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

by Bing West

  A few hours later Hadid called Toolan’s headquarters on Suleiman’s cell phone. The message was garbled, but the phone number was clear. Minutes later Hadid mockingly called Suleiman’s wife, who became hysterical, convinced that her two daughters would never again see their father.

  Later that day LtCol Jabar, who commanded the other National Guard battalion, was also kidnapped. Toolan wanted to organize a raid but didn’t know where to look in the city. He called in the city elders and officers in the police and the Fallujah Brigade, warning them to secure Suleiman’s release. They professed knowing nothing. A day later they said it was all a mistake that was being taken care of. A day after that they reported more ominous garbage about Suleiman entering a mosque in a tracksuit instead of in uniform, so he did not merit the protection of the shura. Suleiman’s tribe was trying to buy him back. It sounded like he would be beaten, then released. That had been the punishment meted out to the son of a less powerful sheikh a week earlier. The soles of the man’s feet had been beaten to bloody pulps and he would walk with canes for the rest of his life, but he was alive.

  Toolan hoped that Suleiman’s tribe—the Abu Mahdi—would react, but the tribe was cowed by the ruthlessness of Janabi and Hadid. Several days later Suleiman’s pulverized corpse was dumped on a road south of the mosque. The torso was burned pink, and the feet and legs were swollen and black. Toolan heard that Janabi and Hadid hadn’t set out to kill him. The usual beating had begun—bamboo canes lashing the soles of his feet, then proceeding up his legs. Instead of whimpering and agreeing to a confession, Suleiman had cursed his torturers, who responded by pouring boiling water on his chest. They then propped him up and videotaped his halting monologue that he was an American spy, working for Toolan. Hadid then sawed off his head.

  The next day the videotapes circulated in town, showing a weeping Suleiman, moments before his death, begging forgiveness for betraying the Iraqi people and an abject, sobbing Jabar pleading for his life, claiming that Suleiman had been an American agent. Janabi sent his minions to the compounds of the two National Guard battalions, where the soldiers promptly deserted, leaving behind their trucks and weapons. Jabar was never seen again. Terror had spawned its own biogenesis, the malevolence passing from Zarqawi to Hadid to Janabi, who had mutated from business opportunist to gangster to zealot torturer.

  When the CIA quickly turned up evidence that members of the police and the Fallujah Brigade had helped to engineer the kidnappings, Toolan exploded. In white-hot fury he summoned the leaders of the brigade, the police, and the National Guard to the Fallujah Liaison Center. There he accused them of betrayal and murder. The brigade and the police are finished, Toolan told them. “Insurgents have taken control of the town. I am not going to negotiate with them,” he said. “We fight right now to prevent losing Iraq, or else we’ll be paying the price for years to come.”

  He said anyone loyal to the Iraqi government had one week to get his family out of town. After that the Marines were treating everyone in that city with a weapon as an enemy, to be dealt with accordingly. “Everyone who wants to fight for the new Iraq,” Toolan said, “join us. If not, we’ll see you inside the city.”

  Staff officers in the MEF next door were furious that Toolan had taken matters into his own hands and had reacted without checking up the chain of command. But no senior Marine officer disagreed with Toolan’s command decision. At best the Fallujah Brigade had capitulated to the enemy; at worst it had been the enemy from the beginning.

  LtGen Conway and MajGen Mattis had returned to Iraq in March intending to work alongside the Iraqi forces while respecting the Sunni population. The decision to seize Fallujah and then not to seize it had knocked that strategy off course. Well-intentioned compromise had emboldened the insurgents. Now the theory that secular Baathists and senior Iraqi officers aligned with Baghdad could reclaim status and power in Fallujah lay in ruins.

  Mattis had made no secret of his judgment. “There’s only one way to disarm the Fallujah Brigade,” he said. “Kill it.”

  Toolan rolled tanks south outside Queens. As he expected, the insurgents rushed to man the earthen berm they had thrown up around the outskirts of the city, firing barrages of RPGs. The Abrams tanks maneuvered forward and eagerly returned the fire. The battle raged for several hours; the sounds were clearly heard back at the regimental headquarters. The staff called the episode “Toolan Tunes.” The regiment was straining at the leash.

