by Jim Mattis
“I’m not,” I replied. “I bought a little piece of property on the Euphrates. I’m going to marry one of your daughters and retire there.”
Reporters came in from Baghdad, so my words would sometimes make news. Language is a weapon. In formal circumstances, I’m calculating but I speak pointedly. There’s nothing to be gained by speaking obliquely about important matters. Brought up in the American West, I don’t hide behind euphemisms. As the negotiations turned into a kabuki dance, I warned my interlocutors:
“I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.”
The sheiks did not act on my warning. They were allowing their sons to be recruited by the insurgents while they were talking to me—unwittingly abrogating their own authority.
Every day, our position was becoming increasingly untenable. Ramadi, the provincial capital, saw frequent fighting; we had to protect the governor, who was under siege in his own office. Convoys from Kuwait coming through my southern sector were ambushed regularly, and supplies were running low in Baghdad. I heard talk about evacuating the diplomatic quarter known as the Green Zone.
In my nightly conversations with Jim Conway, we suppressed our frustrations and dealt with the situation. We had few options. I had to maneuver and reposition those of my troops least engaged against the enemy to the most dangerous locations. But there was no denying the increased danger for the Iraqi population we left unprotected. Whenever a member of Congress, a Washington staffer, or any other visitor from the States or Baghdad paid a courtesy call or asked for a briefing, I made the same point: I can’t win on the defense, and I can’t prevail while chained in place. So release my Marines to swiftly finish Fallujah. And then I can redistribute them across the zone.
The military staffs in Baghdad were as frustrated as I was with the fruitless negotiations and sensed that we would be allowed to continue the attack. I was verbally told by the higher military staffs to be prepared, and that I would soon be unleashed. So, on April 23, I again told John Toolan to prepare to resume the offensive. The next day, he called his assault battalion commanders into the briefing room in his ops center, one mile outside Fallujah. The assault plan was straightforward: Battalions would attack from the north, south, and east and drive toward the Euphrates River, where an Army battalion was waiting. In classic hammer-and-anvil fashion, we would smash the Islamist force, killing it physically and destroying its psychological appeal. No way out.
But then policy disarray reared its head. I had to call John out of his briefing to give him the bad news.
General Sanchez had just called Jim Conway. We were not to resume the attack.
“Our orders changed,” Conway later explained to the press.
“Orders from higher, like Washington?” a New York Times reporter asked.
“I don’t ask those questions,” Conway said. “We were probably going to mount up and those [orders] simply changed and that’s not uncommon.”
The impact of such incoherence at the theater and national command levels cannot be overstated. Dizzying is the appropriate word. My division was given orders about what not to do—Do not attack—but we weren’t given any orders about what to do.
It was Groundhog Day. In continued urban fighting, over the next few days, my division lost eighteen killed and wounded.
Conway had had enough. Through the CIA, the MEF was in contact with several former Iraqi generals. They wanted the Marines pulled out so they could form an Iraqi “home guard” inside the city—a “Fallujah Brigade.” After eighteen days of negotiation that went nowhere, General Conway agreed to pull back the Marines and let the former Iraqi generals try to evict the terrorists. I thought it was a forlorn hope. We had no way of vetting these Fallujah Brigade recruits. Because Zarqawi and Janabi dominated the city, those who joined this unit would likely become our enemy. Once they were armed, they would be under Zarqawi’s thumb, and the only way I could retire them would be to kill them.
From the very start, the ad hoc arrangement was fraught. A few days later, I drove to our negotiation site. John Toolan was there, talking with Lieutenant Colonel Suleiman, the commander of the Iraqi National Guardsmen working with us. A Fallujah native, Suleiman was a tough, fair man who viewed Janabi and the Islamists as the real threat. Shortly after I arrived, an Iraqi “brigadier general” named Saleh unexpectedly arrived, wearing his best Saddam-era green uniform. This caught me by surprise.
