The Second Battle of Fallujah
Failure to close the cordon around the city allowed insurgents to take the fight to the Americans in a dozen or more other cities, and the powerful devastation by American guns spreads country-wide
by William Kay
 Any cook will tell you to smother a stove-top grease-fire with a lid rather than douse it with cold water. This will only give you thirty little fires to contend with.
On November 2, the big fire within the Iraqi insurgency was at Fallujah—a city of 300,000 governed by insurgents since April, and the source of much regional instability. Two weeks after the attempt to douse Fallujah, the Americans are now fighting large flames in Baghdad, Ramadi, Baquba, Samara, numerous smaller cities of the Sunni triangle, and most severely in Mosul.
The enduring mystery concerns the US cordon policy during this Second Battle of Fallujah. There was much pre-battle bluster from the Colonel of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division brigade, brought in to enforce the cordon, about how the insurgents “shall not fight and runaway and live to fight another day.” However, the cordon was not really cinched around Fallujah until late Sunday, November 7 when the attack was only hours away.
At the same time, this was the most “telegraphed” invasion of them all. The build-up to 15,000 troops around Fallujah took weeks, with some aspects, like the Black Watch deployment, described in detail in the media. The Americans broadcasted, bull-horned, and leafleted Fallujans for months warning of an invasion and telling them to leave. Artillery shelling and aerial bombardment began six months ago. In the week preceding the invasion, the Army and Marines began doing fully mechanized feints, roaring up to city limits in tanks and armoured personnel carriers (APC), pretending to attack, only to roar off again. Military officers and the interim Iraqi “prime minister” repeatedly told the media an attack on Fallujah was imminent. It came as no surprise.
During this time, Fallujan insurgents debated what portion of them should stay and what portion flee. They were split between those who thought 80% should flee and those favouring a fifty-fifty deal. The latter faction won out.
By the time the Bradley APCs drove up to the railway tracks along Fallujah's northern limits, half the insurgent force (probably totalling 2,500 to 3,500 full-time warriors) had slipped out of town. They fled disguised amongst the stream of refugees by day, or they darted along secret pathways at night, or they drifted down the Euphrates at dusk.
More may have left during the first days of fighting. There were reports of the cordon becoming porous—there were sightings of carloads of masked men talking on satellite phones driving out of the city. During this time the cordon came under sustained mortar fire from inside the city, which 1 st Cavalry commanders interpreted as being part of a complex operation to break out more insurgents. In any event, approximately one-half to two-thirds of the roughly 3,000 insurgents emerged from the Second Battle of Fallujah unscathed.
This is classic guerrilla strategy made quicker by the existence of wide highways and multitudes of Mercedes. The bulk of the “Fallujan” insurgent leaders drove to Mosul, Ramadi and to small towns around Fallujah, moving from bunker to bunker in a couple of hours, with armed escort.
Mao learned the hard way that the guerrilla army must suppress the impulse to stand their ground and fight protracted battles. Keep running away and keep booby-trapping your trail. Break into small groups and blend into the civilian population. Force the enemy down to small patrols, convoys and sentries. Secretly congregate and only attack when you have a decisive element of surprise and outnumber the enemy.
Also true to classic guerrilla warfare form, the main front in this war (and the least talked about front) is the “convoy war” or the “highway war.” It is in their small convoys, patrols, and out-postings where the Americans are taking the hits. If not for air transport—principally helicopter—this war would be over.
The Second Battle of Fallujah began with 6,000 Army and Marine soldiers stationed north of town and 1,000 die-hard rear-detail insurgents peaking out from darkened basement windows around the city's perimeter. The battlefield was several thousand low-rise concrete, flat-topped, buildings interspersed with mosques spread across a four-square-kilometre sandy plain beside a wide bending river.
Estimates of the number of civilians in Fallujah Monday morning November 8 will be debated by historians, but the figures bandied about are from 30,000 to 100,000, with subsequent events favouring the lesser side of the range.
The 11,000 US Army and Marine soldiers and 850 Black Watchmen in and around Fallujah were graced with the accompaniment of 2,500 Iraqi National Guard (ING) troops.
The main assault was undertaken by four Marine and two Army battalions with the remaining forces devoted to maintaining the cordon and bringing in supplies, reinforcements and medi-vacs. “Battalions” number around 1,000 troops each and are usually managed by a Lt Colonel who answers to the Colonel overseeing the brigade to which the battalion belongs. The battalion is divided into several companies each managed by a Captain. A “company” of troops, usually numbering 150 to 180, is said to be the largest formation in which the commanding officer can actually know each member: “Sergeant Jones don't take Smith with you, take Corporal Green, and Bellenson, are you on acid again?” The Captain is the highest ranking officer directly in harms way—witness Captain Sims, first man in on a Fallujan house raid recently. The company is the largest organizational level where the commanding officer can group together and address all troops in a combat situation, and the company is the unit level at which the Second Battle of Fallujah is best understood.
