While the CPA in the field appreciated Dempsey’s soldiers, there was scant cooperation or even civility between the military and the CPA planners in Baghdad. In an effort to bring the CPA and JTF staffs closer together, LtGen Sanchez and Ambassador Bremer shared a briefing room inside the palace in the Green Zone. Usually, though, Bremer’s staff was briefed at seven in the morning and Sanchez’s staff half an hour later.
With the CPA team driven out of Kut by Sadr’s gangs and in desperate shape elsewhere, Bremer’s chief of staff, Jeffrey Oster, asked for a briefing from the JTF about its next steps.
“That’s military business,” a colonel told Oster, “not to be shared with the CPA. LtGen Sanchez doesn’t work for the ambassador.”
Oster, a retired Marine lieutenant general, was outraged by such bureaucratic folderol. He went to Sanchez’s chief of staff, Major General Joseph Weber, who readily agreed to share information in the future. The incident, though, indicated how difficult it was for the CPA and the JTF to form a common strategy in the midst of battle.
The CPA civilians and all Iraqis were relying on the press to inform them about the military situation. Reports about the fighting came from two major sources—Western journalists, principally American, and the Arab press. The two dominant Arab satellite networks were Al Arabiya, based in Dubai, and Al Jazeera, based in Qatar. In addition to reaching hundreds of millions of Arabs, their reportage was more trusted by Iraqis than was the U.S.-funded channel called Al Iraqiya, based in Baghdad. About 25 percent of Iraqis—the more wealthy and influential—had access to satellite reception, and by a five-to-one margin they preferred Jazeera to Iraqiya. Jazeera was financed by the emir of Qatar and Arabiya by a Saudi sheikh.
Both networks had learned not to bite the hands that fed them. Criticism of the autocracies in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere had resulted in the closure of offices and the withdrawal of advertising revenues. Diatribes about the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the American occupation of Iraq were the two staples of their coverage that received wide approval among Arab governments.
In September both networks had been barred from reporting in Iraq for two weeks because they were tipped to attacks on convoys and filmed the events without warning authorities. In November, when Arabiya aired a taped message from Saddam Hussein urging attacks upon Americans, Bremer responded by approving another temporary suspension of the network. A few days later Secretary Rumsfeld accused both Arabiya and Jazeera of cooperating with insurgents by continuing to videotape attacks on American troops. The complaints did not change the tone of Jazeera’s reportage.
In April the insurgents invited a reporter from Al Jazeera, Ahmed Mansour, and his crew into Fallujah, where they filmed scenes from the hospital. Hour after hour, day after day in the first week in April, the airwaves were filled with pictures of the dead, the bleeding, and the maimed. The Arab media were calling the resistance an intifada, linking the insurgent fighting against the Americans to the Palestinian uprising against the Israelis. The sound bites featured the wails of the mourners, the sobs and screams of mothers, and the frenzied shouts and harried faces of blood-bespotted doctors and nurses. No one with a breath of compassion could watch Arab TV and not feel anguish. Most poignant were the pictures Jazeera ran of babies, one after another after another, all calm, frail, and pitiful in the repose of death. Where, how, or when they died was not attributed. The viewer assumed all the infants were killed by the Marines in Fallujah. The baby pictures would bring tears from a rock.
In Baghdad mullahs in Shiite mosques called on the faithful to donate blood and food for Fallujah, while residents in Sunni neighborhoods lauded the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr for rebelling. The clerics in Baghdad urged protests in the streets as calls for jihad rippled across the city.
Fallujah became the rallying point for anti-Coalition anger. Among Iraqis, vehement shouts of support for besieged Fallujah released simmering resentments about power outages, day-long lines for propane and gasoline, drive-by shootings, and random, dreaded suicide car bombings. Pent-up anger burst forth about foreign occupiers who shot at cars at vehicle checkpoints, rammed their armored vehicles through thick traffic, and ransacked homes at three in the morning. Iraqi men from all walks of life—students, laborers, doctors, policemen, shop owners—flocked to the mosques to exchange passionate denunciations of the infidel occupiers.
Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya were unrelenting in broadcasting the plight of the civilians in Fallujah, while the Internet amplified the message of Marine callousness and sped protests around the world on a minute-by-minute basis. On the Google search engine, during the month of April, the word
Fallujah
leaped from 700 to 175,000 stories, many highly critical of the Marines. Quantity had a spurious quality of its own, resulting in an erroneous certitude based on the sheer volume of repetition.
The reports filed by Western journalists embedded with the Marines did not support the allegations of widespread, indiscriminate carnage. Senior U.S. government officials, though, didn’t have the time to peruse tactical reporting. Instead, in their offices they turned on cable news, where video clips from Fallujah were shown over and over again. The images, obtained from a pool that included the Jazeera cameramen inside the city, affected viewers in Iraq, in Washington, and in Crawford, Texas.
In January 1968 overly optimistic reports about progress in the Vietnam War had been shattered by a wave of countrywide attacks called the Tet Offensive. The press reported in vivid detail the fighting and the destruction in dozens of towns and cities. The Vietcong gained an unexpected strategic victory in the States, where support for the war plummeted. Years later, analysts concluded that Tet had been an operational disaster for the guerrillas, resulting in devastating losses.
Peter Braestrup, in his award-winning book on how the 1968 Tet Offensive was miscast as a Vietcong victory, wrote that “most space and play went to the Tet story early, when the least solid information was available. There was no institutional system within the media for keeping track of what the public had been told, no internal priority on updating initial impressions.”
Similarly, the initial impression, created by Al Jazeera, of massive civilian casualties became the accepted storyline about Fallujah. Because entering the city meant capture and beheading, the Western TV networks pooled video shot in Fallujah by Arab cameramen who were approved for entry by the insurgents. Predictably, the pictures stressed destruction and death, although the Western networks could not corroborate the scale of the damage. Lacking any other source, most major U.S. newspaper and television outlets worldwide repeated the estimates cited in the Arab press based on the allegations of Iraqi and Jordanian doctors in Fallujah, arriving at an unsubstantiated consensus figure of more than six hundred dead and a thousand wounded.
“Al Jazeera is lying,” said Brigadier General John Kelly, the assistant division commander.
Nothing was done about his complaint. In the face of this press onslaught, the White House, the Pentagon, the CPA, and CentCom were passive. Partially this was a military reflex to avoid any comparison to the “body count” debacle of Vietnam. None of those at the top of the chains of command, though, requested from the Marine units in daily contact any systematic estimates that distinguished between civilian and enemy casualties. Given the video recorded by the unmanned aerial vehicles and the imagery required of every air strike and AC-130 gun run, records of the damage would have been easy enough to collect and verify had anyone thought of doing so.
In the absence of countervailing visual evidence presented by authoritative sources, Al Jazeera shaped the world’s understanding of Fallujah without having to counter the scrutiny of informed skeptics. The resulting political pressures constrained military actions both against Fallujah and against Sadr.
10
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FARMERS OR SHOOTERS?
ON APRIL 6, THE PRESS WAS FOCUSED on the fighting in Fallujah, while the real battle was raging in Ramadi. By noon, Bronzi and Gulf Company had the situation under control downtown. In the afternoon, the fighting shifted from downtown to the suburbs to the east, where Echo Company had the mission all infantrymen hate—sweeping for IEDs.
Every day an IED exploded somewhere along the thirty kilometers of roads that Echo Company tried to sweep. The IED attacks were wearing on the company, but they didn’t complain. They knew that a sister battalion at Qaim on the Syrian border was sweeping 170 kilometers of roads—a staggering responsibility.
The Marine Humvees weren’t properly armored to withstand the increasing power of the IED explosives. The insurgents were adapting more quickly than the American procurement system could improve the soldiers’ equipment. The men and their commanders shared the risks equally. MajGen Mattis was hit on three occasions, and both his regimental commanders were wounded by IEDs. In the States, the secretary of the navy was demanding a daily tally of new armor shipped to Anbar. But until production stateside caught up with the needs of the battlefield, the Marines would continue sweeping and varying their techniques. Snipers were one means of keeping the insurgents with IEDs off balance.
The night before, a sniper team called Head Hunter 2 drew the duty. Head Hunter 2 was an unlikely-looking team of snipers. Sergeant Romeo Santiago, originally from the Philippines, had been a Marine for six years and had received his citizenship papers only six months before now. A sniper for four years, he smiled constantly, not at all the cold-eyed type. Corporals Ted Stanton and Cameron Ferguson, like Santiago, were easygoing and quick to joke. Not one of the three weighed over 150 pounds, and all looked ludicrously small when burdened down with their sniper gear.
