It was old, and all the more powerful for its historical roots. Islamic Holy Law, or sharia, stressed that the community or state and the religion were inseparable from each other. The religion conferred legitimacy upon the community, while the community protected the religion. In Fallujah the power of the imams was impressive as they nightly exhorted the people, and the longer the siege dragged on, the more the resistance became a community obligation.
LtCol Olson and Capt Zembiec watched through binoculars as boys about ten years old lugged mortar shells across a road. On the roof with them were a Delta Force sniper with a .50 caliber rifle and a Marine corporal with the standard .308 sniper rifle. They sat in separate sandbagged shelters, peering out through mouse holes. Zembiec called them “cooperative carnivores.” They waited all day, hoping that a grown-up insurgent would grow impatient and walk out to take one of the mortar shells from a boy. None did.
From Zembiec’s roof, through his ten-power sniper scope Corporal Ethan Place could see for a thousand meters down a wide street leading into the Jolan District. Place had been an accomplished hunter before qualifying as a sniper.
“I’ve popped a few at four and five hundred yards, but it’s at six hundred that they get stubborn,” he said. “They look up the street and don’t see anyone. They can’t believe I can see them.”
Place had used a laser range-finder to select aim points on either side of the street at six and eight hundred yards from his position. When a man with a rifle sprinted across the street, he fired at an aim point and the insurgent ran into the bullet. In three weeks Place had shot thirty men.
There was a sniper team on every fourth house held by the Marines, and each day they killed ten or twenty insurgents. Working to the east with Battalion 3/4, Sergeant Sean Crane did not have one long avenue to fire down, as did Cpl Place. Instead, he employed traditional sniper tactics and shifted from spot to spot. The day after Cpl Amaya was killed, Crane staked out the house where the defenders had been burned to death and in the late afternoon saw three Iraqis with AKs sneak around a corner. From three hundred yards away he squeezed off four rounds in fifteen seconds, hitting all three. The next day, as refugees continued to pour out of the city, he noticed insurgents in groups of two and three crossing the streets behind the women and children. They walked casually, AKs close to their sides, trying to blend in. Over the course of six hours Crane shot five before the others learned to sprint, not walk, across streets.
To Crane, sniping was like fishing, requiring long hours of patience. The targets were a quarry, like fish. He tried not to think of them as men. One day at dusk he took fire from a house about three hundred yards away. The next day he watched the house for seven hours. In late afternoon an old man, assisted by a tall young man, slowly shuffled next door and returned with a loaf of bread. At the courtyard gate the old man continued inside while the young man paused to glance toward the house where Crane sat hidden behind sandbags. A few minutes later, as the shadows lengthened, the gate opened and the young man slipped out, AK in hand, and ducked behind a burnt-out car. Crane placed the reticule of his scope on the car. When the man peeked out, Crane fired. The man slipped forward into the street and lay still. A scream of pain or grief came from inside the house.
Crane waited. A few minutes later the old man walked out, holding himself stiffly erect. Knowing he was in the line of fire but refusing to look toward Crane’s position, the old man shuffled to the body, grasped the dead man under the armpits, and step by step tugged the body back inside the gate. Crane watched and waited. A few minutes later the old man stepped into the open courtyard with a shovel and dug a grave.
Of the ten men he had hit, Crane had not seen one knocked off his feet, as happened in the movies. When hit in the chest, most men flinched and staggered on for a few steps before sitting down and slouching over, or lying down and bleeding out. He had hit one man in the arm, then in the foot, and still he hobbled away. He shot him again in the jaw and the man stayed upright with three bullets in him, disappearing around a corner.
Day by day the Marine snipers took a steady toll of the armed insurgents. At the Fallujah Liaison Center the city elders complained bitterly to sympathetic listeners from the Iraqi Governing Council. Both the city elders and the Baghdad delegation agreed that the American snipers were inhumane and must stop shooting.
LtGen Conway, presiding over the U.S. delegation, disagreed. “I find it strange,” he said to one group, “that you object to our most discriminate weapon—a Marine firing three ounces of lead at a precise target. A sniper is any Marine with a rifle. I reject your demand, and I wonder who asked you to make it.”