The battle began Sunday November 7 when a company captured Fallujah General Hospital which, conveniently for the Americans, was on the outskirts of the city. The hospital capture was pure “information warfare” doctrine. Local hospital reports are the most credible accounts of civilian casualties. In previous battles, reports of large numbers of dead and wounded civilians negatively affected the military campaign. News about atrocities is bad. Thus, the source of these bad reviews was closed before the show opened. No hospital, no hospital blues. A US officer told New York Times reporters that Fallujah General was seized for propaganda reasons. During the battle, US forces were quick to grab lesser hospitals and emergency wards throughout the city.
Prior to the actual invasion, the bombardment of Fallujah became Dresdenian. Several howitzers lobbed flocks of shells. F-15Es dropped “casualty-lite” 500 lb bombs until Sunday night when they switched back to using 2,000 pounders, particularly around the railway tracks. When the invasion began, two fully-loaded AC-130 Spectre aircraft were circling Fallujah. (These are mammoth four-propeller weaponized air-freighters. They carry three large machine guns, but most menacingly, a 105 mm gun, the sort found atop a main battle tank. The AC-130 can fire building-destroying football-sized shells filled with high density explosives at the same rate of fire as an assault rifle with reasonable accuracy at a distance of four or five kilometres while circling at 300 kph). Within hours, the two AC-130s returned to base, not for refuelling (they are refuelled in flight) but because they emptied their entire arsenals into the rows of houses facing out onto the railway embankment.
Each of the six participating battalions has three attack companies: Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. The rest of the battalion protects their rear, defends headquarters, and runs food, ammo and orders up to the three lead Captains. Early on, during that fateful Monday morning, 18 columns of Bradleys rushed out of the desert to the railway tracks. In front of them, tanks and bulldozers were at work destroying mines and obstacles. When the Sergeants shouted “ramp down,” out the back of the Bradleys charged 3,000 or more American GIs spaced out in companies east to west along the track. These troops crouched behind armoured vehicles or the railway embankment while others launched 100-metre-long hoses loaded with explosives. When the hoses exploded, they blasted away landmines on either side, thus creating a safe mine-free pathway. When the anti-mine hoses blasted, the GIs clambered over the embankment and scurried like clumsy turtles with their 75 pound packs, down the freshly made path to Fallujah's first row of buildings. They came under rifle, rocket and mortar attack from a hundred different locations. Scores of GIs were hit. They returned fire, and it was game on.
The Lt Colonels gave each Captain a list of objectives. These were various buildings or clusters of buildings within Fallujah. They were buildings of tactical importance, such as for snipers' nests or to guard a particular intersection, or they were buildings of political significance, such as government buildings and mosques, or they could be buildings known to house insurgents etc. The Captain was handed a list of addresses and ordered to storm and occupy each address on the list. If he couldn't occupy the objective location, he should surely destroy it attempting to do so. Each target was several blocks deeper south into Fallujah. Each cluster of buildings a company occupies is used as a snipers' nest and left with rear-detail squadron to defend it. Each objective becomes a “lily-pad” as the company leap-frogs across Fallujah. They were not searching all buildings in the vicinity. They were grabbing a few buildings in each neighbourhood and moving on. They were grabbing less than 1% of Fallujan real estate – a school here, five blocks up the road a cluster of tightly packed brick houses, eight blocks up the road a mosque and so forth.
Each company saw a different war. Some were downtown Fallujah in no time; others made it to the first row of houses on the other side of the tracks only after 24 hours of slogging. In the first day of battle the US took a dozen dead and over 100 seriously wounded.
One company met with little resistance until they hit Fallujah's main drag, where for an entire day a single sniper prevented the company from crossing the street. They called in howitzer strikes, tank strikes, and even an air-strike to kill the one sniper. At one point, they spotted the sniper avoiding tank fire by bicycling quickly down the long hallways of the building. When the entire complex was demolished by an air strike the sniper resumed shooting from the dusty rubble.
Late that night the company pushed south past the sniper and encountered a heavily defended apartment complex. They called in a tank which unloaded ten rounds into the building before being disabled by an RPG. A subsequent tank was called in; it too was disabled by an RPG. A third tank's engine mysteriously cracked, leading to a period of intense bickering amongst captain, sergeants and corporals, all ducking behind immobile hulks of armour. It was decided what they really needed was sleep. A corporal was dispatched to see if a nearby building had sleeping accommodations. The door was booby-trapped. It blew his leg off. The company Captain who was rock-solid in the early battles—no flinching or cowering under fire for him—was a week later seen running around in the gun-smoke calling out and cussing a radio operator who, his underlings were afraid to tell him, had been dead for days.
