by Bing West
“John [Abizaid] stressed to the president the need to be firm about Fallujah. At the same time, he pointed out that seizing the city would cause turmoil. He understood both points of view,” a senior aide in the White House said. “He consistently made three points—Fallujah was a difficult situation, we were going to prevail, and the morale of the troops was terrific.”
General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had arrived unexpectedly in Baghdad on the fourteenth. He would bring back to the Pentagon a fresh perspective to supplement the reports from Gen Abizaid. The Marines hoped that Myers would be properly briefed in Baghdad. The sallies by McCoy into Karma and Red Cloud into the center of the city weren’t exceptions; the insurgents were surging forward whenever they sensed an opportunity.
On the fifteenth, Gen Myers held a press conference in Baghdad. He described the attacks throughout the Sunni province of Anbar and Sadr’s revolt as “a symptom of the success that we’re having here in Iraq.”
Concerning Fallujah, he issued an anodyne warning. “We have to be prepared and prepare ourselves that there may be further military action in Fallujah,” he said. “It’s a situation where you clearly have some foreign fighters, former regime element members who—again, while the cease-fire is ongoing—are attacking our Marines.”
While not a clarion call to arms, his remarks signaled that the chairman had doubts about the negotiations. Later that day Conway and Weber met at the MEF headquarters with Ambassadors Jones and Schlicher to review the situation. Colonel Coleman, the MEF chief of staff, said the time had come to attack. Irfan Siddiq, the diplomat representing the British, responded that an attack was out of the question. He urged a negotiated solution that would provide a “dignified exit” for all parties. Ambassador Jones did not take either side. Instead he pointed out that Abizaid had briefed POTUS on the fourteenth. The president had rejected both launching a full-scale attack and continuing the status quo. Jones said the president was meeting with Prime Minister Blair on the sixteenth and was not about to tell him the Marines were in the assault as they spoke.
“I want other options,” President Bush had said. While expressing confidence in the Marines, the president asked for the development of other alternatives rather than an attack through the city. E-mails immediately flew among staffs far removed from Fallujah.
“How the fuck,” said a senior American general emerging from one televideo conference, “can they make operational decisions back in Washington?”
Conway suggested that perhaps some Iraqi generals could be pulled together to take charge of the city, though that would take two to three weeks. Jensen, the foreign service officer, said that with all due respect, that was a fantasy. Baathists, Jensen said, wouldn’t fight the insurgents, most of whose leaders were also Baathists.
Conway’s suggestion wasn’t a fantasy, though. The CIA, which in Iraq was under the operational control of the JTF, was developing a new Iraqi intelligence service headed by General Muhammad Shawany. Several days earlier two CIA operatives working at the MEF had mentioned to Conway that some former Iraqi generals recommended by Shawany could help out in Fallujah. The generals could create a military unit in Fallujah comprised of former soldiers and insurgents. Conway was intrigued. After the meeting broke up, a diplomat from the CPA followed the operatives to their small house trailer.
“You don’t flip out half-baked ideas to a three-star,” the diplomat said. He stalked off, thinking he had persuaded them to drop the idea. Instead, Conway had quietly pulled together a military team to discuss terms with the Iraqi generals. Talks with the Iraqi generals were proceeding in an MEF channel not disclosed to the civilian diplomats.
On the fifteenth, the meeting at the MEF with the ambassadors from the CPA concluded with no new plan of action. After weeks of wrangling, it appeared that if four or six senior American officials discussed Fallujah, the conclusion would be four or six nuanced positions.
When Prime Minister Tony Blair visited the White House on April 16, he was under serious pressure to persuade President Bush to call off the attack in Fallujah. Robin Cook, the former British foreign secretary, urged Blair to warn Bush about “heavy-handed tactics” in Fallujah, citing “1,000 civilians dead.” Fifty-two former senior British diplomats were signing on to an open letter accusing the Marines of applying “weapons unsuited to the task . . . the number killed in Fallujah is several hundred, including many women and children.” Dana Allin of the prestigious London-based Institute for Strategic Studies described “a sense in the British Foreign Office and the British military that the U.S. tactics have been too heavy-handed.”