The fourth team member, Corporal Richard Staysal, was big and muscular. “Staysal’s our California surfer dude,” Stanton said with a smile. “He’s our token minority, so we’d give him all the shit details, except he’s so frigging big, he’d pound us.”
Echo Company covered the Sofia District to the east of Ramadi; thirty-five square kilometers of farmland, expensive houses, palm trees, and irrigation ditches. There were few main roads. Sofia’s longtime residents included smugglers, wealthy Baathists, and former army officers. The snipers knew the terrain and had good communications, so Captain Kelly Royer sent them out for an overnight stakeout on Route Nova, a main road into Sofia that looped along the bank of the Euphrates north of Echo Company’s base.
The four-man sniper team slipped out of the Combat Outpost after dark, walking north through the noisy suburbs. It was after curfew and no cars were moving, but the dogs were yapping and every so often the cows would join in, mooing at the strange-smelling Marines. The snipers crossed Nova at the Tank Graveyard, a field littered with the hulks of shattered Iraqi tanks. On the north side of Nova a few pumping stations sucked water from the Euphrates and emptied it into a maze of ditches. The team sat on top of a cement station, out of the dirt, and took turns watching an empty road through their night-vision goggles. During the night they saw no Iraqis sneaking up to set in IEDs.
On the morning of April 6, they walked a hundred meters north to the edge of the river and sat in the shade of some scrub growth. The radio transmissions and the steady rumble of distant gunfire made it sound as if every squad in Golf and Weapons Companies were in a battle. Everyone seemed to be in action except them: no traffic was moving on Nova.
“Maybe someone will call us to send our ammo,” Staysal muttered.
Not wanting to listen to constant complaints about being left out of the fight, Santiago walked across the field to take a closer look down Nova, which was built up about two feet above the paddies to avoid flooding. When he climbed up onto the road, he surprised a dozen men crouching on the other side, most of them dressed in green Iraqi Army uniforms. Not hesitating a second, Santiago sprinted for his life back across the field, yelling, “Hajis! Hajis!”
Behind him, an Iraqi in a red-and-black-checked kaffiyeh poked his head up, looked quizzically at the startled Marines, ducked down, and popped his head up a few minutes later for a second look. The Marines responded by firing their grenade launchers, lobbing two shells to fall among the insurgents, who were now shooting furiously. As RPGs burst in the trees, two Iraqis hopped over the road, spraying AK fire from the hip, and ran toward the river north of the team. Once they were above the Marines, they intended to push in from the flank, using the shrubs as concealment. The Marines had only two M16s with M203 grenade launchers attached, and two M40 bolt-action sniper rifles with telescopic sights—not much good against enemy crawling forward in hip-high grass and ducking behind scrub trees. The Marines were carrying only nine magazines each and had already ripped through half of them.
“Keep dusting off the road,” Santiago said. “If they rush us, we’ll have to swim for it.”
“You’re crazy,” Staysal said.
Santiago was calling for a Quick Reaction Force, but with the sounds of the firing, his message at first was garbled at the company ops center.
“No, I’m not asking for permission to fire!” he yelled. “You can hear us firing. We need help.”
Another garble.
“No, I’m not dead!” he yelled. “How could I be screaming at you for the QRF if I’m dead?”
It was shortly after noon, and north of Head Hunter, Echo’s 1st Platoon was conducting a road sweep. They had found an artillery shell with wires leading into the shrubbery, where they came across a small clearing marked by cigarette butts and flies buzzing over a pile of human feces. They cut the wires, called for engineers to detonate the shell, and walked on. A few hundred meters farther on they came across two more shells wired to a remote control device. They withdrew a safe distance to wait for the engineers and were sitting under some palm trees when their platoon commander, First Lieutenant Vincent Valdez, heard Santiago’s call for help over the radio. Valdez loaded ten Marines into an open-backed Humvee and sped down the road. Five minutes later Santiago saw the Humvee approaching at high speed. Staysal popped a white smoke to mark their location and warn them that they were driving into a firefight.