, most of them wounded in Fallujah, hospital spokeswoman Marie Shaw said. Bed capacity at the hospital in rural western Germany has been increased to handle the influx.


The U.S. Army has issued a field manual "intended to be a guide to counterinsurgency warfare for regular Army units, an acknowledgment that the kind of fighting under way in Iraq may become more common in the years, ahead," The New York Times reports in its Saturday editions.

All of Fallujah appeared engulfed in thick, black smoke as the attack began at midday Saturday amid the crackle of machine guns and the flashes of fire from muzzles of American tanks arrayed around the southern rim of the city. A single minaret stood out against the blackened southern skyline.

As the U.S. Army and Marines attacked inside Fallujah from the north, the Marines' 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion was blocking insurgents from fleeing.

"We are just pushing them against the anvil," said Col. Michael Formica, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade. "It's a broad attack against the entire southern front."

The U.S. Army diverted an infantry battalion from the fighting in Fallujah and sent it back to Mosul to help quell the uprising there by insurgents, U.S. military officials said Saturday.

The Army's 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment, a unit of the 25th Infantry Division, was ordered back to Mosul late Thursday after militants attacked bridges, police stations and government buildings in the city, officials said.

The battalion, which is now part of the Stryker Brigade of Task Force Olympia, was already back in the Mosul area Saturday.

Insurgents appear to be taking advantage of the thinning out of American troop strength around Fallujah, and U.S. commanders report an increase in small-scale rebel attacks northeast of the city.

Before the Saturday offensive, U.S. forces reported that mortar fire from inside Fallujah has nearly ceased while insurgent mortar attacks have been stepped up against U.S. positions and bases outside of the city.

U.S. officials estimate there are about 1,000 to 2,000 insurgents in the towns and villages in the Fallujah area who have not been trapped inside the city during the U.S.-Iraqi siege, which began Monday.

A four-vehicle convoy of the Iraqi Red Crescent set off Saturday with food, medicine and other supplies, hoping to enter Fallujah to assist the remaining civilians trapped there by the fighting.

With resistance in Fallujah waning, U.S. and Iraqi forces began moving against insurgent sympathizers among the country's hardline Sunni religious leadership, arresting at least four clerics and raiding offices of groups that spoke out against the assault.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military said four American helicopters had been hit by insurgent groundfire in two separate attacks near Fallujah, though their uninjured crews were able to return to base safely.

Two Kiowa helicopters were hit before dawn in an ambush by insurgents firing rocket-propelled grenades and machines guns when U.S. pilots flew in to investigate a body lying near a car. Two Apache attack helicopters also came under small arms fire during a patrol southeast of Fallujah late Friday.

Earlier Friday, insurgents shot down a U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter north of Baghdad, wounding three crew members, the military said. It was the third downed helicopter this week after two Marine Super Cobras succumbed to ground fire in the Fallujah operation.

Two mosques in the city were also hit late Friday after troops reported sniper fire from inside. One mosque was hit by a .50 caliber machine gun from an attack helicopter while warplanes dropped four bombs on the second, destroying its minarets.

Despite the apparent success in Fallujah, violence flared elsewhere in volatile Sunni Muslim areas, including Mosul, where attacks Thursday killed a U.S. soldier. Another soldier was killed in Baghdad as clashes erupted Friday in at least four neighborhoods of the capital. Clashes also broke out from Hawija and Tal Afar in the north to Samarra - where the police chief was fired - and Ramadi in central Iraq.

The most serious uprising occurred in Mosul, a city of about 1 million people 220 miles north of Baghdad, where insurgents targeted bridges, police stations and government buildings starting Thursday.

On Saturday, a car bomb detonated as a seven-vehicle convoy of Iraqi National Guards passed by the main road in the eastern Nour district of Mosul, eyewitnesses said. One vehicle was damaged but it was not immediately known if there were any casualties.

Iraqi authorities requested reinforcements into the city after police abandoned their posts. On Saturday, Iraqi National Guardsmen, many of them ethnic Kurds, were seen patrolling parts of the city, while insurgents were seen elsewhere.

U.S. and Iraqi forces launched their massive ground assault against Fallujah late Monday after the city's hardline clerical leadership refused to hand over extremists, including al-Zarqawi.

The clerics insisted al-Zarqawi was not there, and U.S. officials have confirmed the arrest of only about 14 suspected foreign fighters. U.S. and Iraqi officials wanted to restore control of Fallujah and other Sunni militant strongholds before national elections in January.