British diplomats and senior officers believed in an approach to the insurgency that mixed diplomacy and contracts, playing off the various tribes while coaxing them into compliance. Blair had received a memo from his Foreign Office severely criticizing the siege of Fallujah. “We need to redouble our efforts to ensure a sensible and sensitive U.S. approach to military operations,” the memo read. “The message seems to be accepted at the highest levels but not always implemented lower down the command chain.” Concerns about Iraqi civilian casualties had rippled from Iraq across the greater Middle East to London, where many officials believed they understood Iraqi politics better than did their American cousins.
The chief of the British general staff, General Sir Michael Jackson, weighed in as well. In 1999 Jackson, then commanding British troops in Bosnia, had refused a direct order from General Wesley Clark because he believed it was strategically imprudent. Now Jackson didn’t mince words about Fallujah, either. “We must be able to fight with the Americans,” he told The Times. “That does not mean we must be able to fight as the Americans. That the British approach to post-conflict is doctrinally different to the U.S. is a fact of life.”
Yet British officers were not present in Fallujah to make firsthand judgments about the Marine tactics. Regardless of how the British military had reached its conclusions, Prime Minister Blair warned President Bush that an assault on Fallujah imperiled the solidarity of the coalition.
In their joint press conference, the president heaped praise upon UN representative Brahimi. “We’re grateful that Mr. Brahimi will soon return to Iraq,” he said, “to continue his important work.” It was Brahimi who had publicly threatened to withdraw his support if Fallujah were attacked. The president’s statement sent a strong signal that no such attack would take place.
16
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TWO-FACED SHEIKHS AND IMAMS
BY APRIL 16, HIJACKINGS AND ATTACKS ON convoys had spread across Anbar Province. As on most battlefields, the moral was to the physical as four to one. The longer the Americans temporized, the more they invited attack. Inside a semicircle extending about one hundred kilometers out from Baghdad, roving gangs in pickup trucks and dilapidated cars were randomly shooting at trailer trucks and setting up roadblocks.
The cumulative effects of the constant random attacks were serious. By mid-April, military supply convoys from Jordan and Kuwait had slowed to a trickle. Stocks of military fuel dropped as low as two days’ supply. The ordinary good fare of food at bases was cut back and in some cases replaced by MREs. Logisticians at the 1st Marine Division were concerned lest a few bridges or unguarded highway overpasses be dropped, isolating Baghdad.
Inflamed by rumor and Arab television, Sunni youths were flocking to their villages and local mosques to listen to imams who urged them to revolt. The division’s intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Mike Groen, had analyzed the enemy in a score of battles during Operation Iraqi Freedom I. He hadn’t seen anything like this uprising. “The mujahedeen are on an emotional high,” he told Mattis. “This fight isn’t controlled from the top. Instead, it’s hopping from mosque to mosque. It’s a jihad wave sweeping east.”
Colonel Dunford saw cunning behind the spontaneity. In Fallujah and Ramadi, sheikhs and former Baathists enriched under Saddam encouraged the imams to call for jihad, insisting it was the duty of eve
ry Muslim to take up arms against the infidel invaders. The American occupation had shoved from power both the Sunni clerics and the Baathist officials. Now Sunni nationalism and religious extremism had converged, resulting in calls from the mosques to kill the infidels.
The justification was a jumble of accusations and imprecations. Israel had assassinated Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the spiritual leader of the Hamas party. The ally of Israel, America, was destroying Fallujah, demolishing mosques and raping women. Stolen Iraqi oil was being shipped to America and Israel. The Governing Council in Baghdad were traitors and apostates. On and on went the sermons, the vitriol unchecked by any Iraqi official. Anbar Province was on the verge of slipping out of control.
Mattis was determined to stamp out the insurgent fires before they reached inferno stage. Baghdad was the critical center. If the highways were seized, Sunni gangs in orange and white taxis and Nissan pickup trucks would converge on the capital, making an alliance with Sadr’s Shiite militia. The stage would be set for a replay of Tehran in 1978, when mobs swelled so large they could not be fired upon and the regime fell.
