by Bing West
“What makes you come here, Bush, and mess with the people of Fallujah?” the mob had chanted as they dragged the bodies through the streets.
Under a headline reading “Reminder of Mogadishu: Acts of Hatred, Hints of Doubt,” the New York Times correspondent in Baghdad wrote that “there are hints that American generals are not as sure as they were only weeks ago that they have turned the corner in the conflict.” When Somali tribesmen in 1993 dragged the body of an American soldier through the streets of Mogadishu, President Clinton had withdrawn the U.S. forces. In 2004 the stakes were too high for the Americans to pull out of Iraq. President Bush believed that American soldiers had liberated the Iraqi people.
“Where is Bush?” a boy had yelled, pointing at a charred corpse. “Let him come here and see this!”
President Bush did see the mutilation. The response to the sickening images was emotional and aggressive. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen Abizaid decided that the Marine plan to respond in measured steps ignored the international impact of the event. A city could not be allowed to lurch out of control.
That sentiment was shared by Ambassador Bremer. Seeing the pictures on television, Bremer called General Sanchez into his office.
“I encourage a vigorous attack,” Bremer said. Sanchez agreed. He too was dissatisfied with the tempered Marine approach.
The Marines at the tip of the spear didn’t understand why they were being ordered to launch—without careful thought—an attack on a city of 280,000 people. Those who incited the mob had been passersby, not insurgent leaders. In any case, before they attacked, key Iraqi officials and allies had to be informed and brought on board. And once the Marines seized the city, someone had to administer municipal services—electricity, water, traffic movement. That meant insuring Iraqis supported the attack. The strategic groundwork hadn’t been prepared.
The CPA diplomats in the province aligned with the Marines, sending e-mails to Baghdad urging a focused approach. Let the special operations forces deal with the ringleaders, they urged. They received back an e-mail note saying “the cat was out of the bag.”
BrigGen Kimmitt, the deputy director of operations for the JTF and the spokesman for the Coalition’s military, spoke to the press on April 1. “U.S. troops will go in,” he promised. “It’s going to be deliberate; it will be precise: and it will be overwhelming.”
Fallujah, the heart of the insurgency and the symbol of resistance in Iraq, was about to feel the overwhelming force of America.
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On April 2 the MEF ordered checkpoints and a cordon set up around the city. Only food and medical supplies were allowed in, and the only military-age males allowed out were those accompanying families. Bulldozers began throwing up a berm of dirt around the city, which measured roughly five kilometers on a side. LtCol Olson met with the city council, thanking them for returning the bodies and asking for a written denunciation of the lynching. Show the world where you stand, he urged; do not align with murderers. The sheikhs and imams rejected Olson’s request, issuing instead a bland statement that opposed mutilation but not the killing of Americans.
On April 3 the MEF sent the division the JTF-written order directing offensive operations against the city of Fallujah. The CPA had prepared a public affairs plan in support of the offensive, although it didn’t address the Arab press. Bremer and Sanchez shared the plan with the CPA diplomats in Anbar, who agreed it seemed reasonable.
General Conway directed his MEF staff to lay out the overall concept and specify the key tasks to be performed by the air wing, the logistics support team, and the division. As the ground commander, Mattis would direct the battle.
Officers of all services are trained how to compile and coordinate an operational plan for battle, specifying the mission, forces, and tasks. Op plans run for dozens of pages and include numerous appendices spelling out who, what, when, where, and why. An op plan is a regimented document that provides a specific blueprint for combat.
In Washington, however, there was no comparable strategic plan for Fallujah. The JTF order didn’t specify what the seizure of the city was intended to accomplish. There was no strategic document laying out the mission as set forth by Gen Abizaid, its intent as articulated by Secretary Rumsfeld, the CIA’s projection of opposition at the strategic level, the CPA’s consultations with the Iraqi Governing Council, or the State Department’s coordination with allies. The anticipated phases and timelines of the strategic campaign—warning the population, consulting with allies, gaining Iraqi agreement, preparing the press, briefing the Congress, marshaling the forces, timelines for seizing the city, reestablishing a city government—were not laid out.