When he saw Saleh, Lieutenant Colonel Suleiman clenched his jaw, his face turning scarlet with rage. John hastily steered him into another room, where Suleiman emphatically protested that he had worked with us. But now this so-called Fallujah Brigade would be controlled by the terrorists and Saddam-era generals like Saleh. “You’ve been duped,” he told John.
As Saleh was leaving, Tony Perry, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, asked him if he had come to take over. In fractured English, a smiling Saleh indicated that he was indeed taking command of the Fallujah Brigade. Tony had snared a scoop. To soften the impact of the story I knew Tony was about to write, I interrupted to say, “We’ll make it work.”
Over the next seventy-two hours, in response to our emboldened enemy’s attacks, we launched three dozen strikes at targets in the city. In Baghdad, the same Iraqi politicians who had opposed the use of military force in Fallujah now reversed field. The Iraqi Governing Council warned against the “appeasement” of terrorists. Shiite politicians argued that the creation of a Sunni brigade was a double cross. Arguing against the handover, Bremer objected strongly to the White House.
It was at this difficult moment that CBS’s 60 Minutes broke the story of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, twenty miles east of Fallujah. Pictures taken by American guards showed Iraqi men lying naked in piles and standing blindfolded on stools, with wires attached to their arms. These graphic images repulsed us all and ignited a worldwide firestorm of political and press condemnation. Combined with the inability to sustain the attack on Fallujah, this did grave damage to the entire coalition campaign. The imposed tactical halt in Fallujah and the egregious behavior of rogue guards at Abu Ghraib had cost us the moral high ground.
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John Toolan sent me a terse note saying the Fallujah Brigade was a cover for the terrorists. “This,” he wrote, “is a deal with the devil.” I wholeheartedly agreed. But in a gesture of political theater, in early May I was to meet with the Iraqi generals and turn over control of the city. The negotiators insisted that I be accompanied by only a handful of Marines. Suspecting an ambush, Toolan had a battalion in armored vehicles standing by outside the city.
“Remember, Bryan,” I told the battalion commander, “if shooting starts, your mission is to break through and pull us out, not charge to the Euphrates. We’ll come back later and finish the job.”
The morning of the meeting, a brave CIA officer and two Iraqis—all three bearded and dressed as insurgents—drove a nondescript car into town on the route I was to take. When they saw several men emplacing a large bomb, they marked down the GPS coordinates. Once several blocks away, they transmitted the data via cellphone. In this case, we exploded the bomb remotely, killing those who were preparing it.
An hour later, my small Marine retinue drove into the center of the city, linking up with Suleiman’s nervous soldiers at the conference site. A Cobra gunship pilot overhead radioed sightings of insurgents hiding around street corners adjacent to my route. Were we driving into a shootout? We had no way of knowing, but we were fully prepared to shoot our way out if necessary.
Inside City Hall, two dozen sheiks and clerics—including Janabi—sat rigidly along the square walls. I said a few words to a Japanese TV crew. (I had no idea how they got there.) I also wished good luck to a newly assigned “brigade commander,” a small, tentative Iraqi general in a busin
ess suit. In the fraught atmosphere, I sat down next to Janabi.
In exchange for the pause, I explained that all heavy weapons had to be collected and turned over to us, and that government and coalition forces had to have full access to the city. The Fallujah Brigade would patrol the streets, and government services would be restored.
Janabi smugly agreed to the conditions, knowing that our attack had been stalled by political restraints on my force. I doubted his sincere intention to do one bit of what he promised, and walked out.
The insurgents, knowing they had won politically, held their fire as we drove out of town, past dozens of grim men with their arms folded. Some held up fingers in the V-for-victory sign. Others turned their backs and gestured as if defecating.
