by Bing West
By mid-June the division had been convinced of the perfidy of the Fallujah Brigade. But with the return of sovereignty only two weeks away, the timing was wrong to push for an attack. During July, Prime Minister Allawi and Gen Casey were adjusting to their roles and working out a satisfactory path to their opaque command relationship; Casey could not undertake major operations without Allawi’s approval and Allawi could not conduct operations without the American forces commanded by Casey. In August, Sadr’s revolt demanded the attention of both men. By September, Allawi’s standing was high in Iraqi polls; his first confrontation had been against a fellow Shiite, giving him the political room to maneuver against the rebellious Sunni city.
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The stage was set to clean out Fallujah. As his first step, Allawi had closed Al Jazeera’s bureau in Iraq, depriving the insurgents of the strategic weapon that had saved them in April. With the intent of emptying the city, he then issued repeated warnings in September that time was running out. As he made it more and more clear that he intended to attack Fallujah, the insurgents repeated the diplomatic tactics that had succeeded for them in April. First they sent a delegation of city elders to meet with the interim government. President Ghazi Yawar, who had negotiated to stop the attack in April, agreed publicly with the delegation that any attack would be an unjust punishment of an innocent population. This time around, though, no major Iraqi official, including Yawar, threatened to resign. There were scores of Iraqis eager to replace any minister who chose to step down. Yawar was playing a politician’s standard gambit, publicly appearing sympathetic to his fellow Sunnis by decrying the impending attack, while behind the scenes doing nothing to prevent it.
Highly publicized negotiations between Baghdad and representatives of the insurgents continued throughout October. At one point the Marines waited until the chief negotiator, Abdullah Jumali, and the police chief, Sabar, felt safe enough to visit outside Fallujah, then arrested them for complicity in multiple murders, including that of LtCol Suleiman. Allawi, however, ordered them released because he had promised safe passage. The Marines hoped to meet them soon on the battlefield.
When the insurgents failed to gain support from the interim Iraqi government and when the UN and the Arab world remained muted, the insurgents tried their final gambit. They claimed that their council, the shura, had voted by ten to two to throw out the foreign fighters (whose existence they had denied for months) and to allow the Iraqi National Guard to enter the city—provided of course that the U.S. Marines stayed out.
This time, however, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld did not leave negotiations to the regular military and diplomatic chains of command. In April he had been informed after decisions had been made in Iraq. In mid-October he flew to Baghdad for discussions with Prime Minister Allawi and General Casey. Allawi then told the shura to hand over Zarqawi. That, he said, would prove they were serious about ridding the city of foreign fighters. The shura, of course, refused. Rumsfeld and Allawi had called their bluff.
At the same time the press was describing how the Marines were edging up to the line of departure. Nothing in their training or their nature comported with staying on the defense outside an enemy sanctuary, steadily losing men. In early September one suicide bomber had killed seven Marines from Battalion 2/1. Then in mid-September it was Toolan’s turn, as Mattis and Conway had done, to return to the States. A few hours after his change of command, a rocket slammed into the regimental headquarters, killing the regiment’s popular and outgoing communications officer, Major Kevin Shea. In late October another suicide bomber killed nine Marines from Battalion 1/3 that had just arrived at Fallujah.
Enough was enough.
PART IV
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ATTACK
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November to December 2004
24
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THE WATCHDOGS
FOUR DAYS AFTER GEORGE W. BUSH was reelected, Prime Minister Allawi, who had pledged not to allow Fallujah to keep drifting, ordered the attack against the city. This time around senior American and Iraqi leaders had taken the time and care to shape the strategic setting before commencing the operation. Since April the Sunni insurgency and the terrorist bombings across Iraq had grown in intensity, while the reelection of President Bush had reassured the Iraqi government. The intransigence of the insurgents and the duplicity of Fallujah’s city elders had exhausted the sympathy of most Shiites, who knew the terrorist bombings were intended to prevent them from gaining political power. The Sunni hierarchy—a few small parties and a large group of clerics—complained that the forthcoming election lacked security and therefore shouldn’t be held. They then declared a boycott of the election scheduled for January and became a marginal factor. Sunni imams in a dozen cities railed and postured, threatening a popular uprising if Fallujah were attacked. Allawi ignored them. As prime minister of a sovereign nation, he was better able than American diplomats to gauge popular support and to sense when his fellow Arab leaders were bluffing.
