Ramadi was not improving. Having lost in open battle in April, the insurgents had reverted to their tried-and-true intimidation tactics. The humiliation and exile of Governor Burgis had gravely weakened the city’s political structure. The security was similarly damaged by the downfall of the top cop. The provincial police chief, Jaddan, had been the friendly rascal in Ramadi who had befriended LtCol Mirable a year ago and had warned Kennedy about the attack last April. The 82nd staff knew he was padding his payroll, but he turned in IEDs and wanted to get along. He wasn’t mean or thuggish; his police didn’t beat up people. He was taking a cut when he could, trying to navigate a nice, reasonable life through swift currents.
The insurgents tried to kill Jaddan three times during the summer. On the last attempt, in July, his eighteen-year-old son lost his leg. LtCol Kennedy wasn’t sure whether the assailants were insurgents or criminals disgruntled about a botched payoff. Whatever the reasons, Jaddan began to cooperate with the insurgents. After Governor Burgis fled to Jordan as a broken man, ODA had dug into the actions of the police who had abandoned their posts. In late August Kennedy arrested Jaddan for complicity in the kidnapping of the governor’s sons.
In early September Battalion 2/4 and LtCol Kennedy returned to the States, understanding of but not sympathetic to Ramadi’s basic contradiction: the residents feared turning into another Fallujah, under the whips of the jihadists; yet they were fence-sitters who, as had happened in Fallujah, in a frenzy would drag an American body through the streets. Americans could keep a lid on the military growth of the insurgents, but only Iraqi leaders could bring the city over to the government’s side. And in Ramadi, where the governor had fled and the police chief had been arrested, that wasn’t happening. Ramadi had settled into a routine of short, desultory skirmishes punctuated by IEDs and suicide bombers. The insurgents controlled the population, while the Americans controlled the main streets and highways. The Iraqi government had yet to make an impact.
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In late August MajGen Mattis was nominated for three-stars and left to take command of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Virginia. LtGen Conway would also be leaving. All the battalions in the division would follow in the next several weeks as their seven-month rotations ended.
Mattis understood the nature of the combat. His small “jump” command element convoy had been hit by IEDs on three occasions and engaged in three extended firefights. In April his aide, Lieutenant Steven Thompson, was severely injured. In May Staff Sergeant Jorge Molinabautista was killed outside Fallujah, and in June Lance Corporal Jeremy L. Bohlman was killed in Ramadi.
“Staff Sergeant Molinabautista was devoted to his family and kind towards the young men in the Jump—I trusted him totally,” Mattis said. “Bohlman was keenly attentive on patrol and high-spirited off duty. He was a lot of fun for the rest of the team to have around.”
On the eve of the campaign to overthrow the Saddam regime in March of 2003, Mattis had told his Marines that “on your young shoulders rest the hopes of mankind.” When he left Anbar Province in August of 2004, he did not talk about the liberation of Iraqis. At the end of their tours, MajGen Swannack and LtGen Sanchez had spoken in optimistic tones about progress in Anbar. When Mattis left, he exuded no such confident optimism. There was no soaring rhetoric. Instead, he focused on soldierly virtues. He read to his Marines a poem by Lieutenant Andre Zirnheld that stressed ascetism and belief in each other.
“ ‘Give me, God, what no one else asks for;
I ask not for wealth, or for success or health;
People ask you so often for all that,
That you cannot have any left.
Give me what people refuse to accept from you.
“ ‘‘ want insecurity and disquietude,
I want turmoil and the brawl.
If you should give them to me,
Let me be sure to have them always,
For I will not always have the courage to ask for them.’
“May God be with you, my fine young Marines,
As you head out once again
Into the heat of the Iraqi sun,
Into the still of the dark night,
To close with the enemy.
“Beside you, I’d do it all again. Semper Fidelis.”
s/ Mattis
September marked a turnover month. Olson’s battalion (2/1), responsible for patrolling outside Fallujah, had few Iraqi security forces to turn over to the next battalion. After Suleiman was murdered, it was a week before some Iraqi soldiers straggled back to their looted posts. Since then they had been provided new officers, but the officers showed up for duty only haphazardly and avoided any encounters with the insurgents.
“We have to start from scratch,” Olson said.
