No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah

by Bing West

  The Marines had a plan they wanted to stick with. For months American forces had been venturing into the city only in brief forays in armored vehicles; meanwhile the opposition had strengthened. Over the next several months the Marines intended to move back into Fallujah on foot, district by district, bringing with them Iraqi forces. The rub for the past year had been that the Iraqi police and National Guard had refused to be seen with Americans, yet they had also failed to control the city. The Marines intended to coax the Iraqi forces into joint patrols, regaining control of the city by slipping in “all quiet like the fog.”

  Seeing no reason to alter that plan, Dunford sat down and wrote an e-mail to be used on the evening news in the States. “We’re not going to overreact to today’s violence,” he wrote. “We have a methodology of patient, persistent presence. We will identify who was responsible, and in cooperation with Iraqi security forces, we will kill them.”

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  The Iraqi police returned three bodies the next day, and the fourth corpse was recovered the following day. The CIA and military intelligence began to match the faces of the ringleaders to names and addresses. More than twenty names were placed on a list of targets for future raids. Two brothers, for instance, lived in a wealthy compound that was dotted with date trees on the eastern bank of the Euphrates. They would be easy to take down. Another ringleader operated a computer and photo shop in the center of the city. Reading his e-mails and samizdat would be revealing. He would be a tough target, though, requiring the expertise of Task Force 6-26. The special operations commandos would need a few weeks to plan and rehearse their raid. If the Marines took it step by step, the ringleaders would be arrested or killed over the course of the next month.

  General Conway’s senior was Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the Joint Task Force commander in charge of all coalition forces. Sanchez wanted swift, visible retaliation for the lynchings: for instance, bomb the Brooklyn Bridge. Conway rejected that option—he wanted to use the bridge to run convoys. All right then, the JTF staff in Baghdad replied, bomb the computer shop. No, the Marines replied, we want to read those records, not burn them. Besides, it’s an e-mail café, with kids wandering in and out. Well, the JTF came back, bomb the compound on the Euphrates. No, the MEF replied, families live there, and the ringleaders might not be home when the bombs come calling. When every suggestion for immediate action was rebuffed, JTF headquarters grumbled that the Marines were too reluctant to apply force.

  Don’t push us, the MEF staff said. Give us a few weeks to pick off the ringleaders when they least expect it. To rush into a city of 280,000 made no strategic sense. Once they occupied the city, what would they do with it? You could do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. The sensible plan was to gain control gradually, leaving Iraqis—not Marines—in charge. Not the right answer, the JTF staff replied. You guys in the field don’t grasp the international significance. The mutilation was not a tactical matter; the political symbolism was huge, and the analogy to Somalia was on the lips of television pundits and in newspaper commentaries.

  A decade earlier the United States had intervened in Somalia’s tribal wars in order to save millions from starvation. But a resentful tribe eventually turned on the military peacekeepers and butchered twenty-four Pakistani soldiers. At the urging of the United Nations, American soldiers set out to arrest the tribe’s leader and were trapped in a fierce firefight. When it was over, a vengeful Somali mob dragged the corpse of an American soldier through the streets. American revulsion hardened into determination not to aid such a barbaric country. The mutilation forced a policy review in Washington, resulting in the withdrawal of all American forces from Somalia.

  Once again tremors from a mutilation were being felt in official Washington. President George W. Bush was reported to be furious. For a gleeful mob to hang Americans like pieces of charred meat mocked the rationale that the war had liberated grateful Iraqis. The mutilation was both a stinging rebuke and a challenge. National pride and honor were involved. The president’s envoy to Iraq, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, went on television in Baghdad to denounce the atrocity, vowing that the “deaths will not go unpunished.” The spokesman for the JTF, Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, followed up by saying the attack on Fallujah would be “overwhelming.” Write an order for the Marines to attack, General Sanchez told his staff, and I don’t mean any fucking knock-before-search, touchy-feely stuff.