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On April 4, Fallujah was dominating international headlines because all major news outlets had rushed reporters and video crews there after the administration’s vow of an overwhelming response. But the fighting was threatening to sweep far beyond Fallujah.
A week earlier Ambassador Bremer had shut down the incendiary newspaper Hawza, controlled by the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr. For a year Sadr, the twenty-eight-year-old son of a revered imam killed in 1993 on Saddam’s orders, had been preaching sedition in the slums of Sadr City on the east side of Baghdad. He railed against the Americans as infidel invaders and branded as traitors all Iraqis who were cooperating with the Coalition.
After an Iraqi court secretly indicted Sadr for the murder of a rival cleric, the CPA wanted to arrest him but could not act without the power of the JTF. The JTF refused, agreeing instead with the Shiite clerics who argued that an arrest would provoke violence. The Shiite clerics claimed they could marginalize Sadr. But left unchecked for a year and funded by Iran, he had gained control over an ever-growing militia of impoverished Shiite youths throughout the south. His populist movement had spread from Sadr City to the poorest sections of major Shiite cities.
After shutting down Sadr’s newspaper on April 2, Bremer ordered the arrest of Sadr’s top aide, Mustafa al Yaccoubi. The next day Sadr called for rebellion. His militia, called the Mahdi Army, took to the streets.
“Terrorize your enemy!” Sadr shouted on Al Jazeera television.
Thousands of excited, impoverished Shiite youths armed with AKs and RPGs poured into the streets in Kufa, Karbala, Najaf, Nasariya, Kut, and Basra. The Iraqi police in the Shiite cities, like the police in the Sunni cities, fled to their homes. The multinational division assigned by the JTF to the normally peaceful Shiite cities fell apart. The Bulgarian battalion in Karbala took shelter in its base and called for American soldiers. The Ukranian battalion in the city of Kut came under siege and cracked. The Spanish soldiers in Najaf abandoned the streets. Sadr’s militia—street gangs, actually—was taking over city after city without a serious battle.
The speed, breadth, and depth of the rebellion took American officials by surprise. The fall of Saddam’s regime had removed the yoke of oppression from the necks of the majority Shiites; yet the Shiite leaders had tolerated the rise of a demagogue who urged attacks on the Americans who had brought them freedom. If the Americans withdrew, the Sunnis would easily dominate the Shiites; yet when Sadr’s armed mobs rampaged through the streets, no Shiite leaders emerged to restore order. Instead they wrung their hands, called for dialogue, and left the fighting to the Americans.
The consequence of having broken the chain of command in two was that each half exercised its authority to launch a major action. On April 1, General Abizaid moved against the Sunni city of Fallujah. On April 2, Ambassador Bremer moved against the Shiite supporters of Sadr. Within a day, these two separate operations provoked a chain reaction of Sunni and Shiite rebellions across western and southern Iraq.
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Sadr’s uprising in eastern Baghdad and in the Shiite cities to the south did not seem connected to the Sunni city of Fallujah to the west. The JTF sent no order to hold off against Fallujah. So on April 4, the Marines proceeded to marshal their forces and cut off the city, knowing full well that urba
n combat would be a mess for all concerned. Conway was convinced that the forthcoming assault would further inflame an already embittered population and fuel support for the insurgents. Mattis knew that once his Marines had fought their way down Fallujah’s long streets, neither they, nor the surviving insurgents, nor the innocent civilians would be in a forgiving mood. Taking Fallujah by raw force meant subduing a hostile city and declaring terms of obedience. Given his mission, Mattis crafted four objectives: arrest the perpetrators, clean out the foreign fighters, remove all heavy weapons from the city, and reopen Highway 10 for military traffic.
The MEF sent the JTF order to the division, which sent it to Regimental Combat Team 1, commanded by Colonel John Toolan. Raised in Brooklyn, Toolan had a stern, angular face and an air of calm reserve. An informal man with the Irish gift of gab, if he found a conversation interesting, he’d pursue it. When he ran behind schedule, his staff would say, “We’re on Toolan time.” He was also an experienced tactician, having commanded the regiment on the march to Baghdad.
The plan worked out by the division, called Operation Vigilant Resolve, was simple and direct. The 1st Recon Battalion would act as a screening force to the south, while Battalion 2/1 pushed in from the northwest and Battalion 1/5 moved up from the southeast.
