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

by Bing West

  At the edge of the souk he stumbled as he walked around a bread truck. When he angrily slammed a fist against a dented rear fender, the rear doors suddenly opened, he was hauled inside, and the doors slammed shut. The Delta soldier paused a minute to catch his breath in relief. Had an arms dealer challenged him inside the souk, his rudimentary Arabic would have betrayed him. If his partner, fluent in Arabic, couldn’t talk their way out, Drinkwine would have had to rush in when the shooting began. Whether he would have arrived in time was another matter.

  Safely inside the truck, the Delta operative drew a quick sketch, showing the paratroopers their key targets. Minutes later a company of paratroopers leaped from hiding places as Bradley fighting vehicles roared up to form a cordon. Led by their special forces guides, the paratroopers rushed from alley to alley, arresting fifteen Iraqis and seizing seventeen IEDs. Breaking into back rooms, they found so many explosives and weapons that they had to call for four dump trucks to haul them all away. They withdrew before the insurgents could organize a counterattack.

  _____

  While the raid was a success, it had no wider implications. A few days later insurgents in Fallujah killed two French citizens. The two, working for a U.S. company, had stopped for a quick repair outside Fallujah on Highway 6, the heavily traveled main artery. A passing car had opened fire on the two men. After that no prudent Westerner traveled near Fallujah in a small group.

  Travel by air near the city was equally perilous. On January 8 a Blackhawk helicopter, with five huge red crosses on the fuselage, was flying a medevac mission along the Euphrates south of Fallujah when it was downed by a surface-to-air missile, killing nine soldiers and bringing the number of Americans killed to thirty-seven in and around the city. It was the second shoot-down in a week. Of the six helicopters shot down since Baghdad was seized, four had occurred in the Fallujah area.

  Informers reported that Khamis Sirhan had sent a surface-to-air missile (SAM) team into the farming district south of the city. A major general under Saddam, Sirhan was the highest-ranking insurgent in the Fallujah area. Before his arrest, Sheikh Barakat had moved money for Sirhan.

  Drinkwine set out to find Sirhan, surrounding the farmlands with two companies and searching house to house. The SAM team had left, some said going back to Syria. Sirhan, though, made the mistake of remaining in the city. A woman admitted knowing his cousin, and his cousin gave up an address. At three in the morning of January 11 the house was surrounded and Sirhan was seized without a struggle. He was the eighth high-ranking former officer to be captured in six weeks.

  “It had taken us five months to figure it out,” Dudin said. “But at last we had a technique. The special ops and intel guys were putting together diagrams of the movers and shakers in the city. Most of them had big houses and big egos. They didn’t like living in the boondocks. Sooner or later they came home for a few days. Some nights we’d search their houses and not even wake up their kids. We got that skilled, all quiet like. We missed a lot of times, but we kept coming back.”

  Believing he had momentum, Drinkwine organized an FPAC, or Fallujah Provisional Authority Council, comprised of sheikhs, business leaders, and imams. Janabi emerged from hiding to claim one of the spots reserved for the imams, and Drinkwine put aside his suspicions in a gesture toward a new beginning. With General Sirhan behind bars, he invited the FPAC to take charge and to work with eleven Fallujah Liaison Teams appointed from his battalion. Bring your requests, Drinkwine said, and we’ll try to resolve them.

  The mid-January FPAC meeting seemed to go well. A torrent of complaints about American conduct and contracts not delivered poured forth, but there were no threats of violence. Drinkwine noticed that Janabi didn’t say a word. The meeting ended with the election of a council president, and a meeting was scheduled for the next month.

  Two days later a mob gathered outside the mayor’s office at the Government Center to protest the election of the council. When the paratroopers were called to disperse them, a riot ensued and two Iraqis were killed.

  “It’s great to be nice,” Drinkwine said. “But we’ve found out if you let up for one second against the bad guys, they’re right back at your throat.”

  Drinkwine had tried political suasion and municipal improvement, but in the end it came back to raw military muscle. The battle lines were clear: it was the Americans against the insurgents.