About one Marine in four had an M16 with a three-power scope, which increased kills at three and four hundred yards. The M40 sniper rifles with ten-power scopes reached out half a mile during the day. Inside the city were European as well as Arab aid workers and journalists sympathetic to the insurgents. Describing the fighting from the other side, a British journalist in Fallujah wrote that “it is the snipers the people of Fallujah fear more than anything else.”
At night the 7.62mm machine gun with a thermal scope took over for the sniper rifle. The thermal was clunky, temperamental, and gobbled up batteries. It also was excellent at detecting a heat source a quarter of a mile away, meaning that no infiltrator could sneak close enough to pitch a grenade. Mangy packs of wild dogs scavenged in the dark, wriggling through the concertina wire and setting off trip flares. The Marines called them “sapper dogs.” The thermals picked them up easily, thus avoiding shooting at phantom attackers. When Iraqis did try to probe, they stood out clearly as black “hot spots.” When hit by a burst of bullets, a hot spot would gradually dim and fade out, at which time the machine-gunner would report another kill on the lines.
Every day Red Crescent ambulances drove up to the lines to remove the corpses. During the first week in April, Marines shot the drivers of two ambulances carrying armed fighters. After that the ambulances stayed out of the fight and conducted only humanitarian missions, tending to the wounded and the dead, distributing food to the stubborn families living in no-man’s-land between the two sides.
At a few places they left the dead where they had fallen. When Cpl Villalobos of Battalion 3/4 had shot up cars careening toward his position, one of the drivers lay out in the field where he had been shot, unattended. The body, black with flies, had swelled and split apart, the stink of rotting death wafting into the house where Villalobos and his squad lived. They doused the body with gasoline and tried to burn it, which only increased the mess—a dog carried off a roasted thigh.
At a meeting at regiment, Captain Shannon Johnson, the company commander, requested flamethrowers. “That way, sir,” he explained to Col Toolan, “we clean up the mess in front of our lines and torch the hard points once the cease-fire is lifted.”
Corporal Amaya had been one of Johnson’s squad leaders. If jihadists were going to barricade themselves in houses to kill Americans before dying, better to burn them out than send in a Marine.
“You know I can’t make that kind of decision,” Toolan said.
There was no reprimand in his tone. Strong requests were not unusual from aggressive fighters. The translators said the Iraqis called McCoy’s battalion the “Black Plague.” The Marines liked the image that they were one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but the Iraqis were referring to their fear of disease from the blackened corpses in front of the battalion lines. Before jumping off in the attack, McCoy had the habit of gathering his troops and playing at full blast “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor.” In 1804 Andrew Jackson’s musketeers had advanced to drum rolls composed by Beethoven; in 2004 Marines attacked under the blare of hard rock composed by Eminem.
Each battalion had its idiosyncrasies. Byrne’s Battalion 2/1—more partial to blasting Jimi Hendrix at 110 decibels—had been the first to persuade the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare teams to initiate scatological warfare. Platoons in 1/5 competed to dream up the filthiest insults for the translators to scream over the loudspeakers. When enraged Iraqis rushed from a mosque blindly firing their AKs, the Marines shot them down.
The tactic of insult-and-shoot spread along the lines. Soon the Marines were mocking the city as “Lalafallujah” (after the popular stateside concert Lollapalooza) and cranking out “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns ’n’ Roses and “Hell’s Bells” by AC/DC. Not to be outdone, the mullahs responded with loudspeakers hooked to generators, trying to drown out Eminem with prayers, chants of
Allahu akbar,
and Arabic music. Every night discordant sound washed over the lines.
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And every night images of civilian casualties were transmitted worldwide via satellite and across the Internet. Western TV networks pooled video from Fallujah, including film from the Arab cameramen with the insurgents. Predictably, the pictures stressed destruction. Al Jazeera was unrelenting in depicting the deaths of civilians.
In three weeks of fighting, eighty-two buildings and two mosques had been bombed. The average number of air strikes per day was four. Massive civilian casualties, however, became the accepted storyline. The Coalition made no institutional effort to rebut each false report or to conduct systematic assessments. Given the imagery from the UAVs and from every air strike, records were certainly available to inform the press. In the absence of such data, however, Al Jazeera shaped the story.