To prevent that development, Mattis decided to apply such overwhelming force along the main lines of communication that no gang could move toward the capital. The exuberance at firing a few RPGs at lumbering American convoys before darting away had to be replaced by the fear of being hunted down and killed, with crushed bodies left in shattered pickups for some stranger to bury.
Mattis called on Colonel Craig Tucker to pull together most of his Regimental Combat Team 7, or RCT 7, and sweep the area south and east of Fallujah. The task Mattis had given him demanded balancing risks. With four battalions Tucker was responsible for a huge area, including a thousand kilometers of border with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria. One of Tucker’s battalions had been sent to Fallujah, and another was engaged in daily fights along the Syrian border. Tucker gambled that he could pull together his light armored reconnaissance (LAR) battalion and Battalion 2/7, move eighty kilometers south, scrub five hundred square kilometers of suburbs, and quell the attacks on convoys. This would set back security across the province, but there was no alternative.
Tucker’s force came down from the north as subtly as a bulldozer, a column of 168 LAVs, Humvees, and seven-ton trucks, with amtracs and Abrams tanks in support. As intended, Task Force Ripper presented an imposing sight as it rolled down the deserted highways: kilometer after kilometer of armored vehicles, gun barrels pointed outboard, moved and stopped in unison.
Mattis drove out from division headquarters to meet Tucker. The general traveled light, with three or four Humvees and a command LAV outfitted with six radios. The vehicles moved constantly at high speed. The LAV driver, Lance Corporal Andrew Wike, scarcely slowed down when making turns, and more than once Mattis was almost thrown out. The men enjoyed moving with Mattis. They saw the countryside, and they saw action.
They were hit three times by IEDs and fought off two ambushes, losing one Marine and having three others injured. Some on the staff believed the insurgents were targeting Mattis, who shrugged off the warnings. In an LAV he could move around, stopping wherever he wanted without covering everyone in dust from the backwash of a helicopter. Mattis never mentioned the attacks.
The meeting with Tucker was brief. “We’re getting mortared from south of the city, so start there,” Mattis said, pointing to a map. “Move decisively. Everywhere you go, act like you’re staying, like you’re going to homestead and become their new best friend, whether they like it or not. Were going to break this jihad.”
As he spoke, Mattis’s hand swept across the dozens of black grid squares on the map. Each square measured one kilometer by one kilometer and contained hundreds of houses, each surrounded by a cement wall; some were shaded by palm trees, while others were open to the blistering sun and frequent winds. At a glance, the area held more than a hundred thousand people and ten thousand houses. Tucker’s task force would clear south and east of Fallujah along the southern side of the Euphrates, relying on about nine hundred dismounted Marines to search the houses. In physical terms, it was impossible to conduct a thorough search. Instead, the intent was psychological. Rumor and emotion had fueled the jihad; Mattis was counting on emotion to spread the rumor that the Marines were everywhere in force, searching in every house for the insurgents.
Too many teenagers treated opposing the American soldiers as a game, an adrenaline rush, the thing to do after listening to the impassioned imam in the village mosque. A young man ran home, grabbed an AK, embraced a fearful mother, received a blessing from a father, and drove off in high spirits, waving his rifle in the air, promising to free Fallujah, protect Islam, and kill an infidel American. A day later at some dusty crossroad, the youth would crouch with his friends behind a house listening to the clipped voices of an approaching Marine patrol. Eyes wide, he would nod vigorously to his friends and run out in the street, AK at his waist, pulling the trigger as he ran. A Marine would raise his rifle, center the front aiming post in the rear reticule—as he had done a thousand times on a half-dozen different rifle ranges—and squeeze off a three-round burst. Mattis called it “senseless killing” and reserved his special scorn for the Sunni clerics who encouraged it.
To feel enthusiastic for martyrdom among the like-minded inside the local mosque was one thing; it was quite another to be at home with the family, isolated and alone, when the American war machine rumbled by, shaking the walls. Then young men had second thoughts about joining the resistance.
