by Bing West
While the fighting was going on, LtCol Byrne had Weapons Company systematically clearing the filthy industrial buildings, knocking down false walls and hauling out dozens of machine guns, RPG launchers, and rockets welded from scrap piping. The soldiers found over a ton of TNT and black powder for IEDs. Major Peter Farnum, 1/5’s operations officer, estimated that there were enough weapons and ammunition for a battalion.
By the afternoon of April 6, Toolan concluded he had exchanged enough jabs with the insurgents to understand their fighting style. They had no formal, hierarchical military structure with a commander and subcommanders. Rather, they were gangs organized around mosques, neighborhoods, and local leaders. Knowing the streets and alleys, they were fighting a running battle, instead of setting up a fixed defense inside a row of houses.
Toolan didn’t need massive firepower—he needed more infantry. Byrne had momentum. By adding a battalion on Byrne’s right flank, Toolan could push the insurgents northwest into the Jolan and crush them against Olson’s lines. He spoke with Gen Mattis, who said he had two battalions moving in, one American and one Iraqi.
_____
All the American generals—Abizaid, Sanchez, Conway, and Mattis—wanted to put an Iraqi face on the fight at Fallujah. The Iraqis with Battalion 2/1 were commandos, but they couldn’t stay in the city for the long term. So the 2nd Iraqi Battalion of the new Iraqi Army, based north of Baghdad, was ordered to proceed to Fallujah.
After graduating from boot camp in October, the seven hundred soldiers in the battalion had received some additional training from the 1st Armored Division. But when a team of American advisers arrived in March, they found that the Iraqi soldiers had decided political freedom meant the end of discipline. When Staff Sergeant Andrew Garcia, one of the new advisers, told an Iraqi soldier to clean up the barracks, the man replied, “I refuse to pick up trash. I am now free.”
Garcia was speechless. Nothing had prepared him for a pompous private. A few weeks earlier the husky sergeant had been serving as a drill instructor at Parris Island. In SSgt Garcia’s universe, dogs didn’t talk, and neither did privates. The advisers held an emergency meeting and agreed it was time to reestablish the natural order of the military world.
“We treated them like recruits, green as June grass,” Garcia said. “We rolled them out at zero five hundred for physical training, then spent the day drilling in infantry basics. We got in their faces, we screamed, the usual routine, gave them back their self-respect a little at a time. They learned to pick up trash.”
When Mattis requested Iraqi troops, the advisers believed the 2nd Battalion was ready. The senior adviser, Major David Lane, flew by helicopter to Toolan’s headquarters. Lane assured the regimental staff that his Iraqis could perform simple duties like traffic control and organizing the thousands of civilians fleeing the city. While Lane coordinated with the regiment, the 2nd Battalion packed up. On April 5, the Iraqi soldiers and nine American advisers set out on the five-hour drive south, escorted by four U.S. Army Humvees.
After leaving camp, the convoy initially made good time because few civilian cars were on the highways. Fighting was flaring up everywhere. Sunni insurgents were battling in Fallujah, while in the slums of Baghdad the Shiite militia loyal to Sadr were rioting. Television stations were showing skirmishes and mobs in a dozen cities and villages. As thousands of unemployed men gathered in marketplaces and murmured to one another, the general atmosphere of unrest and tension spread.
On the northern outskirts of Baghdad, the highway narrowed to four lanes. Cars were parked haphazardly, forcing the military vehicles to proceed at a crawl in single file. The scruffy shops and two-story storefronts on both sides of the road were crowded with men who stared unsmilingly at the Iraqi soldiers. The Iraqi officers acted nervous, yelling at the restive onlookers to get out of the way and let the convoy pass.
To the unease of the American advisers, who were sitting in pairs in separate trucks, the convoy stopped while the driver of the lead Humvee shouted at a trucker to stop blocking the way. Men started running into the street, rolling out barrels and rocks. In the fourth truck back in line, Garcia yelled over his handheld radio, “Go around that truck! Drive up the median! Let’s get the hell out of here!”
