U.S. Marines on the Verge of Assaulting Falluja

[ODShowtime]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Speaking of Ashcroft, what will become of your avatar when Patriot Act boy retires and fades into obscurity. I think you'll need a new one. May I suggest Janet Reno.:D

Man I was just bustin' his balls about that... but you take the cake. THAT is funny!:D

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by ODShowtime
Man I was just bustin' his balls about that... but you take the cake. THAT is funny!:D

I could see it! The Janet Reno Dance Party on JA's avatar. He's gotta' do it. That would be hysterical!:D

[Nickdfresh]

Latest-20 Marines wounded in attack

7:53 AM PST, November 6, 2004 E-mail story Print



Insurgents Attack Police Station in Samarra
American warplanes pound Fallouja as residents say attacks are strongest in months.





From Associated Press


NEAR FALLOUJA, Iraq — Insurgents set off at least two car bombs and attacked a police station today in the central Iraqi town of Samarra, killing at least 21 people and wounding 22 in what could be an effort to take pressure off Fallouja, where U.S. forces are gearing up for an assault.

Elsewhere, 20 American soldiers were wounded in the Sunni Triangle city of Ramadi, the U.S. command said without elaborating. Residents of that insurgent stronghold, located 70 miles west of Baghdad, reported clashes and explosions throughout the day.







The attacks in Samarra, 60 miles northeast of Fallouja, occurred in a city that U.S. and Iraqi forces reclaimed from insurgents in September and had sought to use as a model for pacifying restive Sunni Muslim areas of the country.

Early today, however, armed militants stormed a police station, killing 12 policemen and injuring one. In other attacks, a suicide car bomber detonated explosives inside a stolen police car near the mayor's office, a second car bomb exploded near a U.S. base and a mortar fell on a crowded market.

The dead included an Iraqi National Guard commander, Abdel Razeq Shaker al-Garmali, hospital officials said. The town's mayor was reportedly injured in the car bombing.

Residents said U.S. forces, using loudspeakers to make the announcement, imposed an indefinite curfew on Samarra. American warplanes and helicopters were heard roaming overhead.

In western Baghdad, a suicide car bomber detonated an explosion that killed an Iraqi civilian and wounded three coalition troops and an Iraqi, the U.S. military said. The bomber was killed and another occupant in the car was wounded. Witnesses said the blast hit about 300 yards from a security checkpoint on the road to the international airport.

The new violence could be aimed at relieving U.S. pressure on Fallouja as American commanders shift their forces for an anticipated showdown there.

More than 10,000 American soldiers and Marines are massed for an expected offensive against Fallouja, and Iraq's interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi warned the "window is closing" to avert an attack.

As the Americans prepare for an offensive, U.S. planes dropped five 500-pound bombs at several targets in Fallouja early today, including a factory as well as suspected weapons caches. The drone of U.S. aircraft heading toward Fallouja could be heard over Baghdad. The U.S. military said the main highway into Fallouja has now been completely sealed off.

U.S. intelligence estimates there are about 3,000 insurgents dug in behind defenses and booby traps in Fallouja, a city of about 300,000 located 40 miles west of Baghdad.

Military planners believe there are about 1,200 hardcore insurgents in Fallouja -- at least half of them Iraqis. They are bolstered by insurgent cells with up to 2,000 fighters in the surrounding towns and countryside.

In Brussels, Belgium, Allawi warned that the "window really is closing for a peaceful settlement" in Fallouja. Allawi must give the final go-ahead for the offensive, part of a campaign to curb the insurgency ahead of national elections planned for January.

Sunni clerics have threatened to boycott the election if Fallouja is attacked, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has warned U.S., British and Iraqi authorities that a military campaign and "increased insurgent violence" could put elections at risk.

Iraqi authorities closed a border crossing point with Syria, and U.S. troops set up checkpoints along major routes into the city. Marines fired on a civilian vehicle that did not stop, killing an Iraqi woman and wounding her husband, according to the U.S. military and witnesses. The car didn't notice the checkpoint, witnesses said.

The insurgents struck back, killing one U.S. soldier and wounding five in a rocket attack. Clashes were reported at other checkpoints around the city and in the east and north of the city late in the day. An AC-130 gunship fired at several targets as U.S. forces skirmished with insurgents, the U.S. army said.

Elsewhere, U.S. Cobra attack helicopters fired Friday on insurgents operating an illegal checkpoint south of Baghdad, killing or wounding an "unknown number" of people, the military said.

Allawi, a secular Shiite Muslim with strong ties to the CIA and State Department, has demanded that Fallouja hand over foreign extremists, including Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his followers, and allow government troops to enter the city.

Allawi faces strong opposition to a Fallouja offensive from the Sunni minority. The Sunni clerical Association of Muslim Scholars has threatened to boycott the January election and mount a nationwide civil disobedience campaign.

A public outcry over civilian casualties prompted the Bush administration to call off a siege in April, after which Fallouja fell under control of radical clerics.