To create the largest visible impact, Col Tucker spread out his force. A dozen rifle platoons formed the nucleus of the search teams. Lieutenant Bill Vesterman of 2nd Platoon, Fox Company, Battalion 2/7, drew a six-kilometer sector on the west side of the highway leading north to Fallujah. Vesterman had quit his job in investment banking and enlisted after 9/11.
Vesterman’s sector was the same as the others—long stretches of dirt covered by dust inches thick, clusters of tan-colored brick and cement houses, each with a courtyard enclosed by a cinder block wall, most with rough-barked palm trees topped with dark branches providing shade and casting a touch of green to the monotonous ochre color of the countryside. Vesterman’s platoon hopped down from their seven-ton trucks and trotted in a skirmish line toward the nearest line of houses. As they moved forward, four LAVs slowly kept pace on the highway, the 25mm guns ready to provide covering fire.
Each of the three squads selected a house. One fire team would provide outside cover while the other two rushed into the house. Within minutes Iraqi men and boys were herded outside and forced to lie facedown, while the women and children huddled against the walls. A fire team went back into the house for a quick search, starting with the diwan, or living room—with worn rugs covering rough cement floors, scattered cushions, an overstuffed chair or two—then on to the bedrooms and closets stuffed with blankets and more cushions, and through the meager kitchen with a dripping faucet and one or two burners fueled by a small propane bottle. A desultory peek at the bathroom with its hand shower and hole in the cement completed the search. The squads were finished in minutes, emerging with AKs with plastic stocks and a few bolt-action rifles, relics from a bygone war.
“Whose are these?” a fire team leader, holding an AK, yelled at the men lying on the ground. “You have papers? Papers?”
The Iraqis looked at the dirt in front of their faces.
“Get some interpreters up here,” Vesterman said.
Two Marine sergeants from the HET, or Human Exploitation Team, joined the platoon. One sergeant, with a slender build, was of Lebanese descent and spoke Arabic; the other, a huge African American with a West African accent, spoke no Arabic. The two moved among the Iraqis, tugging up sleeves and examining the soles of feet for the telltale acid burns that form after handling explosives.
The slender sergeant asked questions in soft Arabic, while the huge sergeant roared at the startled Iraqis: “Where Ali Baba? Where Ali Baba?”
At Vesterman’s reque
st, an Iraqi interpreter named Abdul Mehlik had joined the platoon. A Shiite from Najaf, Mehlik did not hide his dislike of Sunnis from Fallujah. But he stood off to one side shaking his head as the HET team yelled at the men. At one point Mehlik told Vesterman that it was “bad” to force the Iraqi men to lie down in the dirt.
Vesterman shook his head in disagreement.
“Can’t take a chance. They stay down,” he said. “One hidden grenade and I’d lose a Marine.”
Mehlik said no more, standing aside and tagging along, attached to but not part of the platoon.
As the platoon continued up the west side of the road, the size of the houses and the palm trees increased and the fields held more cows, sheep, and donkeys. As the platoon crossed a field dotted with palm trees, they heard the sharp crack! crack! of AK bullets passing overhead. They dispersed, took cover, and bounded ahead. But the shooter was gone, hidden somewhere among the acres and acres of fields and palm groves.
A kilometer in from the highway, Vesterman’s platoon was walking through farmlands where no Americans had ever patrolled. The villagers and farmers looked at the Marines with curiosity, showing neither hostility nor friendliness. They simply stared as the Marines trudged across the open fields. Farther on the platoon searched some houses large enough to be called estates, devoid of rugs and personal items but with expensive doors, windows, and dust-laden electrical fixtures still intact. The owners had packed up and left, yet such was their aura of power that in the year since the regime had fallen, no one had dared loot the empty houses of prominent Baathists.
In late afternoon, after walking six kilometers across the fields and randomly searching between one and two hundred houses, the platoon came to a small mosque. The Marines pounded on the door, and about thirty men of all ages filed out, followed by a young imam with sandy hair and a neat beard, wearing a spotless white dishdasha. Vesterman politely asked the imam for permission to search his mosque.