It would take a day for Toolan to get those forces into position. He used that time to demand that the city elders turn over the ring-leaders of the mob. For a year the elders had complained for hours at a stretch about American misconduct, poor crops, neglect from Baghdad, the high price of seeds, Shiite plots, poor water, contracts not delivered, erratic electric power, favoritism toward the wrong tribes—issuing great rivers of words. The final message was always the same: send money and stay out of town; “outsiders” were causing all the trouble.
Well, Toolan told Mattis, the sheikhs couldn’t blame the mutilation on “outsiders.” As the city elders listened to the bulldozers and tanks clanking around the outskirts of the city, maybe they would take the sensible route and deliver the criminals.
Hunkered down in the city was a hard core of about twenty insurgent leaders. A mixture of former Baathists, army officers, criminals, jihadists, and terrorists, these hard men believed that causing American casualties would have the same results as in Vietnam and Somalia. They controlled about six hundred tough fighters, plus a thousand part-timers who would grab a weapon to defend the city or Islam or whatever someone told an impoverished, impressionable teenager to defend.
The two chief weapons of the insurgents were the AK-47 automatic rifle and the rocket-propelled grenade. There were literally millions of AKs in Iraq; the Russian rifle was brilliant in the simplicity of its design, with a short barrel and a jam-resistant mechanism, firing the sturdy 7.62 cartridge in lethal bursts. Even a child could pick up a light AK and in seconds figure out how to load, clean, and fire it. Saddam’s factories had churned out AKs as if they were cigarettes. You could rub mud, dirt, or sand all over an AK, dip it into a muddy puddle, shake it a time or two, and still blaze away. Saddam’s workers were sloppy in filling powder into cartridges, and often the rifle would misfire. But with good bullets, the AK was a deadly weapon.
The RPG was just as simple but even more destructive: a slim tube with a grenade attached to the end of the barrel, a simple trigger mecha-nism, open iron sights, and a short stock. Any teenager could shoot the weapon without training or thinking. You could point it in the air and lob it like a mortar, or you could aim directly at a vehicle or a person. When the grenade hit a building, chips of cement flew like darts in all directions.
With sound weapons, a vast pool of recruits, and a rallying cry of defending the city against the infidel invaders, the insurgent leaders in Fallujah were in a strong position. As Toolan and Mattis expected, the city elders did not stand up to them. No mob leaders were delivered on April 4 as the Marines worked long into a cold, dust-filled night to string concertina wire, set in barricades, direct streams of fleeing civilians into tents, and move the rifle companies into position.
7
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MUTINY
ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 4, LtCol Olson led a column of trucks, amphibious vehicles, and Humvees toward an apartment complex on the northwestern outskirts of Fallujah. The undefended complex would provide Battalion 2/1 with a launch point to probe the defenses of the Jolan District.
“People are holding rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, and they are prepared to use them if Americans enter their neighborhoods,” said Qais Halawi, a local sheikh.
As Olson pulled up with his lead unit, he was astonished to see a dozen men, most of them unarmed, pushing a trailer truck across the highway to block the Marines, while other insurgents opened fire from the flanks. To Olson, it seemed senseless. The Marines made short work of the flimsy ambush and proceeded to the apartment complex.
Accompanying 2/1 was a company from the 36th Iraqi Battalion from Baghdad. Most were Kurdish soldiers who wasted no time in ordering the apartment residents to pack and get out, giving each family $200. Olson sent Golf Company to hold the peninsula at the western end of the Brooklyn Bridge. Echo and Fox spread out along the trash heaps north of the city. A train station with loading platforms, low-slung buildings, and abandoned rolling stock sat about three hundred meters north of the city. As Fox was crossing the rail tracks, insurgents from inside the city launched a barrage of automatic fire and RPGs, killing Corporal Tyler Fey. The battle for Fallujah had begun.