It was too late. Rifle fire crackled from the rooftops of the stores, and the crowd broke and ran, ducking behind the shops and darting down alleys. Acting without orders, several Iraqi troops leaped down from their open-back trucks and fired wildly. More soldiers joined them. More firing. Garcia saw small groups of men gathering at the ends of the alleys, AKs and RPGs in hand. Soon the insurgents crawled forward on the flat rooftops and stuck their rifle muzzles over the edge, firing wild bursts. The Iraqi soldiers were equally undisciplined, spraying bullets every which way. There were no apparent leaders on either side, only clusters of young men blazing away. Crowds were swarming in, like hordes of mosquitoes.
Garcia thought the situation absurd yet deadly. “Cease fire! Get back in the trucks!” he yelled. “Cease fire! Move, move!”
Strung out over a mile of road and entangled with civilian traffic, the convoy broke down. The company-grade Iraqi officers were looking around helplessly, unable to take action, awaiting orders from above. Up and down the line Marine NCOs were yelling at the soldiers, pulling them back to the trucks, screaming at everyone to mount up and get the hell out of there.
The senior adviser, Major Chris Davis, was riding in the sixth truck in line. When all movement stalled and the firing began to pick up, Davis ran forward to the first truck. There he found the Iraqi battalion commander, the nephew of a powerful sheikh, arguing with a gathering crowd. This is crazy, Davis thought—you never stop a convoy in a kill zone, let alone debate with the natives. The battalion interpreters had fled, but it took only a few seconds for Davis to understand from the gestures and rants that the crowd wanted the American advisers handed over. The battalion commander was shaking his head no, vigorously debating the point.
Davis grabbed his shoulder: “Let’s go, let’s go!”
The battalion commander looked around as if seeing the wild scene for the first time. While he was arguing with one group, only a few hundred meters down the street a gun battle was raging. When he hopped into his Humvee, the Iraqi soldiers climbed back into the trucks and the convoy moved slowly forward.
When the firing had started, the driver of Garcia’s truck had leaped down and run away. Garcia saw the other trucks leaving. The cracks of the AK rounds were getting closer to his truck. Ejected shells jingled on the pavement around him as Iraqis on the roof above his head fired blindly. Garcia saw Staff Sergeant Johnny McKnight a block away, trying to organize a base of fire.
“Get up there!” Garcia yelled, pointing at the abandoned truck. “You drive! The hajis will get back in when they see we’re leaving. We’re not staying here!”
McKnight ran to the Hyundai truck, which was still idling. As Garcia predicted, the Iraqi soldiers followed, clambering into the truck bed, spraying bullets in every direction. The truck jerked and bucked forward, McKnight making no effort to change gears. Sitting next to McKnight, Garcia could see rifles poking out of windows and along rooftops. The store owners had joined in. Down the alleys he saw crowds of men running, trying to get into firing positions in front of the truck. A U.S. Army Humvee with a .50 caliber whizzed by, followed by another, heading for the rear of the convoy. The gunner gestured to McKnight to accelerate.
McKnight didn’t have to be encouraged. To his right, bearded men were rolling barrels into the road. Some boys were throwing rocks, while others crouched in the roadside ditch, pitching objects under the truck’s tires. McKnight’s scalp tingled as he imagined grenades going off. Then he saw they were flipping small stones, playing some sort of game.
A pickup truck skidded out of an alley and jerked to a stop in front of him. McKnight swerved to the left, bounced off two parked cars, then regained control and headed down the dirt median strip. Men were throwing rocks, concret
e blocks, and pieces of metal onto the highway. Others were shooting.
A bullet smashed the driver’s mirror next to McKnight’s shoulder. Another went through the windshield. McKnight was praying. In front of him a large blue farm truck—the kind used to haul cattle to market—blocked two lanes. The rear half was on fire, thick black smoke pouring into the air. As McKnight trundled by, several men were throwing a bucket of gasoline onto the truck, more interested in their private bonfire than the escaping convoy.