Sadr mouthed support for “the holy warriors of Fallujah” but, true to his nature, did nothing to help them. The pro-Sunni voices of UN representative Brahimi, King Abdullah of Jordan, Mubarak of Egypt, and Iraqi notables like Hassani ensconced in Baghdad—all shrill in April—were silent in November. Prime Minister Allawi had shut down Al Jazeera in August, which resulted in restraint on Al Arabiya’s reporting as well.
Gen Casey asked for a British battalion from Basra to guard a highway outside Fallujah, freeing up a Marine battalion for the assault. As part of the attack, the British didn’t have the luxury of criticizing American tactics from the outside.
Day after day senior Iraqi and American officials signaled the proximity of the attack, urging the civilians to leave. Rumsfeld added to the public pressure by telling the press that this time around there would be no cease-fire. Military planners estimated that the population of Fallujah, knowing the assault was coming and terrified by the daily bombings against terrorist houses, had plummeted from 280,000 to less than 30,000. In June the insurgents had zipped jauntily through town in white-and-red-striped Nissan pickups seized from the police and National Guard. Throughout the summer the Marines had confiscated all police vehicles leaving the city, and each night the AC-130s had destroyed any truck seen with a weapon.
By October video from the UAVs showed that the clotheslines throughout Queens were empty, indicating the families had fled. Agents reported that Janabi was directing a steady flow of foreign fighters to take up residence in Queens, choosing whatever house they liked. In the middle-class districts north of Highway 10, each day fewer residents were seen. By November, Fallujah looked like a scene from the film Blade Runner—block after block of squat, unpainted cement houses and grubby streets littered with trash and dirt, bereft of vehicles and people.
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In April, Fallujah was defended by about five hundred hard core and a thousand part-timers. Seven months later the estimate had doubled to a thousand hard core and two thousand part-timers, although how many had fled in late October was unknown. Eager to show they were ready to repel the Marines, the insurgents welcomed Arab reporters. From press stories and numerous agent reports, a composite picture of the insurgents emerged. They were clustered in groups of four to twenty, each with a leader and a spiritual commissar. Their daily training consisted of weapons handling, studying the Koran, and watching videos of suicide bombers and attacks on Coalition forces.
With months to prepare, they had dug trench lines, rigged daisy chains of explosives along alleyways, hauled buses and trucks as barriers across the main streets, and planned fallback positions. To the south, they had bulldozed earthen berms on the outskirts of the industrial sector and Queens, inserting land mines and RPG revetments. In the northwest, where Zembiec had fought, they dug trench lines and threw up a huge berm. Where McCoy and 3/4 had assaulted from the northeast, they placed Hetsco barriers—massive sandbags filled with dirt and wired together to yield solid protectio
n. At whatever point the Marines had previously entered the city, the insurgents prepared to repulse a return visit.
As in Ramadi, the gangs relied on dispersion and cover inside cement houses and mosques to withstand the firepower of the Marines. As in the April battle, the Jolan loomed as the redoubt of the key leaders and the area south of Highway 10 west of the Government Center seemed the likely rallying spot for the defenders. The insurgents had limited running room in a city measuring roughly five by five kilometers. Offsetting that, though, the city contained 39,000 buildings and almost 400,000 rooms, most offering solid protection against small-arms fire. The insurgents knew every alleyway and back door. They could slither around, allow the Marines to surge past them, then fire from the rear.
