Marines see little progress in rebel-controlled Fallujah
FALLUJAH, Iraq -- Six months after US Marines arrived with a promise to win over this rebel stronghold through intense outreach and focused military strikes, the city is "a cancer" that threatens to spread chaos around Iraq, Marine commanders said this week in a frank assessment.
Shoot-outs among rival gangs punctuate the nights. Insurgents also export violence to the rest of Iraq, and they impose religious restrictions on the population. The rebel-held city is risky to ignore, but a fight to bring it under control could blacken the image of the US-backed government, and no Iraqi force is ready to maintain security there afterward.
That is the Marines' view of Fallujah, from their main base on the outskirts of the city. Even as they pledge to solve the problem before national elections set for January, top Marine commanders in Iraq acknowledge they are facing many of the same problems that they hoped to solve in April -- yet the insurgents are more entrenched now and US forces are even less popular.
Iraq's government has pledged to seize control of trouble spots such as Fallujah, but any attempt must take into account the lessons learned when the US military and civilian occupation authority tried to impose order in April.
The biggest mistake the Marines cite is the stop-and-go assault on Fallujah, in which they were ordered to take the city, then told to halt their advance three days later -- abandoning their original plans for a softer, more diplomatic approach yet stopping short of a decisive victory. Now, in sovereign Iraq, a major attack by US forces would be even less palatable, but Marine commanders say Iraqi security forces are not ready to lead an all-out assault.
After he took command Sunday of the First Marine Expeditionary Force and its 42,000 troops in many of Iraq's toughest areas, from Fallujah and Ramadi west of Baghdad to trouble spots south of the capital, Lieutenant General John F. Sattler declared, "The status quo in Fallujah cannot stand."
Sattler said Marines were capable of taking over Fallujah in a matter of days. "We could arm the 1,000-pound grizzly bear and take it into town," he said.
Instead, Marine commanders said their mission is to support Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's government. They said Allawi plans to issue an ultimatum to Fallujah as soon as Iraqi security forces from other parts of the country are ready to lead an assault on the city and maintain security there once it is subdued.
Fallujah's leaders must "either join the rest of Iraq in sharing the progress toward freedom and hopefully democracy, [or] if they choose not to do so, they become a problem for the government and he will have to take dramatic action," Lieutenant General James T. Conway, the outgoing commander, said of Allawi.
"It's a question for the prime minister of how long he wants the cancer that Fallujah has become to potentially infect the rest of this region."
The only hope, Conway said, is to bring in police from Baghdad or units such as the new Iraqi Army's 36th Battalion, which US commanders say has fought cohesively against rebels in Najaf and elsewhere. Conway said military planners are likely to take the same "fire brigade approach" around the country, bringing Iraqis from other regions to fight insurgents in places like Samarra and Baqubah.
The top US operational commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Thomas Metz, said on a visit to Camp Fallujah that Fallujah may soon see a campaign similar to one in Samarra, where troops from the Army's First Infantry Division entered the city last week for the first time after weeks of insurgent control.
"Everyone said Samarra was the next Fallujah," Metz said. "But right now the First ID moves in and out of Samarra. We are reestablishing the police stations with Iraqi leadership.
"There will be some more fights. . . . Everyone reports there's chaos, but when the sun comes up in the morning the coalition has regained control."
Yet the Marines' experience in Fallujah offers a caution for the Iraqi government.
Marines are by far the strongest fighting force in the region yet are politically unable to win over residents through force alone. And their attempts to set up Iraqi forces have been plagued by rampant attacks on those forces and widespread suspicion among Marines on the front lines that they are not trustworthy. Now, the Marines are starting from scratch in several places, after some of their dearest projects were scuttled by insurgent pressure.
In Haditha, a city that had been relatively peaceful, a program in which Marines lived and worked with Iraqi police in their station -- modeled on a Vietnam-era counterinsurgency program -- was called off recently after the police station was bombed. Living with Marines proved too risky for the Iraqi police, who received numerous death threats.
In Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, Governor Abdelkarim Burgis al-Rawi, who had worked with US officials for more than a year, resigned at the demand of insurgents who had kidnapped his three sons. He also apologized on television for working with the United States.
In Fallujah, the Iraqi National Guard commander who had cooperated most closely with Marines was executed by militants. His battalion, unlike others, had not fled during the April fighting.
The Marines blame the setbacks in part on political decisions made far up the chain of command. Senior Marine officers also said they underestimated the strength of the insurgency in Fallujah and did not get the results they wanted when they tried to turn over control of the city to a group of former officers from there to end the April crisis.
"I'm not sure we understood the harshness of the city, the harshness of the elements operating within it," said Chief of Staff Colonel John C. Coleman, the second in command to Sattler.
He described a complex, delicate situation inside Fallujah. The one benefit of pulling out, he said, has been to force rival rebel gangs to turn on one another once they were no longer united against the attacking Marines. "Foreign fighters were operating in three- to five-man cells all over the city," he said. "With the start of the Fallujah Brigades, we saw the people of Fallujah start to isolate the foreign fighters. We took advantage of that and targeted them."
Airstrikes and skirmishes on the outskirts have killed hundreds of foreign fighters, he estimated. "They're now looking over their shoulders."
Fallujah doctors have said the airstrikes have killed many women and children. Because Fallujah is a dangerous place for reporters, the competing assertions are nearly impossible to verify.
Conway said the Fallujah Brigades, which took over in late April, failed for the same reason they were initially successful. While their tribal ties gave them enough credibility to calm the fighting, they also prevented them from taking aggressive action against their kinsmen.
But bringing in outsiders could dangerously inflame ethnic tensions. In April, when an Iraqi Army unit with many Kurdish members fought in Fallujah, many Sunni Arabs protested that "peshmerga" -- the Kurdish militia -- had been let loose on the Fallujah population.
Meanwhile, Iraqis say the only way to calm the insurgency is for US troops to leave the cities. Coleman said there is nothing he would like better. "We'd like to be Zorro-like: You don't know where we come from, you don't know where we live, we're quick to put a 'Z' on the chest of the problem and then disappear," he said.
But, he cautioned, Fallujah is "a microcosm of what Iraq would be without multinational forces here." After six months working with Conway, Coleman plans to stay on as second in command to Sattler for as long as he is needed.
"I'll be damned if when I'm 65 I'm going to be sitting on the redwood deck of my double-wide and read some snot-nosed grad school thesis about another failed US foreign policy example in the early part of the century," he said. "I'll die staying here so I don't have to read that."
Anne Barnard can be reached at abarnard@globe.com. 