Our troops pulled out of their positions deep inside the city, gained at the cost of their buddies. A freckle-faced, filthy Marine, his machine gun over his shoulder, was asked by a reporter how he felt about losing his buddies and then being ordered to pull out. He looked into the camera and, in a slow southern drawl, said, “Doesn’t matter. We’ll hunt ’em down somewhere else and kill ’em.”
Reflecting back on the weeks of brutal urban fighting, I thought of a Kipling line: “For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.” For all the dysfunction of the on-again, off-again attack, I was proud beyond words that our Marines kept the faith when they’d had every reason to give it up.
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The day after we pulled out of Fallujah, Al Qaeda posted on the Internet a video of the gruesome beheading of twenty-six-year-old American Nicholas Berg. The executioner, dressed in black and wielding a sword, was a hooded Zarqawi. The location was somewhere in the Jolan market.
Our invasion had unleashed impulses, historical and current, that were sweeping across the Middle East. Zarqawi was out to tear apart Iraq and make it an Islamist terrorist caliphate. We had entered a twilight zone of directionless policy that defied strategic logic. Zarqawi and his terrorists were killing thousands, and they weren’t hiding their intent from us. One of Zarqawi’s deputies, who was reported to be in Fallujah as early as February 2004, was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would emerge as the leader of ISIS a decade later.
The Fallujah Brigade seemed to provide a political off-ramp from a situation my seniors deemed unresolvable. In execution, it provided no solution, political or military. Instead it sent a message of defeat. The fig leaf of the Fallujah Brigade did not hide the fact that we had been stopped, and the consequences would be felt for years.
I believed I had let my men down, having failed to prevent the attack in the first place and subsequently failing to prevent a stop order once we were deep inside the city. It was a tough time for me, because higher-level decisions had cost us lives, but now was not the time to go inward. You must always keep fighting for those who are still with you.
BECAUSE ANBAR’S SUNNIS were seen by central authorities in Baghdad as the most recalcitrant in Iraq, the province was assigned as a secondary priority for pacification, an “economy of force” zone, in military parlance. It was 2004, and the insurgency was morphing into a civil war, not least because we had erred in handling Fallujah.
On long nighttime helicopter flights, I watched the arcs of green and red tracers and the bright flashes of explosions flaring up in a dozen towns and cities. The tribal sheiks, whether they liked Marines or not, were now complaining to me about their young men joining Zarqawi’s terrorists. In undiplomatic language, I replied that they had to stand up to stop the destruction they had brought upon themselves.
From their point of view, the sheiks now saw us as unreliable. The fight for Fallujah had put us on our back foot. We were going to have to work long and hard to find trustworthy Iraqi partners.
In the last week of May, President Bush gave a speech at the Army War College, announcing a change in policy. Going forward, security would be a “shared responsibility in Fallujah….Coalition commanders have worked with local leaders to create an all-Iraqi security force….I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history, and find their own way.”
I believed the President’s goal was idealistic and tragically misplaced, based on misguided assessments that appeared impervious to my reporting. Of all places in Iraq, Fallujah was certainly the wrong example for the President to cite. I had no idea who told him that responsibility for security was being “shared.” Not one American was left inside the city.
Zarqawi, safe in his Fallujah sanctuary, had a plan that was working. By targeting Shiites, he provoked Shiite militias into exacting indiscriminate revenge upon hapless Sunnis. The President envisioned Iraqis left to “find their own way” coming together. The reality, tragically, was that they were forced to choose sides in a rapidly developing civil war.
Washington was focused on the transfer of political power from Ambassador Bremer to Iraqi leaders who had no conception of democracy and the power sharing it requires. Joe Dunford, John Kelly, and I conveyed our blunt assessments to Washington visitors. But we were out in Anbar, far removed from the political conversations taking place in Baghdad and Washington.