In hopes of assuaging public outrage, Iraqi authorities have earmarked $75 million to repair the damage in Fallouja, Marine Maj. Jim West said. The strategy is similar to one used when U.S. troops restored government authority in the Shiite holy city Najaf in August after weeks of fighting with militiamen.


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[Nickdfresh]

"Falluja Under the Gun"

November 6, 2004 E-mail story Print

http://www.LAtimes.com/

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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Under the Gun in Fallouja
Some of the remaining residents willingly help rebels. Others fear them and want them out.



By Alissa J. Rubin, Times Staff Writer


FALLOUJA, Iraq — This rebel city's broad boulevards are empty now, the mosques thinly attended even for Friday prayers. Save for those too poor, too old or too sick to leave, Fallouja has been left to the insurgents and the Marines who vow to crush them.

Driven from their homes by daily American bombing, most families are camping in the surrounding countryside or, if they have the means, renting houses in Baghdad, 35 miles to the east. No one knows how many civilians are left in Fallouja. In fact, no one knows exactly what it means to be a civilian in a city where almost anyone would open his door to an insurgent, either out of sympathy or fear of reprisal.







Interviews over the last four months with residents of the Sunni Muslim stronghold offer a portrait of a community that has become a symbol of violence and rebellion but, like many symbols, is far more complicated.

Although a significant segment of the population participates in the insurgency — militant Sunni Islamists, foreign fighters and Saddam Hussein loyalists — many Falloujans have chafed under the militants' rule, and some are fed up — enough to leave for good. In between are the largest group: those who sympathize with the fighters but also fear them.

"Roughly a quarter to a third of the people in Fallouja support what the [Iraqi] government is trying to do, but they're afraid to say anything," said a senior Western diplomat who declined to be identified. "Then there's about 30-40% who don't know what they think and are just waiting, and the remaining 20-30% will go down fighting.

"The fight," he added, "is for the people in the middle."

Some Fallouja natives say they hope only that the Marines' threatened assault to end the rebels' reign will come — and end — quickly so reconstruction can begin. Others want the insurgents to fight hard, to prove that they can stand up to the U.S. military and the interim government that has backed American firepower.

Falloujans who support the insurgents were much more willing to talk about their views than the fence-sitters and those who dislike the insurgents' presence, most of whom are afraid to speak out.

"The foreign fighters are fighting for the same thing we are fighting for — the end of the occupation," said Amar Mohammed, a doctor of internal medicine at Fallouja Hospital who is now without work because the hospital closed all but its emergency room and surgery facilities. "Why should we give them up to the Americans?"

Mohammed and his brother Jassim fled Fallouja when the American bombing went on for 12 hours on the first day of the holy month of Ramadan. They paused only long enough to grab a change of clothes.

Now their 30 family members drift through an unfurnished house on Baghdad's western edge. The bombing kept the schools closed, so the children have missed their classes. Instead, they race up and down the Baghdad house's empty rooms and listen to the grown-ups denounce the Americans.

The Mohammeds view themselves as supporters of the insurgency but not active fighters. By talking to a reporter, they believed they were contributing to the "resistance" by explaining Falloujans' views.

During the summer, another Fallouja resident, gastroenterologist Abu Hamid, expressed similar sympathy for the militants and anger at the Americans, even though the Marines had given him a contract to renovate a clinic in the area.

Speaking at the Fallouja liaison center, a Marine outpost on the city's edge where he was waiting to be approved for his next payment, he condemned the Americans in almost every other sentence. "What would you feel if somebody killed your brother or your son?" he asked.

"This story of Zarqawi being here is only a pretext," he said, referring to Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant reportedly holed up in Fallouja who is blamed for some of the beheadings and the most lethal insurgent bombings.

"Why are they using this excuse? What's the goal in bombing civilian people?" he asked. "They are just after undermining the morale of the people."

But other Falloujan businessmen at the Marine liaison center appeared to be torn by conflicting emotions, a desire to make a living and help their community and fear of the insurgents.

Abu Saif, a thin man with a melancholy air who was rebuilding a school near the city, looked around nervously as he spoke in August. He said he feared the masked men who stalked the streets. They hate the Americans so violently, he said, that they believe that anyone who talks to them is an informer who deserves to be killed.

"Frankly, we cannot allow you to take pictures of us or give you our full names because we are afraid of the mujahedin," he said.

But he eagerly opened a folder filled with photographs of his school project, which he had brought to show to the Marines. Holding up picture after picture, he described the school's disrepair, explained that he had decided to rebuild almost from the ground up, then showed photos of stacks of bricks and the beginnings of each classroom.

If only the insurgents understood that he was trying to help Iraqis, maybe they would approve, he said, anxiety in his voice. "The problem is that, when I come in here [the Marine outpost], I don't hold a sign that says, 'I am building a school.' I come in here like everybody else, including those who really are agents."

Some Falloujans have been willing to express their disapproval of the insurgents. Middle-aged women who grew up under Hussein's secular rule — when they could receive an education, walk the streets freely, dress in Western clothes and enjoy sports — seemed particularly concerned about the authority of Islamic fundamentalist fighters.

