Deadly April Battle Became a Turning Point for Fallouja

The insurgents came at the Marines in relentless, almost suicidal waves. By the time the two-hour firefight in the Jolan district of this Sunni Muslim stronghold was over, dozens of anti-American fighters and one Marine were dead.

When the April 26 battle ended, Lt. Gen. James Conway, commanding officer of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, knew something else: It was, in a microcosm, what house-to-house fighting might look like if the Marines were forced to storm Fallouja and, possibly, level a city of 300,000 people. He didn’t like the look of the future battlefield.

Conway had been given authority to cut a deal. He had long spoken about “putting an Iraqi face” on the security forces here. From unexpected quarters, a chance suddenly emerged to accomplish that goal in spectacular -- if far from ideal -- fashion. The April 26 firefight came during an uneasy, and often broken, cease-fire between the insurgents and the Marines who had surrounded the city earlier that month. At the time, the best hope for a peaceful resolution appeared to be the heavily publicized negotiations involving Sunni clerics, Fallouja civic leaders and sheiks, the Marines and U.S. occupation officials.

But behind the scenes, a back-channel communication between guerrilla envoys and the Marines was showing promise. It appears that several insurgent commanders -- former generals in Saddam Hussein’s regime who had joined the armed resistance -- had made an overture through third parties in the days before the battle.

“There are factions among the insurgents, and we’ve been talking to some of them,” a Marine commander confided to a journalist a few days before news of the deal broke. “We think some would rather live than die.”

With a potential bloodbath looming, Marine leaders adopted a mantra: “We don’t want to turn Fallouja into Dresden,” referring to the Allied firebombing of the German city in World War II that killed tens of thousands of civilians.

Three days after that April 26 firefight, the remarkable deal was cut: The Marine leadership made a pact with the ex-generals. The Marines pulled out, violence ceased, further carnage was averted, and both sides declared victory.

Top officials at the Pentagon and in Baghdad were stunned. Most appeared caught off-guard by the deal, and were denying any withdrawal was taking place even as Marines were moving out and dismantling roadblocks and checkpoints.

Today, Fallouja is for all intents and purposes a rebel town, complete with banners proclaiming a great victory and insurgents integrated into the new Fallouja Brigade -- the protective force set up with U.S. assistance to keep the peace.

At any rate, it had never been the Marines’ intention to storm this restive city along the Euphrates.

Privately, Marines who began arriving here in March viewed the Army’s strategy throughout Iraq’s Sunni heartland as unduly confrontational.

But the grisly slayings of four U.S. contractors March 31 changed everything. Orders from a higher authority eclipsed the Marines’ “no better friend” intentions for Fallouja. “When the president says go, we go,” said Col. J.C. Coleman, chief of staff for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

So the Marines were pushed to do something -- a full-fledged assault on the city -- that the Army had avoided, and military strategists now say was ill-conceived. Too few Marines were marshaled to confront a dug-in urban foe that proved unexpectedly resilient, well-armed and relentless.

The fighting quickly turned ugly, as did the images of dead and maimed civilians and fleeing refugees broadcast on Arab-language television. U.S. forces called a cease-fire after several days. Three weeks later, the insurgents had benefited from the chance to rearm, bring in new recruits and prepare ambushes, ensuring even more slaughter once the battle was renewed.

“In the end, the Americans left themselves with only bad options,” said Michael Clarke, professor of defense studies at King’s College, London. “They could either destroy the city, causing heavy loss of life. Or they could walk away. Both are a disaster, but the Americans chose the less disastrous of the two.”

Despite the current calm in Fallouja, there are still great doubts in Washington and Baghdad about a deal that seemed to allow Hussein’s men to pull their old olive-green uniforms and burgundy berets out of the closet and go back to work. One key player -- Maj. Gen. Jassim Mohammed Saleh, who was among the first to meet with the Marines -- had to be hastily dispatched to the background after the deal was struck because of his Republican Guard past and insurgent connections.

