LIGHT RESISTANCE, BAD NEWS?

Already ten sol­diers have lost their lives dur­ing the fight­ing in Fallujah. But, accord­ing to the L.A. Times, “U.S. mil­i­tary lead­ers said that over­all, resis­tance was lighter than expected and the advance was pro­ceed­ing more quickly than antic­i­pated.“
And that may be the bad news. As I men­tioned yes­ter­day, a rel­a­tively easy fight — and this is all rel­a­tive here — would prob­a­bly mean that the hard­est of the hard-​​core insur­gents are skipped out of town before the G.I.s came bar­rel­ing in.
An American gen­eral admit­ted as much yes­ter­day, the New York Times reports.

Insurgent lead­ers in Falluja prob­a­bly fled before the American-​​led offen­sive and may be coor­di­nat­ing attacks in Iraq that have left scores dead over the past few days, accord­ing to American mil­i­tary offi­cials here… “I per­son­ally believe some of the senior lead­ers prob­a­bly have fled,” Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, com­man­der of the multi­na­tional forces in Iraq, said in a video con­fer­ence with reporters on Tuesday. “I would hope not, but I’ve got to assume that those kinds of lead­ers under­stand the com­bat power we can bring.“
Insurgent attacks con­tin­ued to exact a heavy toll across Iraq on Tuesday. Two American sol­diers died in a mor­tar attack in Mosul, where gov­ern­ment author­ity appears to be ebbing. Gunmen assas­si­nated a senior gov­ern­ment offi­cial in Samarra. Guerrillas fired mor­tars at police sta­tions in down­town Baghdad while hun­dreds of fight­ers massed in the cen­ter of the provin­cial cap­i­tal of Ramadi, just 30 miles west of Falluja.
A sus­pected car bomb­ing out­side an Iraqi National Guard base in Kirkuk killed three peo­ple and wounded two oth­ers, Reuters reported. The attacks on Tuesday fol­lowed sev­eral oth­ers over the week­end, both in Baghdad and the Sunni tri­an­gle.
The American mil­i­tary said on Tuesday that six peo­ple had been killed in the car bomb attack Monday night out­side Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad. Five were Iraqi police­men, and the sixth was a civil­ian, the mil­i­tary said. In the two church bomb­ings the same night, one Iraqi was killed and sev­eral wounded, and one of the bombers was dis­guised as an Iraqi police­man, accord­ing to a report put out by a Western secu­rity con­trac­tor.
This spate of what appear to be coor­di­nated attacks, as well as the dis­per­sal of top insur­gent lead­ers, sug­gests that the Falluja offen­sive alone will not crush an insur­gency that has been gath­er­ing strength. And it raises the prospect that insur­gents will try to regroup and infil­trate Falluja after the fight­ing is over, as they have done in Samarra.

November 10th, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.