  The composition and leadership of the insurgents were changing. As the FREs weakened, Drinkwine received warnings that foreign fighters were infiltrating into the Jolan, including the arch-terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi. From Fallujah, Zarqawi sent Osama bin Laden a letter in January asking for help in continuing the guerrilla war. On a night raid two Egyptians were arrested in an apartment with slogans supporting bin Laden scrawled in sheep’s blood on a wall. Neighbors told a reporter that foreign fighters were threatening people who played Western music, styled their hair, wore revealing clothes, or even sold wood to contractors working for the Americans.

  “Fallujah is controlled by two powers—the Americans and the muja-hedeen,” one Fallujan said after the raid. “If we cooperate with the mujahedeen, we get raided. If we cooperate with the Americans, we get killed.”

  Some groups among the insurgents were becoming bolder, firing RPGs during the daytime from East Manhattan at Bradleys parked at the cloverleaf. More IEDs were being found inside the city than along the highways.

  “We heard the Islamic fundamentalists were starting to taunt Saddam’s guys, saying the old army guys didn’t have the balls to take on the Americans,” Dudin said. “We saw changes in tactics.”

  A Bradley came under fire as it passed an elementary school attended by the daughters of members of the FPAC. The insurgents kept running out from behind the school, firing a few bursts and ducking back again. The soldiers didn’t fire back. The next day Drinkwine conducted a two-company sweep from the cloverleaf on the eastern outskirts of the city. Within twenty minutes a white flare went off over the Blue Mosque where Janabi preached, about a kilometer west down Highway 10. Soon pickup trucks were darting out of alleyways, shooting at the paratroopers, and dodging back to cover. When the paratroopers moved forward, the insurgents moved back deeper into the city. Drinkwine declined to follow, seeing no gain in escalating a clash with excitable youths.

  Such random fights were constant in Fallujah. Since August his soldiers had engaged in 262 firefights and come under rocket or mortar attack on sixty-one occasions. In addition, 270 IEDs had been detonated or disarmed, and there had been eight serious attacks against helicopters. Faced with such violence, Drinkwine and his brigade commander, Col Smith, preferred the scalpel of the night raid to the broadsword of the daytime sweep.

  “The enemy [in Fallujah] is like a cancer,” Drinkwine said. “It has had thirty-five years to grow. When you have someone who has cancer, you go and carve out the heart of it. If you just turn away from it, it will continue to grow and it may grow back stronger.”

  The opposition returned the sentiment, using the same analogy. “The occupation is like a cancer,” said Nadhim Khalil, a twenty-five-year-old Sunni cleric suspected of plotting attacks. “It has to be removed.”

  As January drew to a close, Drinkwine believed the city elders were prevailing over the shrill voices of the Sunni clerics. Preachers like Janabi weren’t speaking up in the council meetings. They seemed to be malcontents whose influence could be marginalized by economic improvement. “After you cut out a cancer, you have to rejuvenate the body,” he said, elaborating on his cancer analogy. “We’re cutting out the FREs. Then the body has to heal. Fallujah needs a healthy economy and hope in the future.”

  From his perspective, the city elders lived in perpetual fear of political and economic isolation, paranoid about change and the outside world because it had never brought them any good. With their provincial accent, country ways, and enormous rate of illiteracy, they were the butt of jokes among the Baghdad middle class. The bustling eight-lane highway outside t
he city had devastated their commerce as a waystop between Baghdad and Jordan. Their industry, which had been totally subsidized by Saddam’s military machine, had collapsed. Aside from farming, kidnapping, and truck driving, the sources of income in the city were nil. The business leaders had no functioning businesses.

  Every family in Iraq was provided with food and electricity, when it was on, for free. This subsistence economy and lack of money gave rise to a belief among the American military that creating jobs was the surest means of combating the insurgency.

  Col Smith regularly trekked to Baghdad with a list of the brigade’s needs that overwhelmed the resources it received. For Fallujah, he had a total of $200,000 a month to spend. Repairing the sewer and water-purification system alone would cost $20 million. Thirty industries capable of employing tens of thousands of laborers lay idle; the cost of rejuvenating them would be $25 million.

  “Baghdad kept too much for itself,” Smith said.