  According to the New York Times, Allawi, despite Suleiman’s murder and UAV videos of terrorist safe houses, had promised not to permit large-scale American attacks while Janabi was considering halting insurgent attacks. “Keep the noise down,” higher headquarters in Baghdad told the MEF, not wanting a full-scale battle in Fallujah to upset Iraqi political maneuverings. The MEF was sympathetic with Toolan’s instinct but had to call him off. The tanks pulled back after a battle of several hours.

  “Keep the noise down,” the MEF told a simmering division.

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  ____

  ALL OF THIS FOR NOTHING?

  WITH THE IRAQIS, IT WAS DIFFICULT sorting out friend from foe and what motivated resistance. Stability in the Sunni areas required an amalgam of political compromise, economic blandishment, and superior firepower. It was a Mafioso game that only Iraqis could master, and in late summer the new Iraqi government was off to a slow start.

  Spontaneous professions of gratitude for the sacrifices Americans had made to liberate Iraq were few. When President Bush congratulated Iraq’s soccer team for its excellent play during the August Olympics in Athens, the team reacted with outrage. The coach exclaimed, “Bush helps destroy our country.” Ahmed Manajid, a midfielder and a resident of Fallujah, said his cousin had been killed fighting as an insurgent, and if he weren’t playing soccer, he too would be an insurgent. “I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists?” Manajid said. “Everyone [in Fallujah] has been labeled a terrorist. These are all lies. Fallujah people are some of the best people in Iraq.”

  The best people, however, weren’t opposing the insurgents who had taken over their city. Finding volunteers for the National Guard in Fallujah while its athletes went to Athens was proving next to impossible. Under Ambassador Bremer’s plan of a year before, the U.S. Congress had authorized $18 billion in aid for Iraq over a two-year period; less than 20 percent of the funding was to go to Iraqi security forces. The CPA view was that the rebuilding of the infrastructures of electricity, oil, water, and sewage would provide the underpinnings for a burgeoning economy offering jobs and undercutting the insurgency. A year later most monies had not been spent due to the skyrocketing costs of protecting the workers, congressional “Buy America” restrictions, and the challenge of administering contracts during a war.

  While the CPA had planned on deploying at least twelve thousand trained Iraqi soldiers by September, the actual number deployed was half that. The new U.S. ambassador, John Negroponte, had requested that the security budget proposed by Bremer be doubled to $6.6 billion. Money, though, wouldn’t put effective Iraqi soldiers on the streets in Ramadi or Fallujah as long as the insurgents were the intimidators fighting with the blessing of the Sunni imams.

  Allawi’s strategic alternative was to reduce the number of insurgents by persuasion instead of by battle. Moderate Sunni Baathist insurgents appeared to be an oxymoron, but wooing them was the course Allawi doggedly was pursuing as the summer ended.

  While in exile in London a decade earlier, Dr. Allawi and his wife had been severely wounded by Saddam’s ax-wielding assassins. Despite those terrible wounds Allawi tried to work with secular Baathists, believing that goodwill and dialogue could substitute for raw force and violence. At the least negotiations would indicate he had tried to be reasonable. Allawi was convinced that rational dialogue would yield beneficial results. “I said to them, and to [delegations from] Ramadi and Fallujah, ‘Okay, for the sake of argument, let me assume the multinat
ional forces will leave. What do you think will happen?” Allawi said. “You know what they answered? I swear to God, they said: ‘Catastrophe. Iraq will be dismembered.’ ”

  Allawi met in Baghdad with the leaders from Ramadi, pitching that Ramadi should not embrace impoverishment for the cause of radical Islam. Not one post in the Iraqi government was held by a representative from Anbar Province. Baghdad could treat Ramadi as hostile, controlled by military force and neglected economically, a mirror image of how the Sunnis had treated the Shiites and a sure guarantee of a never-ending insurgency. Allawi indicated that that path was self-defeating for all parties. Instead, the city elders had to marginalize the insurgents and turn them away. If they did not, Ramadi faced a bleak future.

