Fighting heavy in Fallujah

[usmc4669]

FALLUJAH, Iraq — U.S. forces killed dozens of insurgents and seized three suicide explosive belts during heavy fighting in this Sunni Muslim city yesterday, while preparations for a religious festival complicated plans to retake southern cities held by followers of radical Shi'ite cleric Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr.
Operations were particularly difficult in the rebel-held city of Najaf, where thousands of pilgrims filled the streets around the office where Sheik al-Sadr is thought to be ensconced, according to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the Army's top commander in Iraq.
The Pentagon's Central Command reported six new American combat deaths in the past two days, four of them in scattered incidents north of Baghdad. Forty Americans have been killed in combat across Iraq this week.
In Fallujah, Marines backed by AC-130 gunships combed through a mainly industrial area of the city captured during three previous days of combat, battling snipers perched in the steeplelike minarets of Fallujah's many mosques.
"If we can drive them to the surface, we can kill them," said Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Regiment, from his command post in Fallujah. "That is our strategy."
One Marine was killed Wednesday and another yesterday in Fallujah. A hospital director told the Associated Press that more than 280 Iraqis have died in the city where four Americans were killed and their bodies mutilated last week.
"Those are anticoalition forces that are being brought [to the hospital] by their fellow jihadis," Col. Byrne insisted. "We have had limited dealings with civilians. As we move more into [residential areas], we will treat the civilians with the appropriate dignity, decency and respect."
A convoy carrying food and medicine sent by Sunni clerics in Baghdad was permitted to enter the city after extensive negotiations.
Marines also captured large quantities of plastic explosives — enough to blow up a city block, one said — and found three sophisticated suicide belts, two of them on the bodies of dead insurgents. Col. Byrne described the devices as money belts stuffed with plastic explosives and lead fishing weights, each with a detonator wire.
In one neighborhood, the Marines said, they broke into the house of a suspected sniper but found only a long-distance truck driver cowering in fear.
They gave the man, who had been hiding for two days, a case of bottled water and some packaged meals but confiscated his AK-47 rifle. They said the man came to the door, his eyes swollen with tears, to wave goodbye.
U.S. commanders promised that additional troops would be sent to help out in Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, but declined to say whether Americans would be sent to assist allied forces facing a separate Shi'ite rebellion in the south.
Black-clad members of Sheik al Sadr's Mahdi's Army were in full control of Kut and Kufa as well as the central part of Najaf, a holy city where thousands of Shi'ite pilgrims have been gathering for weekend ceremonies related to the seventh century death of a Shi'ite saint.
In Baghdad, chief American Administrator L. Paul Bremer warned pilgrims of the danger of terror attacks on mosques during the holiday, recalling explosions that killed about 150 people in Baghdad and Karbala during a similar holiday last month.
Gen. Sanchez acknowledged that the crowds were hampering attempts to move against Sheik al-Sadr, whose office issued a statement saying the dual uprisings by Sunnis and Shi'ites "have shown that all the Iraqi people are united."
Nevertheless, there was little evidence that the great majority of Shi'ites — who at first welcomed the American entry into Iraq — have been rallying behind the radical 30-year-old preacher.
Gen. Sanchez said coalition forces would move "imminently" to clear Mahdi's Army militants from Kut, which was abandoned on Wednesday by its Ukrainian garrison after an all-night battle with the insurgents.
However, it was not clear how that would be achieved without the help of American troops. Several coalition countries had been placed in the south precisely because they had not been expected to face combat. In the case of the Bulgarians, their mandate forbids them to engage in battle."Then what the hell good are they to us."
Polish and Bulgarian soldiers proved more effective yesterday, fending off an attack on their positions during all-night battles in Karbala, a Polish spokesman told the AP.
U.S.-trained police also have been ineffective in defense of the southern cities, and members of an American-trained civil-defense force were seen supplying ammunition to insurgents in Fallujah on Wednesday.