Interviewed in her sparsely furnished Fallouja home in early September, one woman offered a searing account of how women's lives had changed since the fighters rose to power.

Before the discussion, her husband, a government worker in the Iraqi Finance Ministry, admonished the reporter not to ask his wife about politics and to avoid publishing the family name. But for women in Fallouja, the line between politics and life is thin indeed. The Islamic militants who now run the city have focused much of their energy on censuring women's behavior in the name of eliminating "vice."

Bushraa, 41, a mother of nine who eschewed wearing the head covering known as the hijab at home, even with a guest present, said the atmosphere started becoming restrictive in June, when armed Islamists, many of them teenagers, began to roam the streets.

The men masked the lower halves of their faces, Bushraa said, making it difficult to know whether they were strangers or neighbors. Only their accents gave some of them away as Arabs from outside Iraq.

She began to hear stories about militants striking women for small perceived infractions. Her teenage daughters encountered the insurgents on their way to school and refused to leave the house without a black head-to-toe abaya.

"I only have one [abaya], and I wanted to take my daughter to the market. She said, 'Mother, we have to buy another one.' I usually go out like this with just a scarf," Bushraa said, gesturing to her colorful housedress. "I didn't even wear hijab before, but now I'm afraid."

Bushraa said she no longer feels free to go alone to a friend's house, for fear that the mujahedin will humiliate her in public. They scold women wearing makeup; they have even targeted beauty salons, she said.

"I have a close friend who owned a salon. She has a very good reputation. And she got a threat saying they would destroy it. One of her salons they destroyed three times. Each time she rebuilt it. The last time, they threatened to kill her in it."

Like some Fallouja women, including her friend whose shop was bombed, Bushraa is a quiet rebel. Her friend set up the salon equipment in her kitchen, and Bushraa and her friends swathed themselves in abayas, walked swiftly through the rubble-filled streets and slipped through her back door to have their hair done.

"My friend's husband has a heart problem," she said. "She's responsible for the family [income]. The mujahedin don't understand that."

But that was in September. Since then, as the foreign fighters have continued to flow into the city — and the Americans settled into a daily routine of bombing — Bushraa's family has packed up and moved to Syria.


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[Nickdfresh]

Uh Oh!

Iraqi briefed on Falluja plans missing
Marines concerned captain could pass along information
From Karl Penhaul, embedded with the Marines
Saturday, November 6, 2004 Posted: 4:42 PM EST (2142 GMT)


U.S. Marines participate in a briefing Saturday at their base outside Falluja in Anbar province.
Image:

NEAR FALLUJA, Iraq (CNN) -- A company commander of the Iraqi security forces who received a full briefing on the expected Falluja assault is missing from a military base where U.S. and Iraqi troops are preparing for the possible operation.

The captain, a Kurd with no known ties to the Sunni city of Falluja, is thought to have taken notes from the battle briefing late Thursday. U.S. Marines and his fellow Iraqi officers found no sign of him Friday morning, except for his uniform and a weapon on his cot.

Marines are concerned that the information he knows could be passed along to insurgents. U.S. military sources believe insurgents have friends in the military and government.

The captain commands a company of about 160 men. He is among 10,000 U.S. and Iraqi forces expected to take part in the operation.

Marines say the captain's disappearance won't alter the tactics or timing of the Falluja operation.

Coalition officials hope the missing captain, who was not named, has merely headed home.

Most Kurds in Iraq live in the northeast corner of the country, several hundred miles from Falluja.

Falluja has been in insurgent hands since late April, when Marines were ordered to withdraw from the city's perimeter.

Responsibility for the city was given to a squad of former Iraqi soldiers and police who were from the city, but the insurgency has continued.

The Abu Musab al-Zarqawi terror network is based in Falluja, according to the U.S. and Iraqi governments.

The group has taken responsibility for car bombings, kidnappings and beheadings throughout Iraq. In mid-October, a statement from the terror group posted on an Islamist Web site declared allegiance to Osama bin Laden.

[Nickdfresh]

So much for our "allies."

[BigBadBrian]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
So much for our "allies."

You're probably celebrating about that one, aren't you Lib?

[Nickdfresh]

No, just providing insightful honesty and truth, which this adminstration lacks.

[wraytw]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
No, just providing insightful honesty and truth, which this adminstration lacks.

You're selling yourself short if you think honesty is a trait that any administration has held.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by wraytw
You're selling yourself short if you think honesty is a trait that any administration has held.

Agreed.

-But-

Some are more dishonest than others, especially when they have caused catastrophic blunders like going into Iraq

They simply have more to cover up and distort.

[Nickdfresh]

Is this the start?

CNN reports fighting on the outskirts of Falluja and continued bombardment from the air and artillery on the ground.

Fox News reports Marines and their armor have moved to "staging areas" and that Iraqi commandos are siezing religious sites on the outskirts of the city.

[BigBadBrian]

bump

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by BigBadBrian
bump

WTF BigBad?

[BigBadBrian]

bump

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by BigBadBrian
bump