Fallouja Defies Simple Solution

The strategy appears simple enough.

“What we’d like to do is have the good people of Fallouja who see their country has a future -- who want to be a part of that -- to separate themselves from those who have nothing to live for,” said Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which has encircled this city of 300,000.

If only it were that easy.

Counter-insurgency warfare seldom is, experts say, as U.S. forces learned painfully in Southeast Asia and the Soviet Union discovered in Afghanistan. Now Iraq is the arena -- and to make matters more difficult, the battlefield is urban. The guerrillas’ strength is that they can hide among the populace when confronted with superior forces.

Little headway has been made in U.S. demands that insurgents turn in their arms, although talks continue. L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, traveled here Saturday to assist in the negotiations involving clerics, Fallouja city officials and other Iraqi intermediaries, a spokesman said. President Bush was spending the weekend at Camp David, where administration officials said he was reviewing his options. No decision had been made about U.S. military action, the officials said.

Few doubt the Marines, with their superior firepower and air dominance, could overrun the Sunni Muslim stronghold in 48 hours or so -- just as U.S. forces were able to swiftly overtake the country a year ago.

Despite the sense of a brutal inevitability closing in around Fallouja, U.S. officials remain torn about the possibility of a bloodbath among Iraqi civilians -- and the revulsion among Iraqis at the inevitable images of dead women and children. The great fear is that a swift and decisive victory in Fallouja could make things worse.

The initial Marine assault three weeks ago was a public relations disaster, even though officials said reports of 600 civilian dead were greatly exaggerated. Arabic-language networks broadcast footage of bloodied civilians, which mesmerized and outraged Iraqis.

The attack deepened many Iraqis’ hostility toward their U.S. occupiers and probably bolstered enemy recruits. Fallouja became a national rallying cry -- even among Shiite Muslims, long rivals of the Sunnis.

It was the kind of scenario that the 82nd Airborne Division, which ceded control of Fallouja to the Marines a month ago, had tried for months to avoid.

“What you never want to do is create the next terrorist,” Lt. Col. Brian Drinkwine, the 82nd Airborne’s former commander of Fallouja, said in an interview with The Times this year. “What will happen is that extremists will come in after us and say, ‘Look at what the Americans did -- they violated your rights.’ And that could very well work against you.... I do not want to create excess friction.”

Privately, many Marines are critical of the 82nd Airborne’s six-month tenure in Fallouja. From the Marines’ standpoint, the paratroopers left Fallouja to the insurgents, carrying out a containment strategy and allowing enemy forces to fester and grow.

The 82nd Airborne’s strategy was to concentrate on targeted raids based on intelligence, while trying not to be a provocative presence around the traditional and conservative town. Units from the 82nd searched 1,000 or so houses in Fallouja and arrested hundreds of suspects, including “the rocket man” -- Taha Dayea Jaab, a rocket engineer and former Iraqi air force colonel alleged to be a manufacturer of sophisticated roadside bombs. Troops found triggering devices hidden in his refrigerator.

In this city of soaring minarets and turquoise-domed mosques, the occupying 82nd Airborne was adamant about respecting holy places -- it even avoided entering one mosque when a prominent imam was arrested for inciting violence against U.S. forces. The Marines have been accused of violating the sanctity of mosques -- although Conway argues that mosques lose their protected status when they become staging grounds for attacks.

Although many top loyalists of Saddam Hussein were arrested or killed, the 82nd Airborne’s way of doing things left a core insurgent element in Fallouja. But the targeted tactics also resulted in fewer casualties, both civilian and military: The 82nd lost only one paratrooper during its Fallouja tenure.

And the city, while always restive, never deteriorated into open revolt. Marines said the veneer of relative calm was deceptive. The city has served as a “center of gravity” for insurgent activity throughout western and central Iraq and must be confronted, Conway said.

With an invasion seemingly imminent, however, the U.S. command hasn’t found a way to confront its armed enemy without the likelihood of many civilian casualties.

Marines are considering issuing an order that all noncombatants leave the city, Conway said, though how it would be accomplished remains unclear. Many people probably would refuse to leave or be forced to remain by insurgents seeking civilian shields.

And it appears unlikely that a “pacified” Fallouja would be any friendlier to U.S. troops. This is a city where U.S.-trained and -paid police officers staged a demonstration last year demanding that American troops stay away from them.

Most of the U.S.-trained security forces went into hiding once Marines surrounded the city, and some are believed to have defected to the insurgency. Marines are pushing for joint patrols -- Marines alongside Fallouja police, something security forces throughout Sunni Iraq have strongly resisted -- and are vowing a much heavier U.S. presence inside town.

“It’s not going to be a return to the status quo,” said Col. John Toolan, commander of the 1st Marine Regiment.

The Marines are at least the fifth U.S. unit to occupy Fallouja, a quick turnover that has not helped in an insular city where almost everyone is suspicious of outsiders. Perceived heavy-handedness by previous units -- including the killing of 17 civilians by Army troops last spring during a confrontation at a schoolhouse -- probably contributed to a poisoned atmosphere.

The Marines came to Iraq expecting to engage regular Iraqis in a more effective way than had their Army predecessors. But they had no time for preliminaries in Fallouja. Their timeline for confronting the city was shortened after four U.S. contractors were killed and their bodies mutilated. U.S. leaders determined that a decisive response was warranted.

Military experts differ on the U.S. reaction to the atrocity. A frontal assault on the city was inevitably going to produce civilian casualties -- and a backlash, some argue. British forces responded in a more measured fashion when six of their troops were cornered in a southern Iraqi town last summer and killed.

“Isn’t it much more sensible to cut Fallouja off, put some barbed wire around it, and ratchet down the violence?” asked Charles Heyman, a defense analyst with Jane’s Consultancy Group in Britain. “We are there, at the end of the day, to establish a civic power, and not to destroy and have the whole country stirred up like a hornet’s nest.”

An unfortunate fact, from a U.S. standpoint, is that many people sympathize with the insurgents, which becomes clear in conversations with Falloujans. Refugees interviewed at a tent city set up on a barren stretch of land in Baghdad accused U.S. troops of indiscriminately bombing and shooting civilians.

“We all agree that the best thing would be for the Americans to leave Fallouja and Iraq right away,” said Mohammed Hussein, a 50-year-old father of four from Fallouja who said his 70-year-old mother had been shot dead by a Marine sniper during this month’s fighting.

All rejected the Marines’ contention that the armed rebellion in Fallouja is driven by 200 or so foreign fighters -- an assertion that even Marines appear to have difficulty defending, except by arguing that the foreigners are protected by a civilian buffer.

“It’s probably a significant overstatement to say that 200 or 300 foreign fighters are holding back 2,000 or 3,000 Marines,” Conway conceded. “The fact is, you’ve got several tens of thousands of innocent people caught in between.”

Commanders of the 82nd Airborne, during their tenure, acknowledged that it was overwhelmingly Iraqis -- former Baath Party members, religious militants, extreme nationalists -- who were their major enemy, although there were some foreign fighters with strong tribal ties to the west and the roads to Syria and Saudi Arabia.

On Saturday, Brig Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, estimated the insurgent force in Fallouja at 1,000 to 2,000 fighters, with 15% to 20% of them foreigners.

Whatever their numbers and national origins, the three-week pause in the assault on Fallouja probably has allowed the enemy time to regroup, establish defenses and set up ambushes. That’s not going to make it any easier for the troops who will have to go in.

“It will be costly,” Conway said of the coming fight, “but the Marines understand that.”

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Perry reported from Fallouja and McDonnell from Baghdad. Times staff writer Richard B. Schmitt in Washington contributed to this report.