The scene was not a military action; it was madness. Some Shiite militia supporters of Sadr were shooting at the Americans; others were firing at the Iraqi soldiers, half of whom were Shiites; some shop owners were screaming about the damage to their stores; others had grabbed their AKs and were shooting at nothing; cars and trucks were dented, smashed, and lit afire; boys were laughing, throwing rocks, and scampering about as if at a carnival. McKnight was driving for his life, taking in the bizarre sights, including one man running toward the truck, AK in hand, waving and smiling. McKnight couldn’t tell whether the man wanted to help him or kill him.
It took an hour for the convoy to zigzag out of the congestion and bedlam. Like steel balls in a pinball machine, the trucks banged off cars and median railings and bumped over rocks and chunks of concrete. Men in old work shirts and baggy trousers were running out of the alleys, firing AKs from the hip, then ducking away. The Marines saw none of the organized fedayeen in their black ninja outfits or black kafkas, only ordinary unemployed Iraqi men swept up in a frenzy not one of them could explain. Garcia saw one man standing in an alley, with a pistol in each hand, shooting straight up at the air.
As the convoy threatened to be overwhelmed by sheer numbers, two Apache helicopters swooped in, and the mob raced for the safety of the buildings. The battalion finally broke clear of the street of little horrors, drove a few miles along a stretch of deserted highway, then pulled into a wide defensive circle to regroup.
“I ruined the engine driving in second gear. There was no way I was going to shift and risk stalling out,” McKnight said. “I’ll never joke about a Hyundai again.”
For all the chaos, damage was light. A U.S. Army retriever truck had been hit by an RPG, disabled, and left behind to be burned by the mob. Two wounded Iraqi soldiers needed helicopter evacuation. An American soldier had been shot in the face and killed protecting the convoy. Garcia admired the bravery of the American soldiers from the 1st Battalion of the 36th Infantry in the four Humvees. Throughout the fight they had driven up and down the gauntlet, ensuring no one was left behind.
Once the trucks had circled in a solid defense, more than a dozen Iraqi soldiers changed into civilian clothes and ran away at high speed. The Marine advisers were dumbfounded. The Iraqi officers, who had resolutely refused to surrender the Americans to the mob, shrugged. The soldiers lived in the area, they explained, so they wouldn’t be harmed.
When the officers showed no leadership, the advisers took charge, setting the Iraqis on line, sighting in fields of fire for the machine guns, insisting that two-man fighting holes be dug around the perimeter. The Iraqi officers stood and watched. The Marines were angry that an undisciplined, chaotic mob—a wild surge of mankind without any coordination or unified purpose—had flummoxed the 2nd Battalion and forced it into pell-mell retreat.
“We were embarrassed. We expected the battalion to behave better. They should have easily controlled that mob,” Davis said.
Chagrined, Davis called Maj Lane in Fallujah, explaining that the battalion had to return to base to regroup. They would pick up more ammunition and fly out by helicopter that night. As they piled back onto the trucks, the Marines took muster: two Iraqis were wounded and twenty-eight were “missing in action,” having deserted.
During the ride back there was excited jabbering in the trucks, and when they arrived at the airfield, dozens of Iraqi soldiers approached Lane, proffering their ID cards. We quit, they said. We won’t die in Fallujah. It was an American plot for Shiites to attack Sunnis, they said—the Americans had led them into an ambush. The Americans could have sent tanks to crush the mob; instead they wanted the Iraqi soldiers to be massacred.
Other Iraqi soldiers pressed forward, chanting at the mutineers, “Cowards! Cowards!” The Iraqi officers stood off to the side. Fallujah was an American problem, they said; it was wrong for Iraqi soldiers to fight there.
Maj Davis ordered the Marines to take the weapons of one hundred agitators, who were placed in a gymnasium under guard. They would be stricken from the payrolls and dismissed the next day, along with the battalion and company commanders. Davis took the roll call again. Of 695 soldiers, eight were wounded, 106 had deserted, and 104 had mutinied. Thirty percent of the battalion had evaporated.
Davis called Lane. “We’ve had a mutiny,” he said. “We’re not coming to Fallujah.”