Regardless, the company lined up lily-pads all the way to the southern city limits of Fallujah in five days, taking six dead and 36 seriously wounded. (A little worse than average.)
In another company, a single platoon, almost a single Sergeant, was doing all the killing. As the company pounced from location to location deeper into Fallujah, they found that frequently, the target buildings were vacated or offered little resistance. When hostile fire came from a targeted building, a certain Sergeant would arrive in a Bradley and, while the Bradley's 20 mm cannon pulverized the building, the Sergeant paced back and forth furiously behind the vehicle, screaming to psyche himself up. When the cannon stopped, he ran head first through the nearest door, then from room to room, machine gun blazing. Sometimes he even stopped by a window to pick off insurgents trying to flee. Then the clean-up crew went in and the rest of the company followed.
By four or five days, the companies had leap-frogged from one end of Fallujah to the other. Each company had a reliable row of over a dozen lily-pads behind them. Hence they had control of all key intersections and had made hundreds of snipers' nests. And then they declared victory. At this point, thousands of additional troops, including over 2,000 ING, were brought into to do comprehensive searches and bury bodies.
As of November 23, US forces control about 40% of Fallujah. Armed bands of ragtag remnants roam freely about the rubble in many neighbourhoods. Rubble or half-blown apart buildings are preferred by the urban warrior partly because the enemy psychologically doesn't like to half blow things up again and again. Also, the jagged, broken buildings with their smoke, dust and unusual lines and colours make them easier to hide in than in an undamaged building. In the major urban conflicts of WWII, the transition from a battlefield of upright buildings to a field of rubble was an early battle phase.
The Americans control a few hundred lily pads (small neighbourhoods, mosque compounds, industrial parks) and the area with direct and clear sniper and Bradley 20 mm cannon range around the lily pad. Beyond that, it's all shadows and zombies, stray dogs and corpses, against a backdrop of smouldering ruins. At day 14 of the battle, a week after declaring victory, US troops are coming under repeated assaults, some involving mortars. The Americans are still using air and artillery strikes in Fallujah.
The Americans are telling the 250,000 refugees not to expect to return home until February. The Americans are complaining that Fallujan insurgents are slipping back into the city. Many allegedly swim into Falluja down the Euphrates. Insurgent strength seems stabilizing at the 400 range.
Grim Tidings From the Captain
Courageous young Marine officers from the Fallujan field leaked a dire report this week. The burning question is whether or not the two US Army brigades, on loan from the neighbouring divisions but currently serving under the Marines, should be allowed to return to their home forts now that the “battle is over.” The report is basically an example of the Marines way of crooning, “Don't leave me this way.”
The operation to take Fallujah started with 14,000 troops. Of these, 2,500 are Iraqi nationals who, although useful in some situations, are highly unreliable in combat. Moreover, a sizable fraction of the Iraqi National Guard is actually working for the insurgents. As well, the insurgents are mastering the war-crime of wearing enemy uniforms. The ING are a drain during combat.
That leaves 11,500 troops, but only two US Army Stryker battalions left to fight in Mosul. Two of the six battalions engaged inside Fallujah are Army. The cordon, such as it is, is principally the work of a loaned brigade from the US Army's 1 st Cavalry Division whose commanders are busy looking after Baghdad. If these Army units go back to their home divisions, it will leave 6,500 Marines in and around Fallujah. But the Marines have already suffered casualties in the range of 40 dead and 400 wounded, plus a few hundred injured and sick. (Total Army and Marine combat casualties in and around Fallujah this month is 75 dead 600 seriously wounded.)
So it's more like 5,800 Marines who, in addition to holding down the insurgency and keeping themselves supplied, must now look after 1,500 hostile male Fallujan detainees and keep back tens of thousands of returning refugees, in addition to keeping an eye on their own ING.
There were around 1,000 stand-and-fight insurgents in Fallujah. US military claims of over 1,200 dead and 1,500 detained are deception. The detainees are merely suspects, the vast majority of whom would not fit the definition of insurgent, although most will actively join the cause once released from US military custody. The insurgent “killed-in-action” figure is reminiscent of the Five O'Clock follies of the Vietnam War, when military public relations officers would brief the press with invariably outlandish estimates of enemy killed. The figure being used in Fallujah is an estimate, with the vast majority of the killed presumed to have died from air to ground bombardment. No one actually saw a body fall. They were estimating over 1,000 dead before a series of news reports showed how surprised they were to find so few corpses of insurgents. In terms of propaganda, the Americans must win every day. If there are US casualties, enemy casualties must be much worse. To report otherwise is defeatism bordering on treason.
