FALLUJAH: PLEASE, NO CAKEWALKS

As you’d expect, the reports from the first day of fight­ing in Fallujah have been con­fus­ing and con­tra­dic­tory. The New York Times describes an hours-​​long fight for “one house” by a group of 150 marines, while in another part of town, American units had pushed as far as 800 yards into the city. The Washington Post blandly states that “troops encoun­tered some resis­tance in the first hours of the bat­tle.“
We all want as many of our troops as pos­si­ble to come home from this fight safe. But I, for one, am hop­ing U.S. sol­diers and marines don’t have too easy of a time in Fallujah. And before you press “send” on that hate mail, let me explain why.
The goal of the Fallujah attack is to wipe out an insur­gent strong­hold. But that aim will only be met if the insur­gents actu­ally stick around and fight. That’s not a stan­dard tac­tic in the guerilla play­book, how­ever. Insurgents tra­di­tion­ally avoid those kind of direct con­fronta­tions, opt­ing for the hit-​​and-​​run or the ter­ror attack instead. Just look at what hap­pened recently in the Iraqi town of Samarra: American forces eas­ily “take” from the rebels in October; by November, the place is back to being a ter­ror hotspot.
If Fallujah varies from this norm, the fight­ing there could be bru­tal. American tech­no­log­i­cal advan­tages in com­mu­ni­ca­tions and bat­tle­field aware­ness tend to crum­ble in urban canyons. But at least it could prove deci­sive.
Now, there are some signs that the hard-​​core, religiously-​​inspired insur­gents have decided to stick around. The Post caught up with a dozen rebel fight­ers before the shoot­ing started, and the paper found “a new gen­er­a­tion of the jihad dias­pora, arriv­ing in Fallujah from all over the Arab world: five Saudis, three Tunisians, a Yemeni. Only three were Iraqis.” These Associated Press pic­tures seem to tell a story of sea­soned insur­gents.
But John Robb, at the always-​​insightful Global Guerillas blog, isn’t so sure. “Some insur­gents will stay for the fight (as pay­ment for the sup­port pro­vided and/​or due to a strong affec­tion for the city’s peo­ple),” he writes. But “most of the peo­ple and equip­ment we want to kill or cap­ture is already gone. The US/​Iraqi gov­ern­ment telegraphed their desire to retake the city months ago. Further, many other loca­tions are avail­able” for the gueril­las to oper­ate in.
Robb instead pre­dicts a bat­tle “against local boys, orga­nized by neigh­bor­hood, mosque, fam­ily, or tribepeo­ple that are fight­ing for their homes.“
Let’s hope he’s wrong.
THERE’S MORE: “U.S. and Iraqi forces have faced less resis­tance than expected and suf­fered min­i­mal casu­al­ties, a com­man­der [told CNN] Tuesday, as the troops con­tinue their sec­ond day of assaults on militant-​​controlled Falluja.”

November 9th, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.