8
____
THE TIPPING POINT
WHILE THE MARINES WERE ASSESSING THEIR next steps in Fallujah, the insurgents were preparing a major offensive against another city. On April 5, electronic intercepts and agent reports vaguely suggested trouble might be brewing in the provincial capital of Ramadi, thirty miles west of Fallujah. With 400,000 people, Ramadi was larger than Fallujah, with narrower streets and smaller houses, and the same dingy, crowded atmosphere. The largest and most vibrant city in Anbar, Ramadi was the seat of the senior Sunni mufti and the only Anbar city with a smidgen of influence in Baghdad. Ramadi was the tipping point, the pivotal city that signified whether the insurgents or the government controlled Anbar Province. The vague warnings of an insurgent offensive did not signal any grave danger, though; the city had been relatively peaceful for a year.
In mid-March the Marines had relieved an Army National Guard unit, the 1st Battalion of the 124th Infantry Regiment, in Ramadi. Stretched thin, the battalion had mixed nighttime raids with daytime mounted patrols, primarily along the main avenues. The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Hector Mirable, had tried to persuade the tribes to patrol their own sectors. He spread $700,000 in contracts among the sheikhs, but few projects were completed. “The sheikhs claimed to be the power brokers. But they hoarded the money for their own families and the others got little,” Mirable said. “The sooner the sheikh system goes away, the better.”
The new battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Kennedy, had decided to concentrate on military tactics and avoid Iraqi politics. Mirable had kept a lid on the violence, guarding the heart of the city, but Kennedy set a more ambitious goal: control of the whole city. A former instructor in infantry tactics, Kennedy told Battalion 2/4 that they would concentrate upon foot patrols. “Let’s work for the reputation that we’re everywhere,” Kennedy told his company commanders. “There’s no place we won’t go, night or day. We’re going to own this city.”
The governor of the province, Kareem Burgis, invited the battalion staff to dinner and endorsed the concept. Kennedy had received a glowing report about Burgis from Keith Mines, the senior CPA adviser who was leaving the city as Kennedy arrived. A special forces major in the reserves who had spent years in the jungles of Latin America, Mines was a diplomat who understood insurgencies. He referred to Burgis as “my key Iraqi partner and the unifier of the region’s various factions.” Mines, who believed Ramadi was coming along nicely, talked Burgis up in Baghdad, calling the governor “a man of vision and moderation who shares our goals.”
With the support of the governor, the Marines spread out across the city. Kennedy set up headquarters on Hurricane Point at the western end of Ramadi, a small peninsula jutting out into the Euphrates. He kept with him Weapons Company as the battalion’s Quick Reaction Force. From a nearby base, Fox Company patrolled daily. The eastern end was covered by Echo and Golf Companies, based three kilometers down Route Michigan, the main highway that ran through the middle of the city, in a walled compound called the Combat Outpost.
Eight-hour foot patrols became the routine. For the first few days, traffic in the c
ity slowed as drivers stared in disbelief at the small groups of Americans, most escorted by packs of shouting children. Downtown Ramadi was eight kilometers long and five kilometers wide, containing 45,000 buildings. The Marines walked into neighborhoods miles away from main avenues and poked around courtyards where the dogs had never smelled an American. By the end of March, shin splints and bone bruises were common and even the fittest in the battalion were fatigued.
The patrols were wearing, too, on the insurgents, who resented Americans walking around wherever they pleased. One morning outside Hurricane Point the Marines found a scraggly gray donkey with “Bush” painted on one flank and “American forces” on the other. After washing off the paint, two corporals kept it as a pet until its smell and braying led to its banishment. A few days later the donkey came back looking for another meal, again with mocking graffiti on its flanks. Still, the insurgents hadn’t done anything to make it clear that they, and not these new Americans, owned the streets. It wasn’t clear who was awat, or soft cake—the Marines or the insurgents.
On April 5, when electronic intercepts picked up unusual chatter, Kennedy sought out Governor Burgis, who said he, too, had heard that something was brewing. The police chief, Muhammad Jaddan, warned Kennedy that the irahabin (or criminals, an Iraqi term for the insurgents) were bragging that they would kill many Americans. Every Iraqi policeman seemed to know the irahabin, yet not one had been arrested.