U.S. Marines pray over a fallen comrade at a first aid point after he died from wounds suffered in fighting in Fallujah, Iraq, yesterday.
(AP)

[namgrunt]

Damn, Gunny.
That picture you attached brings tears to my eyes.
Another brother lost in combat. We were not there, but we have been "there" ourselves. The fighting is getting heavier. We will see and hear of more scenes like this one.

We need to put on our spiritual flak jackets, and pray for the lives of our little brothers engaging those kooks over in Iraq. Marine moms are hanging on the news channels hoping against hope that they will see their sons or daughters, while at the same time hoping against hope that they won't see them in a poncho being carried to a med-evac chopper.

Semper Fi!

[thedrifter]

U.S. Forces Retake Most of Key Iraqi City

By LOURDES NAVARRO

FALLUJAH, Iraq - U.S. forces Friday said they had retaken most of a key southern city from a rebellious Shiite militia, and an American-declared halt to fighting in the embattled city of Fallujah was undercut by bursts of gunfire on the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.

On the western edge of Baghdad insurgents hit a fuel convoy, killing one U.S. soldier and an Iraqi driver the military reported.

A Baghdad correspondent for the Arab satellite broadcaster Al-Jazeera said the convoy had been carrying fuel near Al-Amiriyah and that not fewer than nine people were killed in the attack. The report said none of the dead had been identified.

A second soldier was killed in an attack using roadside bombs and small arms at Camp Cook, a U.S. base in northern Baghdad, the military said.

The deaths brought the toll of U.S. troops killed across Iraq this week to 42. The fighting also has killed more than 460 Iraqis _ including more than 280 in Fallujah, a hospital official said. At least 643 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.

Iraq's top U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, announced a unilateral pause in the 5-day-old Fallujah operation to allow Sunni clerics and American military leaders an opportunity to talk with anti-coalition insurgents.

It also was designed to allow in humanitarian aid and let beleaguered residents bury their dead. Cars filled with women, children and the elderly streamed out of the city, a bastion of anti-U.S. Sunni guerrillas 35 miles west of Baghdad.

The violence that has intensified and spread throughout Iraq this week has created a degree of cooperation between anti-American elements in both the Sunni and Shiite Muslim communities, which have been deeply at odds for decades.

U.S. troops drove into Kut before dawn Friday, pushing out members of the militia headed by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr that had seized the southern textile and farming center this week after Ukrainian troops abandoned the city under heavy attack.

A U.S. helicopter struck al-Sadr's main office in Kut, killing two people, witnesses said. Americans were patrolling the streets during daylight hours.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said he expected the operation to retake Kut from al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army militia would be finished by Saturday morning.

"We are fairly comfortable that the town of al-Kut is well on its way to coming back under coalition control," he said.

Kimmitt told CNN he believed there were 300-400 al-Sadr militants in Kut on Thursday night who had been trying "to intimidate the people" in the city of about 250,000.

The Kut operation represented a major foray by the American military in a region where U.S. allies have struggled to deal with the uprising.

The siege on Fallujah, however, brought a condemnation from one of the most pro-American members of the U.S.-picked Governing Council, Adnan Pachachi.

"These operations were a mass punishment for the people of Fallujah," Pachachi told Al-Arabiya TV. "It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal."

The heavy fighting for Fallujah was prompted by the March 31 slaying of four U.S. civilians in the city. Their burned bodies were mutilated and dragged through the streets by a mob that hung two of them from a bridge.

The Marines called a halt to offensive operations in Fallujah at noon Friday. Only 90 minutes later, Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, commander of the 1st Battalion 5th Marine Regiment, said he had permission to resume offensive operations.

For hours afterward, there was sporadic shooting in the city that for some Iraqis has become a symbol of defiance. Marines were hunkered down around the city and in an industrial zone just inside, without entering residential neighborhoods. Before the halt was called, there was fighting around a mosque that was the center of battles for three days.

A year to the day after Marines toppled Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdos Square, a poster of al-Sadr was attached Friday to an unfinished bronze monument at the site. U.S. soldiers climbed up and tore it down.

The felling of Saddam's statue before a cheering crowd of Iraqis on April 9 was an enduring image of Iraq's liberation.