  Baghdad was the political, economic, and cultural capital of Iraq. Both the CPA and the JTF had their headquarters there. Baghdad had to show progress toward stability and economic growth. The CPA’s next priority was taking care of the political aspirations of the Shiites. Then came Kurdish restiveness in Kirkuk and the needs of population centers like Mosul and Basra.

  Although Fallujah was at the top of the list in terms of violence, in terms of politics it was a backwater problem.

  5

  ____

  VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE

  IN FEBRUARY TWO IRAQI NATIONAL GUARD battalions arrived in Fallujah, and on February 12 Gen Abizaid visited one of the battalions at the Government Center. In Abizaid’s view, the time had come for Americans to take their hands off the controls and allow the Iraqis to help themselves. “It’s their country,” Abizaid said. “It’s their future.”

  The Iraqi battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Nowar, proudly presented a briefing. When Abizaid asked a question, Nowar began his answer by saying, “Well, we all know Fallujah is a tough town.”

  No sooner had he spoken than two rocket-propelled grenades exploded in the courtyard.

  “See?” Nowar said.

  The plan for Abizaid to walk downtown, as American reporters had done the previous summer, was promptly canceled.

  The officers of the 82nd were not pleased that the four-star general had been fired upon in Fallujah. The police insisted the attack had been the work of outsiders and criminals. They shrugged off posters promising death to collaborators. There was no insurgency, the police said. If the Americans stayed away, all would be well. With a battalion of National Guard in the city, Drinkwine agreed to remove his soldiers from all fixed checkpoints. The police assured him they could handle the situation.

  Two days later, on Valentine’s Day, Drinkwine was at his battalion base east of Fallujah when reports came in of a heavy gunfight in the center of the city. Two dozen insurgents, some in National Guard and police uniforms, had launched an assault on the main police station. Shouting “God is great” and “There is no God but Allah,” they also attacked the compound housing the National Guard battalion. When the fighting did not let up after half an hour, Col Smith and LtCol Drinkwine decided to send in an armored column, although they hadn’t been asked to help.

  Before the tanks left the compound, Lieutenant Colonel Suleiman al Marawi drove in, at the head of a half-dozen pickups. A short man with a thick black mustache, Suleiman was in charge of a National Guard battalion stationed on the western peninsula, on the far side of the Brooklyn Bridge. The battalion had been recruited a week earlier and was untrained—it consisted of four hundred former soldiers and unemployed youths, pulled together with the promise that the 82nd would give them three weeks of training, AK rifles, uniforms, and $200 a month. Now Suleiman, summoned by Smith and Drinkwine, had rushed into the American base with a few dozen excited, fresh-faced young men.

  Drinkwine had met Suleiman only a few times. Suleiman had gone to high school in Fallujah, then moved to another city before being accepted at the military academy. He had joined the Baath Party, served in the Republican Guard, trained fedayeen insurgents before the invasion, and refused to speak English. He had been the city elders’ third choice to lead a column into the city because he was an outsider known as a hardhead, difficult to control. Suleiman told Drinkwine that the Americans had to stay out of the fight. If they charged in with their armor, he said, they would kill the wrong people. He demanded grenades, handheld radios, and ammunition for the operation.

  Smith asked where LtCol Nowar was. Gone, Suleiman said. The police chief, Abood, was no help either. Suleiman gestured impatiently. “I need to be the protector,” he said to Smith, “not you.”

  He and his volunteers needed military equipment, not questions. Drinkwine agreed, and the paratroopers piled the pickups full of ammunition. Then Suleiman led his little convoy into the city.

  The battle was petering out, and within an hour Suleiman’s men were sifting through the wreckage of the shattered police station. The insurgents had freed seventy-five prisoners and killed twenty-three policemen. At most, eight attackers were killed or captured.

  When Suleiman called for him to come in, Drinkwine arrived on scene with a company mounted in Bradleys. After his medics extracted thirteen pieces of shrapnel from one insurgent, the dazed guerrilla rattled off the names of his leaders, some of whom had been taken to the hospital.

