COMBAT: After Falluja, U.S. Troops Fight a New Battle Just as Important, and Just as Tough

November 28, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS

CAMP KALSU, Iraq, Nov. 27 - As American commanders turn their concentration toward the area of sullen towns and villages that straddle the southern approaches to Baghdad, they face a battle that is in many ways as crucial to their hopes as Falluja has been. And they enter a battleground where loyalties to Saddam Hussein and the burning enmity for America are at least as intense.

Without a major success here, the battle for Falluja, 50 miles to the northwest, could come to be seen as a Pyrrhic victory, one that reduced much of the city to rubble, cost more than 50 American combat deaths and prompted many insurgents to move on and regroup for yet more chapters in an ever-lengthening war.

The first days of the new campaign suggest it may outstrip Falluja in the demands it will make on American patience and tactical skills.

Once again, marines are leading the fight here, with the best of Iraq's American-trained troops alongside them. But in this area, known for its ceaseless rounds of suicide bombings and ambushes, there will be no knockout blows with tanks and bombs. Rather, as Marine commanders emphasized when 5,000 troops began the offensive this week, success will be built raid by raid, arrest by arrest, until the latticework of rebel cells in virtually every village and town is weakened and the will to sustain the insurgency is broken.

Commanders expect the main offensive to last another week. But nobody is talking about quick victories, rather of the new raids setting the scene for more later on.

A chart of suspected rebels that was developed over months by American intelligence officers and Iraqi undercover agents, laid out like a genealogical table, measures 10 feet by 4 feet. Unrolled in the command center at this Marine base in the desert southeast of the town of Iskandariya, it lists hundreds of rebel leaders, financiers and fighters, grouped together by family, by tribe and by past links in Mr. Hussein's military, political and intelligence apparatus.

"Every day, we have to stay the course," said Col. Ron Johnson, 48, a native of Duxbury, Mass., who commands the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, whose operational area covers parts of three Iraqi provinces with a combined population of 1.2 million. "We're in here for the long haul," he said.

Still, the mood among Marine officers is cautiously upbeat, and the belief, as put to reporters embedded for the offensive, is that the war here can still be won. The immediate objective is to deal a hard enough blow to the insurgents that plans can proceed for the election scheduled for Jan. 30. On its face, this area, the southernmost extension of the Sunni triangle, running about 60 miles south of Baghdad and about 80 miles across, with the Euphrates River to the west and the Tigris to the east, is about as unpromising a political terrain for those favoring elections as any region in Iraq.

About 60 percent of the population living here, in towns like Mahmudiya, Latifiya, Yusufiya, Iskandariya, Musayyib and Hilla, are Sunnis. The rest are Shiite, a group that accounts for about 60 percent of the Iraqi population and strongly favors the election as a way station to Shiite majority rule.

But the religious breakdown alone cannot explain the insurgency's intensity. Sunnis here were favored for decades by Mr. Hussein, who made the area immediately south of Baghdad into a strategic bedrock of his rule. Many of his Republican Guard units were based here and were locally recruited. Weapons research establishments were concentrated here, as were many of the country's main munitions plants.

The American-led invasion 18 months ago destroyed those privileges, and left many local people unemployed. The disbanding of the Mr. Hussein's army made things worse. The insurgency spread rapidly in the months after Mr. Hussein was toppled, feeding off the combination of idled military skills, huge stockpiles of weapons and ammunition, and Sunni resentment at the prospect of being politically usurped.

Early on in American military planning, commanders knew that a campaign to wrest Falluja from the insurgents would necessitate an offensive here, but limitations of logistics, air power and troops dictated the two offensives be staged sequentially. One disadvantage was that this gave the Falluja rebels a ready refuge, one that American generals sought to inhibit by asking Britain to move an 850-soldier battalion of the Black Watch north from Basra to a base just west of the Euphrates.

Marine intelligence officers estimate that 200 to 500 rebels from Falluja, many of them natives of the region south of Baghdad that is the focus of the new offensive, have come here in the past few weeks; some officers say those estimates are too low, as they also say official estimates of 1,200 insurgents killed in Falluja are too high.

Marine intelligence officers say there are 400 to 500 "core leaders" of the Sunni insurgency in the area, many of them former ranking members of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party or senior officers in his military. Although they describe the insurgency as heavily decentralized, they have identified two new political groups that knit together these rebel leaders, one of them known as the Return or Restoration Party. These men, they say, have made common cause in the insurgency with the numerous criminal gangs in the area, who also have much to lose in the new American push. The intelligence estimates say that insurgent attacks in the area are carried out by 2,000 to 6,000 rebels, many of them unemployed youths or criminals released from jail by Mr. Hussein before he was driven from power. In many cases, American officers say, captured men have told them that they were paid sums ranging from $20 to $200 to stage ambushes or plant explosives that are detonated by "part-time triggermen," many of them also paid.

If correct, the estimates make for a startling contrast with the American estimates a year ago, when commanders said they believed that there were no more than 5,000 insurgents across the whole of Iraq.

The havoc the rebels have wrought here emerges from the marines' tallies of recent attacks. In a little over a month, the insurgents have mounted 350 separate attacks, including 12 suicide car bombings and nearly 80 remotely detonated roadside bombs. Since midsummer, when the marines deployed into the area, they have lost 18 men. But by far the heaviest toll has been taken by Iraqi policemen and national guardsmen, of whom nearly 150 have been killed, many by bombs.

Attacks on the police have left barely 550 policemen at work across the entire region, a fraction of the number under Mr. Hussein, and many police stations abandoned.

Despite the attacks, Colonel Johnson said he believed the advantage in the war was moving the Americans' way. Rather than seeing the rising tempo of attacks as a sign of growing confidence among the rebels, he believes the insurgents have stepped up their aggression because they fear they are losing the war.

One reason for this, the colonel said, was the growing involvement of Iraqi troops in the fighting alongside the Americans, and the Iraqis' increasing confidence. "Time is not on the insurgents' side," Colonel Johnson said. "Each day, the Iraqi security forces are getting better and better."

Altogether, in the past four months, more than 600 men have been detained in raids across the area, many of them as a result of intelligence delivered by Iraqi troops and intelligence officers.

"I'll tell you, one I.S.F. who is loyal and effective is worth five marines," Colonel Johnson said, using the abbreviation for men in the Iraqi security forces. "They know exactly who these people running the insurgency are."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company