Some planned to die as martyrs, lurking inside a house to shoot an American before being killed. Most planned to hit and run, joining with other groups to rush forward and, when the pressure became too great, to sprint away down the alleys. The Americans would roar through in their armored vehicles and declare the city taken; then the holy warriors would slip out night after night, destroying the Americans piecemeal, as their fellow Muslims had done to the Russians in Chechnya.
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The MEF planners believed the most deadly weapon would be the IED in all its variations: buried under streets, rigged inside houses, taped to the sides of telephone poles, stuffed into manholes, hidden under loose lumber, or wired inside abandoned cars. The greatest danger was a thousand pounds of explosives detonated inside a house after a squad of Marines had entered.
The new MEF commander, Lieutenant General John F. Sattler, had taken over from LtGen Conway in September. An experienced infantryman, Sattler was determined to conclude the fight by overwhelming force. The main job of the MEF was to arrange the pieces on the military chessboard and work out the overall game plan with the division. All prudent battle plans begin with the marshaling of supplies. For several years both the army and the Marines had been moving toward the “pull” model of logistics championed by Wal-Mart, the world’s largest merchandiser. The infantry battalions, as the end users, determined their rates of consumption and informed the logisticians, thus “pulling” the items they needed rather than having items “pushed” to them based on determinations made in the rear. To avoid overstocking and unnecessary transportation, the logisticians tried to fill the requests on a “just-in-time” basis.
In April, though, as the spontaneous Sunni uprising swept through the villages, convoys headed for Baghdad came under repeated attacks, at one point reducing fuel on hand to two days’ supply. To avoid supply problems during the Fallujah attack, Sattler and Brigadier General Richard S. Kramlich, in charge of Marine logistics in Iraq, reverted to the old method of building several “iron mountains” of supplies, munitions, and fuel around Fallujah, ensuring the attack would not slow regardless of attacks on the highways.
Sattler then turned his attention to the air component. Major General James F. Amos, commanding the air wing, had a plan for twenty-four-hour army and Marine helicopter evacuation of the serious casualties. No heliborne raids were needed inside the city, and the Cobra gunships would work the flanks of the city but would not fly downtown. There was more than adequate fixed-wing air to strike the hard points without losing a rotary-wing gunship to the air defenses inside the city. The heart of the air effort would be precision bombing against targets identified by the forward air controllers assigned to the twelve rifle companies.
With the logistics and air set, Sattler next aligned the ground forces. In April, Mattis had been poised to attack with four battalions, with another three providing an outer ring. The new division commander, Major General Richard F. Natonski, retained that basic concept, adding several new aspects. Colonel Joseph Letoile, the experienced operations officer who had been with the division in its march to Baghdad, and Dunford (recently promoted to brigadier general) proposed to Natonski that this time the main effort by Regimental Combat Team 1 should come from the north, because the insurgents were expecting the attack to come again from the south and east, as in April. The Jolan and the Maqady Mosque south of the railroad station in town comprised the command center and the hub of the defense, Dunford said, so let’s seize the Jolan and that mosque right away and drive a stake into the heart of the enemy.
Natonski approved the concept, directing RCT 1 to run a series of feints from the south to misdirect the insurgents. As in April, the division brought Regimental Combat Team 7 down from the north to provide the supporting effort. This time, though, RCT 7, still commanded by Col Tucker, would attack from the northeast alongside RCT 1. Natonski wanted two armored battalions to charge south to control the city’s main arteries, followed by the four infantry battalions that would clear the buildings. The first priority was seizing the Jolan, the main mosques supporting the insurgents, and the Government Center, all on the north side of Highway 10. After that the attack would continue south into the industrial district and Queens.
He brought the plan to Sattler, asking for armor. Sattler called LtGen Metz, who in July had replaced Sanchez as JTF commander. “Tom, I need two-seven again,” Sattler said, referring to the army mechanized battalion that had fought aggressively alongside the Marines in Najaf in August. “Oh, and two-two as well.”
“John, you know you’re to ask for capabilities, not specific units,” Metz said.
“Let me amend my request,” Sattler said. “I need two hard-charging mounted battalions with the capabilities of two-two and two-seven. Oh, by the way, Rich [Natonski] needs something like the Blackjack Brigade to surround the city.”