More likely, several hundred insurgents were killed or seriously wounded, mostly from air-to-ground fire from high-calibre, high-speed, electric Gattling guns fired from Cobra helicopters or carrier-launched US Navy F-18 Hornets, against which Fallujan walls and floors offer no sanctuary. For the insurgents, the most effective scythe of death so far is the sniper rifle, accounting for 50% of casualties. The survivors continue to bolster their ranks from among the internal refugees, and from insurgents sneaking back into the city, often via the Euphrates. There remains an unvanquished force of three to four hundred fighters in Fallujah moving about in semi-organized squads and platoons.
The Marine Captains and Lt Colonels forecast that as Fallujan refugees return home, many are going to demand compensation for damage to their property and speedy reconstruction of public utilities. The unconquered Fallujan insurgency will infiltrate this delicate process with violent protests, suicide bombers, assassinations and intimidation. If the Army leaves, the Marines will only be able to sustain around 2,000 troops inside Fallujah's city limits. The steady drip of “one-dead-three-wounded” this day and “two-killed-in-ambush” the next can creep up on a Colonel. It means a couple hundred soldiers per month coming out of Fallujah on stretchers or in body bags. In a few months, the Marine Colonels near Fallujah will be feeling acute personnel shortages. Hence, if the Army leaves, the Marines are in for a doozy. But the Army Generals need their battalions back. Oh to be a fly on the headquarters' wall to hear Generals Casey, Chiarelli, Sattler and Abizaid hammer out where they go from here.
Mosul Erupts
There was no question about the decision to withdraw two Stryker battalions from the Fallujan theatre and send them back to Mosul on November 12.
Mosul, with a population of around two million, the “pearl of the north,” would not have made the top ten list of violent centres in Iraq in early November 2004. Baghdad was more turbulent than Mosul, as was Ramadi, Samara, Baquba, and Tal Afar, to say nothing of Najaf and Fallujah. Kut, Karbala and even Basra have seen more action than Mosul. Nevertheless, there has been insurgent activity going on in Mosul since the war began. There was a full-time insurgent community in Mosul, primarily comprised of Sunni-Ba'athite, which was undertaking routing and complex acts of sabotage and assault. Mosul, far more so than Fallujah, was a known bastion of Ba'athite support and a favourite residence of Saddam's military elite.
When the decision was made by the Fallujan insurgency to break up and head for the dunes in advance of the American bombardment, a large contingent sped to Mosul. A US government intelligence report describes a sharp up-tick in insurgent politicizing (postering and meetings) at the beginning of November, a week before the attack on Fallujah. About a dozen different Islamist and Nationalist insurgent groups were, by November 2, openly recruiting and using main Sunni Mosques as their bases of operations. Just prior to the invasion of Fallujah, there were a number of attacks on US forces in Mosul—car bombings, ambushes etc—frequently with lethal consequences.
Two days after the beginning of the US assault on Fallujah, an organized series of raids swept across Mosul. Convoys of four-door cars loaded with insurgents, some over a dozen vehicles long, raced to, and over-ran, 16 police stations. Within hours, the 5,000 man US-sponsored Mosul police force vanished. The insurgents looted 1,000 uniforms, hundreds of machine guns with ammo, and 50 new squad cars. A few days later, the Stryker Brigade was back in town for a day of what the Colonel called “frankly, hard–fighting.” Several police stations were taken back whilst several were destroyed. Conflicting reports have the Strykers in control of three or five of the cities six main bridges.
Now there are two smallish battalions of Strykers totalling 1,200 troops in Mosul accompanied by 1,200 Kurdish militiamen, the deployment of which is extremely controversial. The Americans are struggling to cast an outward buzz of calm about Mosul. But Mosul simmers. In the week following the American blast back into control of Mosul's key bridges and police stations, the Americans have fought over twenty gun battles and have been repeatedly hit with car bombs and mortars, taking casualties from both. Much of the day is taken up with quiet patrols on foot or in Humvees around the protected perimeter of the lily pad whilst scouring for enemy reconnaissance. There is a pair of binoculars poking out of every minaret. Down the street, out of earshot from the Army scouts, large raucous crowds of Sunni Arabs watched insurgents cut the heads off Kurdish militiamen.
So the Generals, who saw flames in Fallujah and smashed into the city, have spread those flames from Ramadi to Baghdad to Mosul. Had a sealed cordon been placed around Fallujah a fortnight earlier and been maintained throughout the battle, it would be a much different war. The Americans still control the pace of the war. The sudden ratcheting up of the body count is the result of their decisions. But time is not on their side. The insurgency grows whether the Americans harass it or not.
Like the Romans, they make a desert and they call it peace.
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