US vows to strike at insurgents

BAGHDAD -- American military commanders yesterday said they would respond to the mutilation of four American contractors in the city of Fallujah by launching an overwhelming counteroffensive against Iraqi insurgents, but would not rush in and make the situation worse.

Taking the unusual step of telegraphing their plans, military officials said that US forces would soon return to the center of Fallujah, about 30 miles west of Baghdad. They said they would rely on a combination of pinpoint raids and rewards for the local population that has helped quell unrest in some Iraqi cities.

US forces recently ceded much of the control of the town to Iraqi police, even though it is in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle, which has seen the most violent resistance to the occupation.

"We will be back in Fallujah," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said in Baghdad. "It will be at the time and place of our choosing. We will hunt down the criminals. We will kill them, or we will capture them. And we will pacify Fallujah."

Kimmitt's pledge contrasted with the cautious US response in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, when American troops did not intervene as a crowd desecrated the bodies. It also highlighted the conundrum Fallujah has posed through three troop rotations.

US military strategists have repeatedly failed to solve the puzzle of the Sunni Triangle insurgents, who have fought on relentlessly as commanders have tried to crush them with force, win them over with public works projects, woo them with political power, and lately, avoid them by withdrawing to the city's fringes.

Yesterday, Marines continued to be cautious in their response to the gruesome attacks, staying out of the central city. News reports said Iraqi police retrieved the charred remains of the four Americans hours later, at the request of the US military.

Family members identified three of the four victims yesterday as Jerko "Jerry' Zovko, 32, of suburban Cleveland; Michael Teague, 38, of Clarksville, Tenn.; and Scott Helvenston, 38, of Leesburg, Fla. The fourth victim has not been identified. The group worked worked for Blackwater Security Consulting of Moyock, N.C., which provides training and guard services.

Yesterday, three soldiers were wounded in a roadside bombing near Fallujah and six Iraqis were killed in a bombing in nearby Ramadi.

A US military official in Baghdad said yesterday that Marines chose to stay out of Fallujah after the contractors were killed because they would have inflamed the situation. "If they had gone in to get the bodies, they would have been attacked, and a lot of Iraqi civilians would have been killed," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

But even while vowing to take aggressive action, US commanders were trying to determine how to retaliate without further riling the civilian population.

"We are not going to do a pell-mell rush into the city. It's going to be deliberate, it will be precise, and it will be overwhelming," Kimmitt said yesterday. "We will not rush in to make things worse."

Officials said a primary focus of the long-term Marine strategy will be to pump more money into building schools and health clinics to win over the civilian population.

However, when the Marines do return in force to the center of the city, they can expect fierce resistance. Fallujah earned its bloody reputation last April, shortly after the US-led coalition took control in Iraq. US soldiers killed 17 people after a crowd turned rowdy and shots were fired.

Since then, Fallujah has consistently been host to many of the worst clashes, even as violence has flared and subsided in other epicenters, like Samarra, Baqubah, Balad, and Mosul.

The city of Samarra was much quieter than Fallujah last summer, until the rate of attacks there grew to a worrisome level last December. The Fourth Infantry Division moved several battalions into Samarra in December, cordoned the entire city, and arrested hundreds of suspected insurgents.

Attacks against American soldiers have subsided significantly there but the frequent roadside bombings and ambushes in Samarra and its environs show that US tactics have not fully diffused the insurgents.

In Samarra, Baqubah, and Tikrit, counterinsurgency operations benefited from the enormous amount of intelligence resources being brought to bear in the hunt for Saddam Hussein last summer and fall.A significant byproduct of that search was a vast library of information about arms dealers, guerrilla financiers, and former Ba'athists, many of whom were arrested in Samarra after Hussein's capture.

In December, commanders on the ground in Samarra worried that the dramatic show of force might have intimidated some guerilla sympathizers but would not deter the most committed insurgents; it would simply force them underground or to more hospitable terrain, like the area around Fallujah.

Now, Kimmitt said US troops "will go in, and just as they have done in so many other towns like Fallujah -- six months ago Samarra was a hot spot, Tikrit was a hot spot, Baqubah was a hot spot, and patient application of kinetic and nonkinetic combat power over time has proven to be the best measure for bringing these cities along."

At the same time, some military officials in Washington cautioned that Fallujah, a city of more than 200,000 people, may not respond as well as other Iraqi cities to the Americans' planned combination of raids and rewards.

"Fallujah has always been the center of resistance for whoever sits in Baghdad," said Colonel Paul D. Hughes, a senior military fellow at the National Defense University in Washington who returned from Iraq in January. "They pride themselves on being the renegades."

Other analysts said that US officials must not lose sight of the larger prize.

"The strategy is to fight a war and pacify a nation," said Anthony Cordesman, a military specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "We are involved in a process that if we are successful means the constant struggle with the enemy. As horrifying as these images were, they were four people."

Thanassis Cambanis reported from Baghdad and Bryan Bender from Washington.