  Drinkwine and Suleiman then drove to the hospital, where the director, Rafi Aieisaw, refused to allow them to see the dead or wounded insurgents, despite blood trails in the main corridor. He relented after Suleiman threatened to kill him. Suleiman identified two of the dead as brothers from a small Luhaibi tribe in eastern Fallujah. One had been a lieutenant and the other a captain in the army. Both were members of a fundamentalist cell working in the city with Zarqawi.

  Drinkwine and Suleiman rushed over to the cell’s headquarters, an abandoned, battered building that also served as a mosque for a recently arrived imam sponsored by Janabi. According to Suleiman, Janabi, who was nowhere to be found, had been a businessman for most of his life and had taken up preaching as a lucrative side business. The paratroopers moved on to search four small “mosques”—shabby, half-built buildings—set up by Janabi in the same neighborhood. All contained weapons and explosives.

  The next day Drinkwine fired the police chief when he refused to wear his uniform. LtCol Nowar, having failed to fight, stepped down in disgrace. Many in the police and the city hierarchy had known the attack was coming and had left town for the day. The mayor, Ra’ad Hussein Abed, had been mysteriously absent during the attack and was uncooperative in answering questions the next day. He was arrested on charges of conspiracy and withholding information. Ra’ad protested that many people had heard of a possible attack. His enemies were setting him up so they would get the American contracts. Call the 3rd ID back in Texas, he said; their commanders would vouch for him. His entreaties were to no avail, and he was sent to prison.

  The following night, despite threats from the insurgents, a thousand people turned out to elect representatives to the Anbar Provincial Council. Safe inside the Government Center, the sheikhs condemned the killings and threatened tribal revenge. In previous attacks insurgents had assassinated translators and contractors who picked up the garbage at the 82nd base. This was the first attack against fellow townsmen who had refused to cooperate with the Americans.

  Drinkwine hoped the sheikhs would retaliate. After a few days he concluded they would mutter and fulminate but not take up arms. The sheikhs had been cowed. The traditional system of tribal retaliation no longer protected anyone in the city. As the American-mounted patrols had daily rolled past the mosques and suburbs, the roots of the rebellion had grown stronger.

  While Gen Abizaid’s principle was to “take American hands off the controls,” if that happened in Fallujah, the insurgents would grab the controls. BrigGen Kimmitt, the deputy director for operations at JTF headquarters in Bag
hdad, acknowledged this point when asked to comment on the fight at the police station. “The fact remains,” he said, “that places like Fallujah are not ready for local control.”

  Working together, the jihadists and the former soldiers had killed the policemen they had grown up with, eaten with, and prayed with. No longer was it enough in Fallujah to be a local who minded his own business and was careful in his dealings with the Americans.

  The twenty-three deaths by small-arms fire were the highest number in any firefight in the Iraqi war. The size of the attack and the exuberance with which neighbors killed neighbors showed a depth of military opposition not previously encountered by the 82nd. The cultural system of clans encouraged submissiveness to a few alpha males; the attack signaled the rise of a new group of alphas. Fallujah had lurched into a new phase of warfare.

  Reaction to the police slayings focused on arrests and investigations of traitors rather than an assessment of the event’s significance. The CIA had only a few agents at the 82nd base camp, and there was no functioning intelligence service inside the Iraqi government. Janabi was not redlined for special attention by Task Force 6-26, and the two fundamentalist cells implicated in the attack received no further attention.

  The Valentine’s Day Massacre was a watershed event, underplayed because the American forces were in a period of transition. Drinkwine’s battalion was preparing to pull out of Fallujah and return to the States, leaving a city where the outcome was in doubt.

  _____

  The destruction of the police station brought Fallujah to the front pages of American newspapers for a few days. The city’s notoriety, however, was soon eclipsed by massive car bombings across Iraq. On March 3, 143 Shiites on religious holiday in Karbala were blown to bits; most likely it was the work of Zarqawi, as he tried to provoke a civil war between the Shiites and the Sunnis. The following week 192 people were killed in Spain when al Qaeda terrorists blew up a train. Five days later Spain elected a prime minister who pledged to pull all Spanish troops out of Iraq.