The Boston Globe November 6, 2004
Assault Nears On Insurgent Stronghold
US Surrounds Fallujah, Ready For Large Strike
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff
WASHINGTON US troops walled off the Iraqi city of Fallujah yesterday and stepped up airstrikes, as Pentagon strategists entered the final stages of planning the largest battle since the invasion of Iraq, defense officials said yesterday.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan pressed President Bush to cancel the assault against the insurgent-controlled city, but US and Iraqi officials, fearing they have lost ground to the insurgency, said they are determined to strike the city in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle.
US commanders held no illusions that the long-awaited operation would end the violent insurgency that has raged for more than a year and taken the lives of thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,100 American soldiers. But after making no progress in slowing the pace of guerrilla attacks by other means, the US and its allies believe they must regain the military initiative.
"We have to demonstrate that we are determined to crush the insurgency," said a senior military officer in Washington who asked not to be identified. "We have to capture their weapons, disrupt their ability to organize, and kill the leaders among them. We have to let them know that we are going to come after them and there will be no safe haven."
Yesterday, US soldiers and Marines blocked key roads leading in and out of Fallujah as US jets pounded targets inside the city part of what military officials say are painstaking preparations, including intelligence gathering and last-minute training, for the large-scale assault that could begin sometime this weekend.
Insurgents struck back, killing one US soldier and injuring five others in a rocket attack on the city's outskirts, while clashes were reported at other checkpoints around the city and in the east and north of Fallujah, a city of 400,000 people located in Anbar Province, which has seen some of the bloodiest fighting since the war began.
The Iraqi interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, warned insurgents yesterday while attending a European Union summit in Brussels that "the window is closing" for a peaceful solution, in a message widely viewed in Baghdad and Washington as a signal that the attack may be just hours away.
However, many commanders agreed, the 10,000 US troops and their Iraqi allies poised outside the Sunni Muslim stronghold have a monumental task ahead that is likely to exact a substantial toll in US and Iraqi lives.
The military is convinced that Fallujah, with its small, crowded streets and rabbit-warren neighborhoods, has become a key supply and planning center for Sunni fighters loyal to toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.
In addition, commanders said, hundreds of Islamic extremists from outside Iraq are using the city as a base to launch attacks.
By some military estimates, at least 3,000 hard-core insurgents are dug in for a slugfest at close quarters with US and Iraqi troops that they have been preparing for for months, say US military officials, citing battlefield intelligence reports. Among them may be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist who has claimed credit for some of the deadliest suicide attacks over the past year.
As a result, Fallujah is shaping up to be the kind of fierce battle that the military purposely avoided when it bypassed many population centers during the original invasion in March of 2003, according to retired officers.
"The urban fight is perhaps the most difficult and dangerous fight to prosecute," retired General Charles Krulak, former commandant of the US Marine Corps, said yesterday. "It is the place where a guerrilla or terrorist force can negate much of the technological advantages we have. If this thing goes down and the bad guys want to resist it will be a hell of a fight."
The political stakes of retaking Fallujah are also very high. The US and its allies must crush the insurgents if they can find them in such a way that the city's residents do not suffer the brunt of the attack and become unwilling to take part in Iraqi elections planned for January.
"They have to systemically kill the enemy combatants but in a way that would minimize non-hostile deaths," said John Pike, a military specialist at GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Va. "It can't be some blind spasm of violence."
Last week, a study in The Lancet, a British medical journal, estimated that 100,000 Iraqi civilians, mostly women and children, have been killed since the war began.
Annan, who is overseeing the planned Iraqi elections, warned in a letter dated Oct. 31 to US, British, and Iraqi leaders that attacking Fallujah could spur more violence and jeopardize the voting.
Military commanders have dubbed Fallujah the "center of gravity" for the Iraq insurgency because of its location as a central axis for transporting weapons and fighters to the battlegrounds of the Sunni Triangle west and north of Baghdad. The city has been virtually off limits to US troops since April, when four American contractors were brutally murdered, their bodies burned and hung from a bridge. Insurgents based there have effectively cut off travel by road to neighboring Jordan, an economic lifeline for the country.
In May, US forces were poised to retake the city when authorities of the US-led coalition agreed to have an Iraqi police force take control instead. But the force quickly crumbled.
"We missed the opportunity and it gets harder and harder the longer we wait," said retired Army General George Joulwan, former commander of the NATO peacekeeping operation in Bosnia. "It is better late than never to impose your will."
Pike said striking at Fallujah is necessary to assert order in one of the prime recruiting spots for insurgents.
"They seem to be in a steady state of recruiting as fast as we can kill them," Pike said of the insurgents. "We have to show them we will do whatever it takes to make elections happen so they might as well get with the program."
The challenge will be preventing many of the fighters from fleeing the city to other areas where the US and Iraqi forces have little control.
"If they melt into the desert, if they did what they did before, then you will just see this battle transferred to another city and location," said Krulak.
"If they have them fully surrounded it will be a battle that will be very important to the success of our operation."
© Copyright 2004, Globe Newspaper Company
