Fallouja Pullout May Be in Works

U.S. Marines and former Iraqi generals reached a tentative agreement Thursday that would allow American troops to withdraw from this besieged city and make way for a new Iraqi force to assume control, Marine commanders said.

The accord -- which would bring an end to the Marines’ nearly monthlong siege of this restive town -- came as the Iraqi people and U.S. officials braced for a military offensive against as many as 2,000 insurgents in house-to-house combat.

There was considerable confusion about the deal, word of which was apparently leaked in Fallouja before top U.S. officials in Baghdad and Washington had a chance to review the terms. U.S. officials in Washington denied that an agreement had been struck to avoid a military assault on Fallouja.

The deal announced by the Marines here calls for Fallouja to be patrolled by an all-Iraqi force headed by a former general under Saddam Hussein .

The agreement came on a day when 10 more U.S. troops were reported killed in Iraq, bringing April’s unofficial death toll to at least 125 -- and making it by far the bloodiest month for American forces since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last spring.

If a Fallouja deal sticks -- details of the agreement remained sketchy late Thursday -- it would probably reduce tension throughout the country as the U.S. prepares to grant sovereignty to Iraq on June 30. The intense recent fighting in Fallouja, which has killed many Iraqi civilians, has made the city a potent symbol of anti-American sentiment.

Thousands of Marines laid siege to Fallouja a few days after the March 31 killing and mutilation of four American contract workers, whose bodies were torched and dragged through the streets. U.S. officials have insisted that those responsible for the killings be turned over. It is unknown if the agreement addresses that demand.

A crucial part of the deal calls for the new Iraqi unit to disarm the insurgents, by force if necessary.

It remained unclear how this would be achieved, since Marines have been unable to accomplish it during weeks of broken cease-fires. Since the fall of Hussein, guerrillas in Fallouja have regularly attacked and killed members of U.S.-trained Iraqi police and Iraqi Civil Defense Corps units.

Under the agreement, Marine officials said, U.S. forces would withdraw from the city but remain in rural areas outside town. Marines control less than half of Fallouja, which is in the nation’s most volatile region, west of Baghdad.

As outlined by Marine commanders, the accord would turn over control to the new Iraqi force, which would be known as the Fallouja Self-Protection Army. Former Iraqi army generals would command the force, the Marines said. The unit’s ranks would come from the new Iraqi army and the former Iraqi armed forces, which fought two wars with the United States.

“As we have been saying, the best solution for Fallouja has an Iraqi face,” said Lt. Col. Gregg Olson, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment of the 1st Marine Division, from Camp Pendleton.

Emerging Thursday from a meeting with four former Iraqi generals and other officials, Marine Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis shook hands and pledged cooperation. “We will make it work, you and I,” Mattis told one of the ex-generals. “I will work with you all the way through. We didn’t come here to fight. We came here to help.”

If any strikes are necessary against insurgents, Mattis told the former general, “we will use a minimum of force.”

Turning to his subordinate officers, Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, said sharply, “I want a smooth turnover. Make it happen.”

A leading U.S. military commander in Baghdad, however, cautioned that it was not a final peace pact -- just one of several negotiating strategies being pursued.

“This is one negotiation track and discussion track among the many that we are trying to look at for a peaceful resolution in Fallouja,” said Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director for coalition operations and chief spokesman for the military in Baghdad. “There is no peace deal.”

Testifying before a House subcommittee Thursday, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz described the situation as confusing but said that a deal had not yet been struck.

“A lot of conversations are going on,” Wolfowitz said.

Kimmitt said U.S. officials still had to be convinced that the new Iraqi unit to patrol Fallouja would actually come to fruition. There is deep mistrust between the U.S. and Fallouja representatives, a fact that has scuttled previous agreements for a peaceful resolution of the crisis.

“Right now this force is nothing more than an aspiration: No one has shown up, no one has reported in, no unit has been mustered,” Kimmitt said in a telephone interview in Baghdad. He said the U.S. envisioned that a force of 600 to 1,000 Iraqi troops would be deployed to patrol the entryways to Fallouja.

The stakes were so high when a storming of Fallouja was being considered last week that the plans reached the desk of President Bush.

The agreement appears to have been part of multitrack negotiations involving the Marines, former Iraqi military officers, religious and tribal leaders from Fallouja, representatives of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and the office of L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. civil administrator in the country.

Sheik Mohammed Yassin, who was close to the talks, said the new Iraqi force would be headed by former Gen. Jassim Mohammed Mihimdi, a native of Fallouja who served as governor of the city’s province, Al Anbar, under Hussein.

Once the accord went into effect, Marine officers said, offensives against insurgents beyond the city’s borders would increase. Hours after the tentative deal was announced, U.S. forces engaged in heavy fighting with guerrillas in and around Fallouja.

Under the deal, the Marines would not face the prospect of urban warfare, amid a dense civilian population.

“We’re not giving up the hunt,” said Col. John Toolan, who was among the U.S. officials who attended the meeting with the Fallouja leaders in a nondescript cinderblock building on the outskirts of the city.