_____
During the third week in April, Ambassador Richard H. Jones, Bremer’s experienced deputy at the CPA, chaired four sessions at the Fallujah Liaison Center to resolve the siege. Every day Iraqis in civilian clothes, robes, and kaffiyehs thronged into the FLC to meet with American diplomats and generals. Every day the Iraqis promised to curtail the violence. Every day rusted and broken weapons were turned in as symbols of progress while the violence continued. As for expelling the terrorists, the negotiators denied they existed. Foreign fighters, they said, were a myth and an excuse to punish the city. At one point Nate Jensen counted thirteen negotiating groups—five American and eight Iraqi teams. Rarely did the meetings have a written agenda.
Having survived by cunning under Saddam, the Iraqis were shrewd at sorting out which American colonels reported to which generals and which verbal assurances sounded most promising. Determined to prevent a Marine attack, the Iraqis pushed for concessions and argued the insurgents’ case with the doggedness of top-flight defense lawyers. Conway, a genial and courteous man, became so angry in one meeting that he pounded the table. In another session, a front man for Janabi insisted that Mattis agree to forty-five written demands. Mattis responded by walking out.
“The Iraqis have never won a battle,” Mattis quipped to Jensen, “or lost a negotiation.”
Whenever the Americans appeared at the end of their tether, Hassani, in the role of interlocutor, called a halt for the day, assuring both sides that tomorrow would be better. Hassani’s pleasing personality and laid-back California style were soothing, but the basis for such assurances was opaque. No insurgent leader sat at the negotiating table. Hoping they would play a mediating role, Bremer agreed to release from prison Sheikh Barakat and the imam mufti Sheikh Jamal, whom Drinkwine had arrested for sedition in November. Once freed, however, Barakat disappeared and Jamal played no significant role in the negotiations.
On the American side, there were too many negotiators with authority. Ambassadors Jones, Bremer, and Blackwill were well-seasoned diplomats, trained to advance America’s interests by outwitting foreign leaders. The three leading generals—Abizaid, Sanchez, and Conway—were managers of violence. Each had a distinct personality. Abizaid was thoughtful and even-handed in his deliberations; Sanchez focused on operations, preferring to leave political-military matters to others; Conway was courteous and fair. Despite their different styles, however, the three generals shared the trait of leadership. Everything they did was based on teamwork and on achieving the objective at the least cost to their men.
If diplomats played poker, generals played bridge. A diplomat can zig and zag to outwit or win over his opponent; a general must calculate each move to fit the capabilities and concerns of his troops. Where a diplomat might urge a nimble strategy of fight and talk, a general would think long and hard before he started his men down one track and then switched to another. Jones and Blackwill had years of experience in negotiations in the Middle East, but the area of operations belonged to the military and the MEF. Without a clear written agenda, goals, and deadlines, the roles of the diplomats and generals in the negotiations became confused.
The ambiguity about negotiating roles reflected the diverse chains of command and communication channels. Conway made the decisions for the Marines, with Mattis in an off-again/on-again supporting role. Mattis’s headquarters was outside Ramadi, and Conway was outside Fallujah. Abizaid was operating from Qatar and Tampa. Bremer and Sanchez were in Baghdad. Abizaid was talking to Rumsfeld and Rice; Bremer was talking to Rumsfeld and Rice; and Blackwill was talking to Rice.
At the same time Conway was secretly meeting with former Iraqi generals. Their titular head was Muhammad Latif, a colonel in the intelligence branch who had been imprisoned for seven years by Saddam. Only the MEF staff knew the details of this negotiating channel. The American diplomats were not informed. The Sunni generals claimed they could exert authority over most of the fighters in Fallujah and restore order—provided the Americans turned control of the city over to them. Conway was intrigued by the proposal and impressed by their sincerity.
The Iraqi Governing Council had achieved nothing in its negotiations. On April 19, Hassani grandly announced to the press that the insurgents were turning in their heavy weapons. Calling the weapons “junk,” Mattis met the next day with Conway, arguing strongly for permission to attack.