On the morning of April 5, Stoddard led Fox Company past a mosque and cemetery on the edge of town and down narrow streets lined with three-story houses and apartment buildings. At first swarms of children ran out, gesturing as though holding pistols in their tiny fingers, shouting bang! bang! The streets quickly emptied, and from alleys and roofs AKs started chattering. The insurgents moved in gangs of five to ten men, rushing forward and firing wildly before dodging down alleys. Empty buses and cars blocked intersections to stop the tanks that advanced with the infantry. Mortar shells were exploding, some disconcertingly close, others distant echoes. It was hard, tiresome work for the Marines in their heavy body armor, and after a few hours Olson sent Capt Zembiec and Echo forward to pitch in. All day the battle seesawed up and down streets of the Jolan District.
When LtCol Olson discussed sending Zembiec a kilometer to the east to conduct a frontal attack parallel to Fox, Zembiec and Stoddard demurred. The insurgents were showing too much moxie. Every few hours a group of five to ten young Iraqis ran forward, eager to close on the Marines, who killed them on every charge. Zembiec didn’t understand why they persisted in running to their deaths. He was sure, though, that if he advanced with Echo on a separate axis, his Marines would be swarmed from all sides.
Instead of continuing into the tangle of buildings in the Jolan, Stoddard cleared a block of two-story houses that fronted on a cemetery, providing an unobstructed field of fire to the east. Zembiec pulled in on Stoddard’s north flank, and the two companies began fortifying the roofs.
At dusk on April 5, as the dogs began their nightly howling, rockets landed in the complex where Olson had set up the battalion ops center, about three hundred meters behind Echo Company. Around ten o’clock bands of insurgents began slipping forward, staying in the shadows of the buildings, groping for the Marine lines. Circling over the city was Slayer, an Air Force C-130 loaded with infrared scopes, two 20mm Gatling guns, and a 105mm howitzer firing fifty-pound shells. The four engines of the powerful aircraft sounded like a thousand hammers beating on steel pots, and what became routine nightly radio chats began.
“Oprah, this is Slayer One. About one hundred meters south of your strobe I see a group of about twenty in a courtyard. Want me to take them out?” The Air Force officers in the AC-130 were informal and low-key.
“Slayer One, this is Oprah,” Captain Michael Martino, a forward air controller with Echo, replied. “We’d appreciate it.”
The ensuing burst of 20mm fire had a low, ripping sound, like a chain saw cutt
ing through hard wood.
“This is Slayer One. Scratch that group. We’ll make another pass over your sector. If we don’t see anyone else, we’ll swing over to War Hammer.”
Three kilometers to the south Battalion 1/5—call sign War Hammer—was conducting a night attack. Col Toolan wanted to squeeze the insurgents between 2/1 in the northwest and 1/5 advancing from the southeast. To clear the southeast industrial sector, Lieutenant Colonel Brennan T. Byrne had taken advantage of night-vision goggles to move his battalion forward at three in the morning. The Marines picked their way among rows of shabby repair shops, heaps of broken pipes and junked cars. While the command group set up in a four-story soft drink factory, Bravo and Alpha Companies pushed up to the south side of Highway 10, directly across from where Zembiec had fought a few days earlier in East Manhattan.
In the predawn Col Toolan drove up in a Humvee, attracting a brace of rocket-propelled grenades. While the Marines assaulted the attackers, Toolan compared notes with Byrne, who was convinced the insurgents slept in their houses north of the industrial zone, got up, had breakfast, met their buddies, and hailed a cab to the battlefield.
Sure enough, Bravo and Alpha spent the day of April 5 shooting at insurgents clustered at a mosque on the north side of Highway 10. The insurgents were firing mortars and RPGs, scampering in and out of courtyards to let loose bursts of AK fire, knowing enough not to bunch up. As Zembiec had noticed a few days before, some of the civilians treated war as a spectator sport, standing on street corners to watch the Marines. Sergeant Tim Cyparski saw a man with an RPG standing amid several families; the children were laughing and the women were hiding their faces in their veils, peeking out at the action. The insurgent hastily fired the RPG, scattering the crowd and hitting a nearby house. A minute later the crowd gathered around the inept gunner, treating him like a rock star. Unable to take a shot, the Marines ran toward the man, who nimbly dodged among some parked cars and disappeared. The Marines walked on, waving at the small crowds to get off the street. As if in response, the insurgents too waved at the women and children to get back inside.