  After six months in the States, the MEF had just returned to Iraq and, the week before, taken responsibility for a province the size of North Carolina, with two million people and thirteen cities. Now Conway was receiving orders, which he believed to be a mistake, about one city. Over the past year Conway had developed a solid rapport with General John P. Abizaid, who was in charge of the Central Command. CentCom commanded all American forces throughout the Middle East. Both Conway and Abizaid had open personalities, and when they issued orders, they explained their reasoning, which won them the loyal support of their staffs. Conway called Abizaid to get some background about what was going on.

  “I’ve discussed this with Secretary Rumsfeld, Jim,” Abizaid said. “This one’s coming from way up the chain of command. Way up.”

  To the Marines, Fallujah was notable for having no American base inside the city. Consequently, allowing themselves a few months to move in seemed a prudent tactical matter. But to Abizaid and Rumsfeld, Fallujah was a city, constantly in the news, that had slipped out of control. That situation was unacceptable—tantamount to secession from the new Iraq. Abizaid had visited the province in November to personally threaten Fallujah’s leaders, following repeated attacks on Americans, but his warning had no effect. On a second trip in February his convoy had had to pull out of Fallujah under gunfire.

  Rumsfeld and Abizaid, with Ambassador Bremer in strong support, had recommended to President Bush that Fallujah be seized immediately. The president ordered the Marines “to go get those responsible,” with no waiting, no delay. The president was not told that the Marines disagreed with his order to rush in.

  The last time American troops fought street by street had been twenty-six years before in Hue City. That battle had raged for a month, and blocks of houses were leveled. Hundreds of Americans and thousands of Vietnamese had died. The Marines knew that in Fallujah rough stuff lay ahead. They wished others understood that.

  On April 2, 2004, the MEF received a written order from the JTF to conduct offensive operations against Fallujah. That settled the matter. The time for talking was over. The Marines had had their say, and General Abizaid had made his decision. If President Bush wanted the city taken, their mission was to take it.

  The Marines saluted, turned about smartly, and let slip the dogs of war.

  PART I

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  COUNTERINSURGENCY

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  April 2003 to March 2004

  1

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  “WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE LOOT DIRT?”

  THROUGHOUT MOST OF IRAQ, the latter days of April 2003 was a time of great joy. Saddam Hussein’s murderous regime had collapsed; the shooting and bombing had stopped; and people could go anywhere they pleased and say anything they wanted. In Baghdad, the American forces were greeted with smiles, waves, and shouts of joy. On the eastern bank of the Euphrates near the French embassy, wealthy Sunni suburbanites—anxious to win favor—led American Marines to the estates of Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and high-level generals. When the giant Stalinesque statue of Saddam, arm raised and mustache bristling, fell in Firdos Square, Americans and Iraqis alike were pulling on the ropes. April 2003 was an interlude of good cheer, reminiscent of the liberation of Paris in 1944—a moment in time when people forgot their wants and their fears and flocked to the streets to cheer the soldiers.

  In Fallujah, though, the residents did not cheer when paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division drove into the city in late April. In Baghdad, looters as numerous as locusts had stripped every government building,
even carting away bricks. In Fallujah, the windows and electric fixtures at the Baath headquarters at the Government Center remained intact. Most looting was confined to the industrial sector, and only the poor people who lived south of Highway 10 greeted the Americans with smiles. Across the Euphrates south of the city, the large estates of prominent Baathists and army officers stood empty but untouched, securely guarded by the curlicue Baathist symbol on the courtyard gates. Saddam’s apparatchiks did not consider themselves defeated. They were in temporary hiding and Fallujah was still their bastion, untouched by the war and unbowed by the presence of a few hundred American soldiers.