The accord apparently puts an end to the American plan to mount joint U.S.-Iraqi patrols in Fallouja. Many were skeptical that U.S. forces could patrol in Fallouja without drawing fire. The new Iraqi force could serve as a buffer between insurgents and U.S. forces.

“Perhaps this will indicate for the first time a wise political and military plan by the Americans,” said Wamid Nadhmi, an Iraqi political analyst. “A few extremists will consider this deal to be an outright victory, but most reasonable people will see it as a step in the right direction. Iraqis don’t want to fight a war with the U.S.”

American authorities worked through intermediaries to end the siege and never negotiated directly with the Fallouja insurgents -- whom the military has described as a collection of Hussein loyalists, foreign fighters, religious militants, drug users and criminals. Many Iraqis say this oft-repeated description ignores a significant contingent of Iraqi nationalists who are dissatisfied with the occupation and have taken up arms in Fallouja and elsewhere to drive out the U.S.-led occupation forces.

Fallouja, a largely Sunni Muslim city of almost 300,000, has become a hotbed of insurgency. Sunnis, favored by the Hussein regime, have felt marginalized by a U.S. administration that they view as favoring the majority Shiite Muslim population.

Ahmed Hardan, chief negotiator from Fallouja, told the Al Jazeera satellite TV channel that U.S. forces had agreed to pull out of the southern districts of Fallouja within 36 hours. A pullout in the northern end -- where much of the recent fighting has occurred -- would take place by Sunday, Hardan said. There was no independent confirmation of the timetable.

It was also not known whether the U.S. made other key concessions.

Yassin, a Sunni cleric close to the negotiations, revealed that American forces released two of Fallouja’s most prominent detainees -- Sheik Jamal Shaker Nazzal and Sheik Barakat Saadon Essawi, a tribal leader. Both men had been arrested late last year for “anti-coalition activities” and Nazzal had sheltered a Yemeni, who was a suspected operative for the Al Qaeda terrorist network, according to the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, which occupied Fallouja for six months before turning over its charge to the Marines last month.

Asked how the people of Fallouja had convinced the world’s most powerful military to withdraw, Hardan replied: “What can we give more than the blood shed in the streets of Fallouja?”

City and hospital officials here have said hundreds of civilians have been killed in the Marine assault. U.S. authorities say those numbers are exaggerated.

The agreement grew out of discussions between U.S. commanders and former Iraqi army officers who had offered their help to end the more than three-week standoff, officials said. The U.S. military has cultivated contacts with hundreds of former Iraqi army officers and put them in charge of newly trained Iraqi police and Iraqi Civil Defense Corps units.

Gen. Mattis, in an interview, said the success of the deal depended “on the maturation level of the Iraqi army” unit that would replace the Marines. The Marines would closely monitor the new force and how it dealt with the insurgents.

The new force, like all police and security forces in Iraq, would remain under the control of the U.S.-led coalition.

U.S. authorities are pledging to help remove some of the rubble caused by weeks of street fighting and aerial bombing, which pounded the city in the days leading up to the deal. American officials have promised a multimillion-dollar rebuilding plan in Fallouja once the area is safe for reconstruction.

Iraqi insurgents have regularly targeted civilian contractors and Iraqi security forces, whom they consider U.S. collaborators. Dozens of contractors and hundreds of police officers have been killed. When the Marines surrounded the city on the night of April 5, in response to the slaying there of the four American contractors, the plan called for the Iraqi army and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps to assist in the operation. But many of those units fled.

From the start, U.S. officials wanted to “put an Iraqi face” on the drive to rout insurgents from Fallouja. U.S. commanders became exasperated at the lack of leadership among Iraqi forces.

Before last year’s invasion to topple Hussein, the Marines, aided by U.S. intelligence agencies, developed extensive dossiers on top Iraqi army officers, their education, their training, their tribal and political connections, even their personal habits and quirks.

Commanders said they were confident that the Iraqi officers who agreed to the pact knew at least some of the insurgent leaders and could pressure them to curb attacks on U.S. forces during the transition, expected to take seven to 10 days.

Despite the tentative agreement for U.S. forces to pull out of Fallouja, Marines and Army troops fought two battles with insurgents Thursday.

In one, Marine tanks demolished several buildings from which guerrillas were firing on them with rockets and machine guns. In the other skirmish, Army troops fighting under Marine command called in F/A-18 Hornet jets to drop 500-pound bombs on insurgent targets.

There were no reports of U.S. casualties in either battle.

The Camp Pendleton-based Marines have had six battalions, about 7,000 troops, operating in and around Fallouja. U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunships have struck numerous targets almost nightly.

Perry reported from Fallouja and Fleishman and McDonnell from Baghdad. Times staff writers Mary Curtius and John Hendren in Washington and special correspondents Salar Jaff and Hamid Sulaibi in Baghdad contributed to this report.

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In all subsequent stories, Maj. Gen. Jassim Mohammed Mihimdi is referred to as Maj. Gen. Jassim Mohammed Saleh.

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