“To bring back that officer corps, it is not by any means black and white,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told a Senate hearing last week when asked about the wisdom of rehabilitating such men. “We just brought back one of those officers in Fallouja, and we pretty much had to sideline him immediately because he was working with the enemy. We need clean, new officers.”

U.S. commanders in the field have long recognized the central role in the insurgency of former officers in Hussein’s regime, especially those from the Republican Guard and various intelligence services. These are middle-aged, often graying men with vast strategic and personal expertise about their country -- and considerable ruthlessness gained as Hussein’s henchmen. Most were left with few options in the face of Washington’s policy of abolishing the military and purging loyalists of Hussein’s Baath Party.

Many Hussein-era generals and colonels are believed to have retreated to Fallouja, Ramadi and other towns in the Sunni Triangle as Baghdad fell, regrouping and organizing to fight another day. U.S. forces have arrested scores of ex-officers for insurgent ties, but others have been approached and recruited as U.S. allies -- helping with the organization of police and civil defense corps units, for instance.

The fact that the Fallouja generals were military professionals made a difference. The Marines were not about to sit down and talk with hard-core jihadists with scarves around their faces and AK-47s slung on their shoulders -- the public face of what is far from a monolithic insurgency. Nor would such hard-liners be likely to seek a compromise with U.S. forces.

Conway brought Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, to make the deal work. He’s a tough combat veteran who led Marines into Afghanistan in 2001 and into Baghdad in 2003.

Mattis took over the day-to-day dealings with Saleh, who was key because he is well respected in town and comes from a large tribe prominent in Fallouja and western Iraq. Another important player on the Iraqi side was Mohammed Latif, a former intelligence officer of murky provenance who, according to the Marines, had gone into exile because of differences with Hussein’s regime. Once Kurds and Shiites outside Fallouja balked at Saleh’s Republican Guard pedigree, Latif was made the public face of the Fallouja security force.

On April 29, when the deal was announced, Mattis smiled and patted Latif and the others on the back. For a self-described “brawler,” it was a sea change in attitude.

Many questions remain in a place where the U.S. has helped organize, fund and arm a military force of unknown capability or intention -- and unabashedly hostile to the occupiers. Some worry that Fallouja may become a free zone for bomb-makers, saboteurs, assassins and other violent types whose desire to drive the United States out of Iraq remains undiminished.

The intentions of Latif are hard to discern. He is slick, winks at journalists, says one thing to Westerners, another thing to Iraqis.

“He’s an intelligence guy,” said Col. John Toolan, commander of the 1st Marine Regiment. “You never get a straight answer from those guys.”

In Fallouja these days, there is little talk of the central U.S. demands -- disarming the insurgents, finding the people who killed and mutilated the four U.S. contractors and hunting down foreign jihadists. There were no foreign fighters, proclaims Latif. And if they were here, they must have escaped, he has said.

An aide to Saleh finds the very question of foreign fighters beside the point.

“The Americans brought different nationalities -- British, Spanish, Salvadorans, Ukrainians,” the aide noted. “Is it acceptable for them and rejected for us? ... And if there were [foreign] Arabs, it is not a shame upon the city of Islam.”

This once-obscure city to the west of the capital is now an inspirational ground zero for anti-Western militants in the Middle East, the place that beat back the Marines. Fresh graffiti in Arabic tell the story: “Long Live the Heroic Mujahedin of Fallouja.” “Long Live the Resistance.”

At the entrance to Jolan, one of the two neighborhoods where the most violent fighting raged, a sign reads: “This Is the Neighborhood of Heroes, Congratulations.”

What happened, Marines say, is that the stakes in Fallouja got too big. An all-out assault, Marines say, would have caused mass casualties, further inflamed the entire region and disrupted the planned June 30 turnover of authority to the Iraqis.

Meanwhile, only a portion of the $100 million earmarked for Fallouja projects will probably be spent, officials now say, and then only funneled through local contractors. No one expects Western workers or non-government agencies to venture into Fallouja any time soon.

“It’s like sausage: ugly to watch being made,” Mattis said of the deal that brought some sense of stability to Fallouja. “We’ll see how it tastes when it’s over.”

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Times special correspondent Raheem Salman contributed to this report.