  At dusk on April 28, 2003—Saddam Hussein’s birthday—a raucous mob of about a hundred men, women, and children pushed their way into the courtyard of the mayor’s office, where the 82nd had set up headquarters. The paratroopers had no warning that an anti-American demonstration was planned and had no idea what the Iraqis were protesting or why. The mob accused the surprised American soldiers of spying on women with night-seeing binoculars and of showing pornography to children. Using translators and loudspeakers, a group of paratroopers warned away the mob. The crowd walked several blocks to another neighborhood, where they harassed another detachment of paratroopers. Several men in the crowd were firing AK-47s into the air, which the veteran paratroopers interpreted not as a threat but as bravado. They told them to move on.

  The mob then walked to a schoolhouse to harass another platoon of paratroopers, who were sleeping inside. It was well after nine and dark. The crowd had a new demand: the soldiers had to leave immediately so that the children could go to school the next day. As the mob pressed up to the schoolyard wall, three Iraqis on a nearby roof started shooting their rifles.

  Inside the schoolhouse a squad leader, convinced he was under fire, radioed his company commander for permission to return fire. At the same time another sergeant radioed the same request. Believing his men were under attack, the company commander gave the order, and the keyed-up paratroopers unleashed a fusillade of automatic weapons fire. In the next several minutes fifteen men, women, and children were killed and dozens were wounded. None of the paratroopers were injured.

  The next day seven major Western news outlets sent reporters from Baghdad to cover the story. Most filed similar stories about a terrible tragedy caused by a sudden flare-up in the dark. Several Iraqis had fired weapons, they reported, but while the Iraqis said they had been shooting in the air, the American soldiers said they had been the targets. The reporters wrote that they did see graffiti written in English on the walls of the school where the soldiers were sleeping, disparaging the Iraqis with slogans like “I love pork” and a drawing of a camel with the words Iraqi Cab Company below it.

  The press focused on the human cost of the incident, the clash of cultures, and the bitterness the casualties had caused throughout the city. The shootings, according to the news accounts, would unleash a cycle of retribution: more deaths and more revenge attacks. But they gave no explanation as to why or how Fallujans had mounted an anti-American protest on Saddam’s birthday, just days after the regime had collapsed, at a time when most Iraqis were celebrating.

  Six months later Jamil Karaba, a Fallujah resident, was arrested after he was overheard bragging about organizing the mob and planting gunmen among the protesters.

  Called the “destruction-maker,” Karaba was an alcoholic former Baathist with several prior arrests and with ties to the gangster element in town. Provoking an incident was a centuries-old guerrilla stratagem for turning the people against the soldiery. And this time, as so often in the past, it had worked.

  The next day a screaming mob carried on its shoulders the mufti Sheikh Jamal—the senior imam who interpreted Islamic laws—to the mayor’s office.

  “All Americans leave Iraq!” he shouted, as the crowd roared in agreement.

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  Cities acquire caricature, if not character. New York is frenetic and brash; San Francisco is liberal and laid-back; Los Angeles is imbued with glitter and celebrity. Ask Iraqis about Fallujah, and they roll their eyes: Fallujah is strange, sullen, wild-eyed, badass, just plain mean. Fallujans don’t like strangers, which includes anyone not homebred. Wear lipstick or Western-style long hair, sip a beer or listen to an American CD, and you risk the whip or a beating.

  For centuries the city had traded with—and stolen from—merchants who were headed east to Baghdad. The frontier town bordering an open desert attracted outcasts and criminals. In the early twentieth century European travelers learned not to tarry in Fallujah. After Iraq won its independence in 1959, Fallujah became a source of enforcers for the ruling Sunni-dominated Baath Party. The city’s tough reputation continued under Saddam.

  Laid out in a square grid of wide boulevards, Fallujah comprised two thousand blocks of courtyard walls, tenements, two-story concrete houses, and squalid alleyways. Half-completed houses, garbage heaps, and wrecks of old cars cluttered every neighborhood. The six lanes of Highway 10 ran straight through the center of the two-mile-long city, from a traffic cloverleaf on the eastern end to the Brooklyn Bridge, over the Euphrates, to the west. South of Highway 10 sprawled the decaying buildings and waste pits of a decrepit industrial zone. On an aerial map the layout of straight streets and dense blocks of houses faintly resembled Manhattan, giving rise to nicknames. Next to the industrial zone was Queens, a poor section of shabby three- and four-room houses. North of Highway 10 were the spacious houses of East Manhattan and Midtown, with its established mosques. The Government Center was in Midtown, while the old souk and marketplace, called the Jolan, were next to the Euphrates to the west. Along the main street were the billboards, restaurants, repair shops, and other struggling efforts of a merchant class. It was a city of monochrome color, without architectural flair.

