thedrifter
12-30-08, 06:55 AM
American Exit Increases Optimism in Falluja
TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 6:01 a.m.
FALLUJA, Iraq — In Falluja, a town that rises abruptly out of the vast Syrian Desert an hour west of Baghdad, nearly every building left standing has some sort of hole in it.
Mosques are without their minarets. Apartment walls have been peeled away by artillery shells. A family’s kitchen is full of tiny holes made by a fragmentary grenade.
Of all the places fighting has raged since the American invasion nearly six years ago, Falluja — the site of two major battles and the town where American security contractors were killed and their bodies hung from a local bridge — stands out as one of the bloodiest and most intractable.
This month, as the last American marines prepare to leave Camp Falluja, the sprawling base a few miles outside of town where many of the American troops who fought the two battles were stationed, Falluja has come to represent something unexpected: the hope that an Iraqi town once at the heart of the insurgency can become a model for peace without the United States military.
As part of the reduction of United States troops from Iraq, by Thursday there will be few marines left in or around this mostly Sunni city of about 300,000 people. The closing of Camp Falluja is one of the most prominent symbols yet that America’s presence in the country, which at times had seemed all encompassing, is diminishing.
As recently as a year ago, the base closing was cause for alarm. The calm that seemed to have taken hold here was fragile enough that both Iraqi and American officials feared the potential consequences of the marines’ departure.
Today they look forward to it.
“That will make our job easier,” said Col. Dowad Muhammad Suliyman, commander of the Falluja Police Department. “The existence of the American forces is an excuse for the insurgents to attack. They consider us spies for the Americans.”
To be sure, the threat of violence has not vanished. But the police said they were proud that a place that suffered a major attack a week just a few years ago had had only two in the last six months.
The view that the town is better off taking care of itself was echoed by residents, even in the neighborhood hit by the most recent big attack, in early December, when suicide truck bombers linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia killed 19 people, wounded dozens of others and leveled nine houses and two police stations.
“Our sons will take care of the security issue,” said Khalil Abrahim, 50, a resident of the neighborhood, as he walked over the rubble of his house, wondering aloud how he could afford to rebuild. “They can do a better job.”
Camp Falluja will be handed over to the Iraqi Army, with most of its marines relocated to Al Asad Air Base, about 90 miles to the west. A smaller contingent will remain at nearby Camp Baharia.
The move reflects the confidence of the American command that major violence will not return here.
“It won’t happen again because the Iraqis don’t want it to happen again,” said Col. George H. Bristol, the bald, heavily muscled commanding officer of the First Marine Expeditionary Force Headquarters Group at Camp Falluja.
“We’ve certainly turned a page,” he said. “The conditions are now there where we can close it and turn it over to the people who fought beside us. It’s a great thing. If you look at the city, it has really come to life.”
The city, which had been emptied of much of its population before the second Battle of Falluja in November 2004, now bustles with people, its streets filled with honking cars inching their way to the Old Bridge that spans the placid, green Euphrates River.
In a small building at the foot of the bridge, freshly painted green, not far from where the bodies of two Blackwater security guards were hung, Falluja has established an Office of Citizen Complaints.
At the elementary school where in 2003 members of the 82nd Airborne Division fired on protesters — some of whom may have been armed — killing 17 people, dozens of girls were at play during recess. A sign out front said the school was a voter registration center for the coming provincial elections.
Not far away, a restaurant named KFC — not affiliated with the American fast-food chain but adorned with unlicensed pictures of Colonel Sanders — sells a fried chicken lunch for about $3.50.
All around the city, people are rebuilding houses and clearing away rubble.
If a rocket-propelled grenade launcher symbolized Falluja during the height of the insurgency, its new symbol may well be the broom. They are sold in bunches at roadside markets and are in almost constant use by workers in bright orange jumpsuits trying to keep the town’s narrow roads free of desert sand.
At Camp Falluja, Maj. James R. Gladden and Master Gunnery Sgt. Ray SiFuentes are overseeing the dismantling of a base that had once been home to 14,000 marines and contractors.
The 2,000-acre post had its own fire department, water treatment plant, scrap yard, voter registration booth, ice-making factory, weather station, prison (for insurgents), beauty shop, power plant, Internet cafe, Turkish bazaar and dog catcher.
Its chapel could fit 800 marines for religious services, a Toby Keith concert or a performance by the Philadelphia Eagles cheerleaders, all of which were held there.
“We had basically everything a small town had,” said Major Gladden, 34, who is known by other marines as the mayor of Camp Falluja. “Everything except fast-food outlets,” he said, which were deemed too unhealthy.
There are only 200 marines left now, and about 170 truckloads a day leave the base, most headed for other United States military installations.
Even the gaggle of geese from the camp’s artificial pond, which some marines had adopted as pets, has been taken away. One by one, they were trapped and set loose at a larger pond at Camp Baharia.
A good deal of packing up involves making sure nothing is left behind that later could be used against American forces. Obsolete armor for trucks, ballistic glass plates for Humvees and concertina wire are cut to pieces. Thousands of mammoth concrete barriers are being trucked to other military bases.
Back in town, where residents have been required to be fingerprinted and to submit to iris scans, Hashim Harmoud, 69, a caretaker at a mosque that had been said to be a center for insurgent activity, said he was thankful for the city’s newfound peace.
But as testament to the town’s dual nature, he was hesitant to discuss an insurgency that could rise up again at a moment’s notice. “Al Qaeda?” he asked, a bit cagily. “I don’t know anything about them. I go from the mosque to my house, and that’s all.”