On September 7, as Battalion 2/1 was preparing to turn over its area, a suicide bomber drove a car into a convoy from Fox Company, killing seven Marines. Toolan struck back the next day, sending a tank company down the highway south of the cloverleaf and parallel to the filthy industrial zone where Byrne’s 1/5 had fought in April. Sure enough, the insurgents rushed out to the berm and began firing RPGs and mortars. The fight raged all day, with the Marines surging forward three blocks deep. But lacking any authority to prosecute an offensive operation, at the end of the day the regiment withdrew its forces from the city.
The tragedy of the suicide bombing was a bitter send-off to a stalwart unit, deepening the resentment toward the sanctuary of Fallujah, which the Marines called “the bomb factory.” Lingering among the Marines was the basic question: what are we going to do about Fallujah?
In early September the mother of Corporal Nathan R. Bush spoke for many Marines in an interview. “It appears to me that not a lot has changed,” she said. “They went in there to bring Fallujah back to the norm and get rid of the insurgents and that didn’t happen. I don’t like to think my son went through all of this for nothing.”
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By early September, from Toolan’s regiment to the White House, there was a solid consensus that the status quo in Fallujah was intolerable. “The whole Fallujah Brigade thing was a fiasco,” said Colonel Jerry L. Durrant, who oversaw the MEF’s training of Iraqi forces. In Washington the secretary of defense was similarly blunt. “The Fallujah Brigade didn’t work,” Rumsfeld told reporters. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed with the secretary. “The situation in Fallujah is unacceptable,” Gen Myers said.
In Baghdad, Prime Minister Allawi’s negotiations with Janabi had gone nowhere. As for the performance of the Iraqi security forces, he accused the CPA and Ambassador Bremer of leaving him with “confusion and the problems of the military and police.” The fifty-nine-year-old formerly exiled leader was equally critical of the Fallujah Brigade. “We did not want this brigade to persist. It was a wrong concept,” he said. “We don’t want militias to be formed in provinces. We don’t agree with what the CPA did.”
Making no mention of his own wooing of former Baathists or his opposition to the Marine attack in April, Allawi disbanded the Fallujah Brigade, formally finishing what Toolan had done weeks earlier.
It was a maestro bureaucratic performance all around. Senior American and Iraqi officials proved equally nimble in lauding the Fallujah Brigade in May and damning it in September, without explaining how the Coalition’s boldest political-military gamble since the fall of Baghdad had ended so disastrously. After Toolan demanded they choose sides, only four of the six hundred members of the Fallujah Brigade crossed over to the Marine side. Every institution involved in establishing the Fallujah Brigade castigated it later and acted as if it had nothing to do with its creation.
In the States, Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for the presidency, was criticizing President Bush for vacillating about Fallujah. He was tilting at a windmill, however, as the newspapers were full of stories about the Marines preparing to reattack.
“From the regimental perspective, in mid-September it looked like someone high up threw a switch,” Major David Bellon said. “No more keeping the noise down. Instead, suddenly we’re told: Get ready to go in. It was great, great news.”
To prevent any backsliding, the Marines kept the pressure on by using the press to convey what they believed had to be done. “We need to make a decision on when the cancer of Fallujah is going to be cut out,” a senior Marine commander said in mid-September, repeating what LtCol Drinkwine had recommended eight months earlier.
The continuous string of kidnappings, beheadings, and car bombings had shaken the city’s staunchest supporters among Baghdad’s political elite. Sunni politicians like Hachim Hassani were quiet. Allawi began a two-pronged campaign, privately agreeing with Gen Casey that planning for an offensive to seize Fallujah should proceed, while publicly urging Fallujah’s city elders to negotiate.
“We waited so long,” Dunford said, “because Baghdad looked on Fallujah as a sideshow. The division wanted to seize Fallujah quickly in August, even though the fight at Najaf was ongoing. But the links among suicide bombings across Iraq, foreign fighters, IEDs, kidnappings, and the Fallujah sanctuary weren’t as clear to others. It took higher headquarters longer to see the consequences of allowing the sanctuary to grow.”