  With forty-seven mosques in its neighborhoods and fifty more in the neighboring villages, Fallujah was called “the city of a hundred mosques.” For decades the city had been the repository of the extreme Wahhabi, or Salafi, traditions flowing in from Saudi Arabia. Saddam, distrusting Fallujans’ fundamentalism, had restricted their movements and used them as his cat’s paw.

  Although 60 percent of Iraqis were Shiites, the 20 percent who were Sunnis had held the political power for centuries. When Saddam’s army was defeated and thrown out of Kuwait in 1991, the Shiites in southern Iraq, encouraged by ill-conceived American exhortations, had revolted. To crush them, Saddam incited sectarian hatred. The Shiites, he warned the Sunnis, were blasphemers who had to be killed to preserve the true Muslim religion. Imams in Fallujah and other Sunni cities led the faithful in the chant: “Our blood and souls to redeem you, O Islam.” Saddam’s army, led by Sunni officers, crushed the Shiite uprising.

  Just before the Americans drove into Fallujah in April 2003, the mufti Jamal, the senior Sunni cleric in the city, warned the residents that the American invaders would turn Iraq over to the Shiites. The radical clerics were calling President Bush “Hulagu II,” a reference to the conquest of ancient Baghdad by the Mongol leader Hulagu, assisted by a Shiite leader who betrayed the ruling caliph. The Americans, the mufti told the citizens, were modern-day Mongols—infidel invaders and occupiers.

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  Fallujah’s pro-Coalition mayor, Taha Bedawi, could not stand up against the anger that the shooting had provoked. He asked the paratroopers to leave the city, explaining that revenge attacks were inevitable. Maintaining peace between tribes depended upon exchanging an eye for an eye, one life for another. If an insult went unavenged, the family and tribe suffered humiliation and were seen as weak, thus encouraging further attacks. While the mayor was talking, a group of men gathered outside under banners that read “US killers we’ll kick you out.”

  The 82nd Airborne units withdrew on schedule in early May and were replaced by a company from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. In the following weeks, although the American soldiers kept a low profile, repeated firefights erupted. The regiment, assigned to patrol more than a thou
sand square kilometers, could devote fewer than two hundred mounted soldiers to Fallujah and its environs.

  Every day on the dusty brown courtyard walls along Highway 10, more anti-American slogans were scrawled: “God bless the holy fighters of the city of mosques.” “Kill the infidel Americans.” “USA leave our country.”

  The JTF decided to make Fallujah the “most occupied city in Iraq,” replacing the two hundred soldiers of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment with fifteen hundred soldiers from the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division.

  The Fallujah campaign of the 3rd ID had two prongs—the carrot and the stick. The “stick,” or force, focused on raids. The 2nd Brigade mounted raids at night on houses that had been identified by informers or by the OGA—Other Government Agency, aka the CIA. During the daytime the 3rd ID conducted large-scale sweeps to search for weapons and arms dealers, locking down whole sections of the city for several hours at a time.

  The armored presence of the 3rd ID was intimidating. During the daylight hours things were usually calm, although Iraqi police often turned their backs on the Americans and children were as likely to throw rocks as to laugh and ask for candy. The men rarely smiled. Yet the children were friendly south of Highway 10. The brigade’s executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Eric Wesley, and New York Times reporter Michael Gordon felt safe enough to walk into the old Jolan quarter and talk with Iraqis in the crowded souk. Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran ate lunch at the Haji Hussein, a popular kebab restaurant.