Ellie
TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 6:01 a.m.
FALLUJA, Iraq — In Falluja, a town that rises abruptly out of the vast Syrian Desert an hour west of Baghdad, nearly every building left standing has some sort of hole in it.
Mosques are without their minarets. Apartment walls have been peeled away by artillery shells. A family’s kitchen is full of tiny holes made by a fragmentary grenade.
Of all the places fighting has raged since the American invasion nearly six years ago, Falluja — the site of two major battles and the town where American security contractors were killed and their bodies hung from a local bridge — stands out as one of the bloodiest and most intractable.
This month, as the last American marines prepare to leave Camp Falluja, the sprawling base a few miles outside of town where many of the American troops who fought the two battles were stationed, Falluja has come to represent something unexpected: the hope that an Iraqi town once at the heart of the insurgency can become a model for peace without the United States military.
As part of the reduction of United States troops from Iraq, by Thursday there will be few marines left in or around this mostly Sunni city of about 300,000 people. The closing of Camp Falluja is one of the most prominent symbols yet that America’s presence in the country, which at times had seemed all encompassing, is diminishing.
As recently as a year ago, the base closing was cause for alarm. The calm that seemed to have taken hold here was fragile enough that both Iraqi and American officials feared the potential consequences of the marines’ departure.
Today they look forward to it.
“That will make our job easier,” said Col. Dowad Muhammad Suliyman, commander of the Falluja Police Department. “The existence of the American forces is an excuse for the insurgents to attack. They consider us spies for the Americans.”
To be sure, the threat of violence has not vanished. But the police said they were proud that a place that suffered a major attack a week just a few years ago had had only two in the last six months.
The view that the town is better off taking care of itself was echoed by residents, even in the neighborhood hit by the most recent big attack, in early December, when suicide truck bombers linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia killed 19 people, wounded dozens of others and leveled nine houses and two police stations.
“Our sons will take care of the security issue,” said Khalil Abrahim, 50, a resident of the neighborhood, as he walked over the rubble of his house, wondering aloud how he could afford to rebuild. “They can do a better job.”
Camp Falluja will be handed over to the Iraqi Army, with most of its marines relocated to Al Asad Air Base, about 90 miles to the west. A smaller contingent will remain at nearby Camp Baharia.
The move reflects the confidence of the American command that major violence will not return here.
“It won’t happen again because the Iraqis don’t want it to happen again,” said Col. George H. Bristol, the bald, heavily muscled commanding officer of the First Marine Expeditionary Force Headquarters Group at Camp Falluja.
“We’ve certainly turned a page,” he said. “The conditions are now there where we can close it and turn it over to the people who fought beside us. It’s a great thing. If you look at the city, it has really come to life.”
The city, which had been emptied of much of its population before the second Battle of Falluja in November 2004, now bustles with people, its streets filled with honking cars inching their way to the Old Bridge that spans the placid, green Euphrates River.
In a small building at the foot of the bridge, freshly painted green, not far from where the bodies of two Blackwater security guards were hung, Falluja has established an Office of Citizen Complaints.
At the elementary school where in 2003 members of the 82nd Airborne Division fired on protesters — some of whom may have been armed — killing 17 people, dozens of girls were at play during recess. A sign out front said the school was a voter registration center for the coming provincial elections.
Not far away, a restaurant named KFC — not affiliated with the American fast-food chain but adorned with unlicensed pictures of Colonel Sanders — sells a fried chicken lunch for about $3.50.
All around the city, people are rebuilding houses and clearing away rubble.
If a rocket-propelled grenade launcher symbolized Falluja during the height of the insurgency, its new symbol may well be the broom. They are sold in bunches at roadside markets and are in almost constant use by workers in bright orange jumpsuits trying to keep the town’s narrow roads free of desert sand.
At Camp Falluja, Maj. James R. Gladden and Master Gunnery Sgt. Ray SiFuentes are overseeing the dismantling of a base that had once been home to 14,000 marines and contractors.
The 2,000-acre post had its own fire department, water treatment plant, scrap yard, voter registration booth, ice-making factory, weather station, prison (for insurgents), beauty shop, power plant, Internet cafe, Turkish bazaar and dog catcher.
Its chapel could fit 800 marines for religious services, a Toby Keith concert or a performance by the Philadelphia Eagles cheerleaders, all of which were held there.
“We had basically everything a small town had,” said Major Gladden, 34, who is known by other marines as the mayor of Camp Falluja. “Everything except fast-food outlets,” he said, which were deemed too unhealthy.
There are only 200 marines left now, and about 170 truckloads a day leave the base, most headed for other United States military installations.
Even the gaggle of geese from the camp’s artificial pond, which some marines had adopted as pets, has been taken away. One by one, they were trapped and set loose at a larger pond at Camp Baharia.
A good deal of packing up involves making sure nothing is left behind that later could be used against American forces. Obsolete armor for trucks, ballistic glass plates for Humvees and concertina wire are cut to pieces. Thousands of mammoth concrete barriers are being trucked to other military bases.
Back in town, where residents have been required to be fingerprinted and to submit to iris scans, Hashim Harmoud, 69, a caretaker at a mosque that had been said to be a center for insurgent activity, said he was thankful for the city’s newfound peace.
But as testament to the town’s dual nature, he was hesitant to discuss an insurgency that could rise up again at a moment’s notice. “Al Qaeda?” he asked, a bit cagily. “I don’t know anything about them. I go from the mosque to my house, and that’s all.”
Ellie