Metz laughed. “All right, you get all three. But that’s it for this way of doing business. We don’t want to be accused of playing favorites.”
Sattler still needed a dependable outfit to patrol the main highways to the east. In April the insurgents had almost cut off Baghdad. This time Metz called on the British as the force with the right skills. Turning aside protests in Parliament, Prime Minister Blair approved the temporary shift of the Black Watch Battalion to the Fallujah region—a move that was criticized in the United Kingdom as “politicized.”
Western troops could crush the insurgents, but they couldn’t control the city. That would require reliable Iraqi units, an ingredient MajGen Mattis had been unable to find last April. In November, however, Lieutenant General Dave Petraeus, in charge of training the Iraqi forces, assured Sattler that three Iraqi battalions would be ready for D-Day.
As the MEF commander, Sattler had assembled one British, three Iraqi, six Marine, and three army battalions. Natonski would fight twelve thousand troops as a composite division. A major task would be coordinating the movement of the battalions across a six-kilometer front, maintaining momentum while avoiding friendly fire.
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The attack began at dusk on November 7 with the seizure of the hospital on the peninsula west of the city. The insurgents regularly met there, and during the siege in April, the hospital staff had daily bombarded the press with wild charges of horrific civilian casualties. That wouldn’t be repeated. Electric power had been cut off days earlier to induce the few remaining civilians to leave, and Allawi had warned all Arab reporters to join the press pool set up by the MEF and not to enter the city unescorted.
Supported by the 3rd LAR Battalion, the 36th Iraqi Battalion and its U.S. Army Special Forces advisers surrounded the hospital as dark fell. The moon was down and the Iraqi night was black as pitch. Yet from several thousand feet above the hospital, the scene looked as bright as day to the forward-looking infrared radar (FLIR) camera mounted on a Pioneer unmanned aerial vehicle. A line-of-sight video link projected the images onto a pair of flat twenty-six-inch screens inside a tent ten miles southwest of the city. A dozen Marines from VMU-l—“The Watchdogs” that flew the Pioneer—peered intently at the video screens.
The black edges of the hospital roof stood out in sharp contrast to the white thistle clumps of palm trees in the courtyard below. A line of
white ghosts snaked around the trees and flowed onto the roof. “Those guys are wearing packs,” Lieutenant Colonel John Neumann, the mission commander, said, watching figures climbing onto the roofs. “They’re friendlies.”
“LAR wants us to scan across the river,” Corporal Robert Daniels said, reading a chat-room message that had popped up on his computer monitor. “Someone’s firing at them.”
“Take us east across the river,” Neumann said over his shoulder. “Shift from white-hot to black-hot.”
Behind him the Marine at the remote controls of the UAV adjusted the flight path as his partner tightened the focus on the infrared camera. The images on the screen jumped slightly and zoomed in on two black shadows hopping from spot to spot behind an earthen berm along the bank of the Euphrates.
“Watch their right arms when they run. I confirm weapons,” said Sergeant Jenifer Forman, an imagery analyst. “They’re shooting across the river.”
The two black spots darted back and forth, firing in the direction of the hospital. As the camera tracked them, the two figures bobbed together to discuss something. The screen suddenly bloomed white, then settled back into focus, showing a thick gray cloud and a scattering of small spots, like someone in the cloud had thrown out a handful of black rocks.
“Direct hit,” Neumann said. “Tankers picked them up on their thermals. They’re scratched.”
The dead insurgents were proof that human beings embrace contradictory thoughts without reconciling them. For months the Marines had hit them night after night on streets empty of civilians. Yet still they ventured out after dark, albeit in dwindling numbers. During World War II, May was the month of the Germans’ heaviest casualties to artillery, because the soldiers were loath to dive into the sopping mud when they heard shellfire. Similarly, the insurgents knew they were being watched, yet clung to the hope that what the Marines called “the finger of God” would point to someone else.