  Ramadi was not improving. Having lost in open battle in April, the insurgents had reverted to their tried-and-true intimidation tactics. The humiliation and exile of Governor Burgis had gravely weakened the city’s political structure. The security was similarly damaged by the downfall of the top cop. The provincial police chief, Jaddan, had been the friendly rascal in Ramadi who had befriended LtCol Mirable a year ago and had warned Kennedy about the attack last April. The 82nd staff knew he was padding his payroll, but he turned in IEDs and wanted to get along. He wasn’t mean or thuggish; his police didn’t beat up people. He was taking a cut when he could, trying to navigate a nice, reasonable life through swift currents.

  The insurgents tried to kill Jaddan three times during the summer. On the last attempt, in July, his eighteen-year-old son lost his leg. LtCol Kennedy wasn’t sure whether the assailants were insurgents or criminals disgruntled about a botched payoff. Whatever the reasons, Jaddan began to cooperate with the insurgents. After Governor Burgis fled to Jordan as a broken man, ODA had dug into the actions of the police who had abandoned their posts. In late August Kennedy arrested Jaddan for complicity in the kidnapping of the governor’s sons.

  In early September Battalion 2/4 and LtCol Kennedy returned to the States, understanding of but not sympathetic to Ramadi’s basic contradiction: the residents feared turning into another Fallujah, under the whips of the jihadists; yet they were fence-sitters who, as had happened in Fallujah, in a frenzy would drag an American body through the streets. Americans could keep a lid on the military growth of the insurgents, but only Iraqi leaders could bring the city over to the government’s side. And in Ramadi, where the governor had fled and the police chief had been arrested, that wasn’t happening. Ramadi had settled into a routine of short, desultory skirmishes punctuated by IEDs and suicide bombers. The insurgents controlled the population, while the Americans controlled the main streets and highways. The Iraqi government had yet to make an impact.

  _____

  In late August MajGen Mattis was nominated for three-stars and left to take command of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Virginia. LtGen Conway would also be leaving. All the battalions in the division would follow in the next several weeks as their seven-month rotations ended.

  Mattis understood the nature of the combat. His small “jump” command element convoy had been hit by IEDs on three occasions and engaged in three extended firefights. In April his aide, Lieutenant Steven Thompson, was severely injured. In May Staff Sergeant Jorge Molinabautista was killed outside Fallujah, and in June Lance Corporal Jeremy L. Bohlman was killed in Ramadi.

  “Staff Sergeant Molinabautista was devoted to his family and kind towards the young men in the Jump—I trusted him totally,” Mattis said. “Bohlman was keenly attentive on patrol and high-spirited off duty. He was a lot of fun for the rest of the team to have around.”

  On the eve of the campaign to overthrow the Saddam regime in March of 2003, Mattis had told his Marines that “on your young shoulders rest the hopes of mankind.” When he left Anbar Province in August of 2004, he did not talk about the liberation of Iraqis. At the end of their tours, MajGen Swannack and LtGen Sanchez had spoken in optimistic tones about progress in Anbar. When Mattis left, he exuded no such confident optimism. There was no soaring rhetoric. Instead, he focused on soldierly virtues. He read to his Marines a poem by Lieutenant Andre Zirnheld that stressed ascetism and belief in each other.

  “ ‘Give me, God, what no one else asks for;

  I ask not for wealth, or for success or health;

  People ask you so often for all that,

  That you cannot have any left.

  Give me what people refuse to accept from you.

  “ ‘‘ want insecurity and disquietude,

  I want turmoil and the brawl.

  If you should give them to me,

  Let me be sure to have them always,

  For I will not always have the courage to ask for them.’

  “May God be with you, my fine young Marines,

  As you head out once again

  Into the heat of the Iraqi sun,

  Into the still of the dark night,

  To close with the enemy.

  “Beside you, I’d do it all again. Semper Fidelis.”

  s/ Mattis

  September marked a turnover month. Olson’s battalion (2/1), responsible for patrolling outside Fallujah, had few Iraqi security forces to turn over to the next battalion. After Suleiman was murdered, it was a week before some Iraqi soldiers straggled back to their looted posts. Since then they had been provided new officers, but the officers showed up for duty only haphazardly and avoided any encounters with the insurgents.

