US troops press deeper into Fallujah
FALLUJAH, Iraq -- US and Iraqi forces battled southward through this guerrilla stronghold yesterday, engaging in some of the fiercest street fighting of the four-day assault that military officials estimated has killed about 600 insurgents.
In the most detailed field reports from Fallujah so far, the military also said 18 US troops and at least five Iraqi soldiers had died since the offensive began Monday, with 178 Americans and 34 Iraqi soldiers wounded. Nine of the dead were Army and Marine reservists and National Guard soldiers killed Monday, the largest single-day death toll for part-time soldiers since the invasion in March 2003.
The military had delayed casualty reports, citing security. An official at the Army's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany said more than 100 wounded arrived at the hospital yesterday.
As coalition forces faced unexpectedly stiff pockets of resistance in Fallujah, more violence broke out across the country.
A car bomb killed at least 17 Iraqis and wounded at least 30 on a busy street in Baghdad. In the northern city of Mosul, pitched battles erupted between insurgents and US-led coalition forces. Guerrillas attacked nine police stations and seized control of several.
Some of the most intense confrontations in Fallujah occurred in the Jolan district south of the main East-West Highway. Heavily armed insurgents, many thought to be from outside Iraq, were cornered in rows of corrugated metal structures that seemed to be machine shops and were covered in graffiti declaring support for the Palestinian extremist group Hamas.
Under constant fire, US soldiers were ordered to shoot at anything suspicious. US tanks, other armored vehicles, and aircraft bombarded factories, apartment buildings, and other two- and three-story structures where guerrillas took up positions in the rubble.
Two Marine Super Cobra attack helicopters were hit by groundfire and forced to land in separate incidents near Fallujah, the military said. The four pilots were rescued, although one suffered slight injuries.
The determination of the remaining insurgents, facing almost certain death in the house-to-house sweep, jolted some of the US troops on the front lines.
"Do you think they're going to accomplish something, or are they just sitting in these positions waiting to die?" said Specialist Todd Taylor, part of a company of First Infantry Division soldiers. His unit, which has a Globe reporter embedded with it, recorded killing several insurgents at close range in a clearing mission that began at 2 p.m. local time and continued well into this morning.
Military commanders said an unspecified number of insurgents were surrendering in the face of the ferocious air and ground assault that has left large swaths of the city in tatters.
In Washington, Pentagon officials expressed confidence that the central planning and logistics hub for the insurgency could be subdued within a few days so that residents could return and the interim Iraqi government could restore authority and begin rebuilding the largely Sunni Muslim city of 300,000.
"We hope that in the next few days we'll be able to return Fallujah to the citizens there without the intimidation that the insurgents brought," Air Force General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CBS.
But he repeated warnings that the operation would not end the deadly insurgency that has raged for more than a year. "If anybody thinks that Fallujah is going to be the end of the insurgency in Iraq, that was never the objective, never our intention, and even never our hope," he said in a separate interview with NBC.
US military officials cautioned that the figure of 600 insurgents killed in Fallujah was a rough estimate. Thousands of insurgents were thought to be in the city at the start of what Iraqi forces have dubbed Operation Dawn.
Myers said "hundreds and hundreds" of insurgents have been killed or captured by the 3,000 Iraqi and 15,000 US troops involved in the battle.
Although the Fallujah offensive seemed to be turning into a rout of the insurgents, there were no illusions that the guerrilla war in Iraq is near its end.
"We're a couple of years into that . . . Another one to three years, I think we'll be involved helping the Iraqis," retired Army General Tommy R. Franks, commander of the Iraq invasion last year, told reporters at a conference in Lisbon, the Portuguese capital.
Franks said the offensive to crush insurgents in Fallujah was "moving in the right direction." Although Fallujah will not be the end of the problem in Iraq, it is the "beginning of the end of the problem in Iraq," he said.
After nightfall yesterday, Fallujah's streets were dark and virtually no civilians were in sight. Many people detained by US and Iraqi forces during the battle said they had been held against their will by insurgents and had been beaten and tortured. In the southern industrial area of the city, US troops were ordered to show more restraint after firing at nearly anything that moved earlier in the day.
In Mosul, insurgents launched attacks for the third consecutive day, raiding police stations and political offices. Smoke billowed over Iraq's third-largest city as US jets streaked overhead. Residents were told to stay away from Mosul's five major bridges spanning the Tigris River because of the fighting, which a US military spokeswoman said could take some time to bring under control.
Insurgents, some brandishing rocket-propelled grenades, "continue to fire at the Iraqi National Guard and the multinational forces," Captain Angela Bowman said. "The operations are still ongoing and probably will [be] for some time until we fully secure the city."
Bender reported from Washington; Barnard reported from Fallujah. Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.Barnard can be reached at abarnard@globe.com.