But on Friday, Baghdad was tense, and a curfew was imposed in Firdos Square, where at least two armored vehicles were parked. At the western entrance to the capital, gunmen freely roamed the main highway, and a burned tanker truck sent a huge pall of smoke over the city.

In the afternoon, a mortar round hit a small building near the square. No injuries were reported in the attack, which shook two nearby hotels that are home to many foreigners.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that a year ago, he had not imagined Iraq would be in its current state.

"I thought that they would go from some good days and some bad days. There is no doubt that the current situation is very serious and it is the most serious that we have faced," Straw told the BBC.

Al-Sadr forces kept control of Kufa and the center of the nearby holy city of Najaf, despite a vow by U.S. commanders Wednesday to crush the militia.

Any U.S. operation to oust the militiamen would be hampered by the hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims who are in southern cities and roads this weekend for al-Arbaeen, which commemorates the end of the period of mourning for a 7th-century martyred saint.

Al-Sadr on Friday demanded U.S. forces leave Iraq, saying they now face "a civil revolt."

"I direct my speech to my enemy Bush and I tell him that if your excuse was that you are fighting Saddam, then this thing is a past and now you are fighting the entire Iraqi people," al-Sadr said in a sermon, delivered by one of his deputies at the Imam Ali Shrine, Shiite Islam's holiest site, in Najaf.

In Tokyo, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi vowed not to withdraw 530 troops in Iraq despite the seizure of three Japanese civilians. Militants have threatened to kill the three unless the troops leave Iraq. A senior aide to al-Sadr denied his militia was responsible for kidnapping the Japanese.

At least three other foreign civilians are being held captive.

Gunmen on the highway outside Baghdad were seen stopping a car carrying two Western civilians _ apparently private security guards _ since both had sidearms. The gunmen pulled the men from the car, firing at the ground to warn them to obey. Their fate was not known.

U.S. troops also came under heavy attack in Muqdadiyah, 55 miles northeast of Baghdad. Up to 80 insurgents ambushed a U.S. patrol late Thursday, prompting an overnight battle. At least three insurgents were killed and up to 20 wounded, said Lt. Col. Peter A. Newell.

Insurgents armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades have put up stiff resistance in Fallujah, but Marines have said they are winning the battle, holding at one point about a quarter of the city.

The security firm that employed the four Americans who were killed in Fallujah, Blackwater USA, told The New York Times that they were lured into an ambush by members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.

The Iraqis promised the Blackwater-led convoy safe passage, but suddenly blocked off the road instead, preventing any escape from waiting gunmen, Patrick Toohey, Blackwater's vice president for government relations said in Friday's editions.

Two senior Pentagon officials said an inquiry into the slayings was continuing.

In Najaf, a policeman watched helplessly Thursday as a pickup truck carrying a dozen heavily armed Shiite militiamen went past his police station _ already in the militia's hands.

Such action has raised concerns about the performance and loyalty of a police force that U.S. administrators are counting on to keep security in the future Iraq.

Coalition forces also have moved in to block the road between Kufa and Najaf, a senior aide to al-Sadr, Sheik Qays al-Khaz'ali, told the AP.

Al-Sadr, a young, firebrand anti-U.S. cleric, is thought to be holed up in his office in Najaf, protected by scores of gunmen. He has said he is willing to die resisting any U.S. attempt to capture him.

Al-Sadr supporters clashed with coalition forces in the southern city of Karbala and in Baqouba, north of Baghdad. At least six Iraqis were killed, officials said.

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/04/09/ap/Headlines/d81rd9i02.txt


Ellie

[MillRatUSMC]

Fallujah, the arm pit of the world...we paid a heavy price this last few days, but it was worth it, today I saw a few scenes from downtown Fallujah.
They are no longer dancing in the streets as they were when they mulated those 4 Americans.
We're not done, we just holding in place, there more "Pay Back" before we done...
Than the question comes to mind, will we have to do this over and over?
Pray for the souls of our Brothers and Sisters in harms way...

Semper Fidelis
Ricardo