  “We have to start from scratch,” Olson said.

  On September 7, as Battalion 2/1 was preparing to turn over its area, a suicide bomber drove a car into a convoy from Fox Company, killing seven Marines. Toolan struck back the next day, sending a tank company down the highway south of the cloverleaf and parallel to the filthy industrial zone where Byrne’s 1/5 had fought in April. Sure enough, the insurgents rushed out to the berm and began firing RPGs and mortars. The fight raged all day, with the Marines surging forward three blocks deep. But lacking any authority to prosecute an offensive operation, at the end of the day the regiment withdrew its forces from the city.

  The tragedy of the suicide bombing was a bitter send-off to a stalwart unit, deepening the resentment toward the sanctuary of Fallujah, which the Marines called “the bomb factory.” Lingering among the Marines was the basic question: what are we going to do about Fallujah?

  In early September the mother of Corporal Nathan R. Bush spoke for many Marines in an interview. “It appears to me that not a lot has changed,” she said. “They went in there to bring Fallujah back to the norm and get rid of the insurgents and that didn’t happen. I don’t like to think my son went through all of this for nothing.”

  _____

  By early September, from Toolan’s regiment to the White House, there was a solid consensus that the status quo in Fallujah was intolerable. “The whole Fallujah Brigade thing was a fiasco,” said Colonel Jerry L. Durrant, who oversaw the MEF’s training of Iraqi forces. In Washington the secretary of defense was similarly blunt. “The Fallujah Brigade didn’t work,” Rumsfeld told reporters. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed with the secretary. “The situation in Fallujah is unacceptable,” Gen Myers said.

  In Baghdad, Prime Minister Allawi’s negotiations with Janabi had gone nowhere. As for the performance of the Iraqi security forces, he accused the CPA and Ambassador Bremer of leaving him with “confusion and the problems of the military and police.” The fifty-nine-year-old formerly exiled leader was equally critical of the Fallujah Brigade. “We did not want this brigade to persist. It was a wrong concept,” he said. “We don’t want militias to be formed in provinces. We don’t agree with what the CPA did.”

  Making no mention of his own wooing of former Baathists or his opposition to the Marine attack in April, Allawi disbanded the Fallujah Brigade, formally finishing what Toolan had done weeks earlier.

  It was a maestro bureaucratic performance all around. Senior American and Iraqi officials proved equally nimble in lauding the Fallujah Br
igade in May and damning it in September, without explaining how the Coalition’s boldest political-military gamble since the fall of Baghdad had ended so disastrously. After Toolan demanded they choose sides, only four of the six hundred members of the Fallujah Brigade crossed over to the Marine side. Every institution involved in establishing the Fallujah Brigade castigated it later and acted as if it had nothing to do with its creation.

  In the States, Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for the presidency, was criticizing President Bush for vacillating about Fallujah. He was tilting at a windmill, however, as the newspapers were full of stories about the Marines preparing to reattack.

  “From the regimental perspective, in mid-September it looked like someone high up threw a switch,” Major David Bellon said. “No more keeping the noise down. Instead, suddenly we’re told: Get ready to go in. It was great, great news.”

  To prevent any backsliding, the Marines kept the pressure on by using the press to convey what they believed had to be done. “We need to make a decision on when the cancer of Fallujah is going to be cut out,” a senior Marine commander said in mid-September, repeating what LtCol Drinkwine had recommended eight months earlier.

  The continuous string of kidnappings, beheadings, and car bombings had shaken the city’s staunchest supporters among Baghdad’s political elite. Sunni politicians like Hachim Hassani were quiet. Allawi began a two-pronged campaign, privately agreeing with Gen Casey that planning for an offensive to seize Fallujah should proceed, while publicly urging Fallujah’s city elders to negotiate.

  “We waited so long,” Dunford said, “because Baghdad looked on Fallujah as a sideshow. The division wanted to seize Fallujah quickly in August, even though the fight at Najaf was ongoing. But the links among suicide bombings across Iraq, foreign fighters, IEDs, kidnappings, and the Fallujah sanctuary weren’t as clear to others. It took higher headquarters longer to see the consequences of allowing the sanctuary to grow.”