By mid-June the division had been convinced of the perfidy of the Fallujah Brigade. But with the return of sovereignty only two weeks away, the timing was wrong to push for an attack. During July, Prime Minister Allawi and Gen Casey were adjusting to their roles and working out a satisfactory path to their opaque command relationship; Casey could not undertake major operations without Allawi’s approval and Allawi could not conduct operations without the American forces commanded by Casey. In August, Sadr’s revolt demanded the attention of both men. By September, Allawi’s standing was high in Iraqi polls; his first confrontation had been against a fellow Shiite, giving him the political room to maneuver against the rebellious Sunni city.
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The stage was set to clean out Fallujah. As his first step, Allawi had closed Al Jazeera’s bureau in Iraq, depriving the insurgents of the strategic weapon that had saved them in April. With the intent of emptying the city, he then issued repeated warnings in September that time was running out. As he made it more and more clear that he intended to attack Fallujah, the insurgents repeated the diplomatic tactics that had succeeded for them in April. First they sent a delegation of city elders to meet with the interim government. President Ghazi Yawar, who had negotiated to stop the attack in April, agreed publicly with the delegation that any attack would be an unjust punishment of an innocent population. This time around, though, no major Iraqi official, including Yawar, threatened to resign. There were scores of Iraqis eager to replace any minister who chose to step down. Yawar was playing a politician’s standard gambit, publicly appearing sympathetic to his fellow Sunnis by decrying the impending attack, while behind the scenes doing nothing to prevent it.
Highly publicized negotiations between Baghdad and representatives of the insurgents continued throughout October. At one point the Marines waited until the chief negotiator, Abdullah Jumali, and the police chief, Sabar, felt safe enough to visit outside Fallujah, then arrested them for complicity in multiple murders, including that of LtCol Suleiman. Allawi, however, ordered them released because he had promised safe passage. The Marines hoped to meet them soon on the battlefield.
When the insurgents failed to gain support from the interim Iraqi government and when the UN and the Arab world remained muted, the insurgents tried their final gambit. They claimed that their council, the shura, had voted by ten to two to throw out the foreign fighters (whose existence they had denied for months) and to allow the Iraqi National Guard to enter the city—provided of course that the U.S. Marines stayed out.
This time, however, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld did not leave negotiations to the regular military and diplomatic chains of command. In April he had been informed after decisions had been made in Iraq. In mid-October he flew to Baghdad for discussions with Prime Minister Allawi and General Casey. Allawi then told the shura to hand over Zarqawi. That, he said, would prove they were serious about ridding the city of foreign fighters. The shura, of course, refused. Rumsfeld and Allawi had called their bluff.
At the same time the press was describing how the Marines were edging up to the line of departure. Nothing in their training or their nature comported with staying on the defense outside an enemy sanctuary, steadily losing men. In early September one suicide bomber had killed seven Marines from Battalion 2/1. Then in mid-September it was Toolan’s turn, as Mattis and Conway had done, to return to the States. A few hours after his change of command, a rocket slammed into the regimental headquarters, killing the regiment’s popular and outgoing communications officer, Major Kevin Shea. In late October another suicide bomber killed nine Marines from Battalion 1/3 that had just arrived at Fallujah.
Enough was enough.
PART IV
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ATTACK
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November to December 2004
24
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THE WATCHDOGS
FOUR DAYS AFTER GEORGE W. BUSH was reelected, Prime Minister Allawi, who had pledged not to allow Fallujah to keep drifting, ordered the attack against the city. This time around senior American and Iraqi leaders had taken the time and care to shape the strategic setting before commencing the operation. Since April the Sunni insurgency and the terrorist bombings across Iraq had grown in intensity, while the reelection of President Bush had reassured the Iraqi government. The intransigence of the insurgents and the duplicity of Fallujah’s city elders had exhausted the sympathy of most Shiites, who knew the terrorist bombings were intended to prevent them from gaining political power. The Sunni hierarchy—a few small parties and a large group of clerics—complained that the forthcoming election lacked security and therefore shouldn’t be held. They then declared a boycott of the election scheduled for January and became a marginal factor. Sunni imams in a dozen cities railed and postured, threatening a popular uprising if Fallujah were attacked. Allawi ignored them. As prime minister of a sovereign nation, he was better able than American diplomats to gauge popular support and to sense when his fellow Arab leaders were bluffing.