At the end of June, Bremer departed after turning over control to Iraqi officials. He wrote to President Bush, “As a result of the President’s courage and the Coalition’s efforts, Iraq has before it a path to a better future.” In reality, nascent Iraqi leaders jockeyed for power amid ever-shifting alliances, with the Shiite factions maneuvering to consolidate power, some with Iranian financial and weaponry support. Anbar received no help from the Shiite-controlled government in Baghdad. The province was remote, restive, and impoverished—and all hell was breaking loose.
Al Qaeda’s approach was to recruit unemployed youths, mostly from the lower rungs of society. Then, by intimidation, they took over towns and farmlands. This should surprise no one. Think of any Hollywood western. Tough guys with guns move in. The townsfolk do not rebel; instead, they accommodate. Not one man in a hundred will stand up alone to a bad man with a gun. The more fanatical the killers, the more intimidated the community.
There were no resolute sheriffs here. Tribal insurgent bands sprouted up, manned by disenfranchised, enthusiastic young men, bored and unemployed. Most fought in the vague hope of restoring Sunni primacy and for the excitement of shooting at an American and later bragging about it. When the Marines killed them, their friends grew bitter. It was now a matter of revenge, and the cycle of violence spun faster.
Having studied the British occupation of Iraq after World War I, I saw that much of what was happening to us could have been predicted. I also studied the 1956–57 French battle for Algiers. In neighborhoods where French troops employed targeted operations and kept up better relationships with the Arab population, they met with more success than in areas where they were more heavy-handed. Hence, I returned to my dictum “First, do no harm” and re-prescribed strict rules. We were uninvited guests seeking friendship, not resentment.
Writing after his command in the Balkans in the 1990s, British general Rupert Smith had observed, “War amongst the people is conducted best as an intelligence and information operation, not as one of manoeuvre and attrition in the manner of industrial war.” This was how the British troops dealt with Northern Ireland. In that war, the antagonists shared much the same culture. But we were American troops from a largely Christian nation, in the heart of the Islamic Middle East. To overcome cultural barriers, we had to all work together until we created a common purpose. I knew it would take years of patient, persistent presence before we had adequate nets of informants, interpreters, and tribal leaders who understood that their interests were aligned with ours.
Few officials from the Saddam era were left in Anbar. In Ramadi, the provincial governor stayed alive because we posted a twenty-four-hour guard around him, with a tank on his front lawn.
But after Al Qaeda kidnapped his son, the governor apologized on TV for supporting the coalition, tearfully embraced his released son, gathered his family, shook hands with the battalion commander, and left for Jordan.
As in Chicago in the early thirties, the local sheiks knew by sight the local gangsters and terrorists. They understood what was going on in their communities. But they didn’t share that with my battalion commanders. In many heated exchanges, I told them they were aligning with the wrong team. The fundamentalists would eventually kill them and rule their tribes in their place, using their young men as cannon fodder. Having seen us fall back from Fallujah, the terrified sheiks had no way of knowing what they could expect from us, and took pains not to antagonize Zarqawi’s terrorists.
In the hot summer of 2004, Green Beret Major Adam Such, working with the poor Albu Nimr tribe, numbering fewer than twenty thousand, found the first flicker of determination among the tribes to stand up to Al Qaeda. Adam nourished the relationship, reinforcing the tribal sheiks’ standing, and violence ebbed in their western Euphrates villages.
While that small tribe proved the exception at the time, I mulled things over with John Toolan, Joe Dunford, John Kelly, Stu Jones, and our staffs, plus the CIA. We agreed that bringing over the tribes remained the key to a successful counterinsurgency campaign in Anbar. But we also saw that it would be a long, long road.
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At midnight one night in late May, an officer from the ops center awakened me to report that an Al Qaeda team we had been tracking for weeks had crossed from Syria into Iraq. Immediately I gave the order to attack. A short time later, F-18s and Cobra gunships struck the target, while recon Marines moved to cut off any escape. A Special Forces team helo-assaulted into the shattered campsite, scooping up papers, passports, and computers. The team reported twenty-six men killed, recovering weapons and satellite phones.