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U.S. Launches Airstrikes on Falluja....

 
 
Aris
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 Nov, 2004 05:18 am
Oh, and BTW, those Iraqi troops that are supposed to be leading the way in Falluja? Well, most of them have already deserted. I really wonder how far Bush & Co. have their heads up each others' asses.

I also like how the one of the first things that the US did in Falluja in this new offensive was to bomb the crap out of a newly-built, just-opened hospital, the Nazzal Emergency Hospital. The US has never been one to respect the Geneva Conventions, has it.
0 Replies
 
Aris
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 Nov, 2004 05:21 am
Good commentary from Uner The Same Sun with regards to the US not allowing any Fallujan male under 45 to leave the city:

Quote:

Here's more from Rumsfeld's press conference yesterday:

Civilians in the city of Fallujah got plenty of warning to steer clear of the fighting between U.S. and insurgent forces, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in predicting "there aren't going to be large numbers" of civilians killed there.

"Innocent civilians in that city have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference Monday. He referred to a round-the-clock curfew and other emergency measures announced by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

"There aren't going to be large numbers of civilians killed and certainly not by U.S. forces," Rumsfeld said.

...

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared with Rumsfeld and said it's likely the insurgents will try to use civilians as shields against attacking U.S. troops.



For one thing, they would not let any man under the age 45 to leave Fallujah. What does it say about the nature of your occupation that you consider all men of fighting age to be your enemy. Plus, what gives you the right to say we will flatten your city -- and it's not our problem if you stay with male members of your family, whom we will kill? We are not responsible for killing people who refuse to leave behind their 17 year old son or cousin?

I've said this often: this is the test of whether or not an occupation has even any transitory justification. If you consider all males of military age to be "enemies," and if these "enemies" and the civilian population seem to be undistinguishable, you're in the wrong country. It means the whole country is united against you and your occupation and the only thing to do is a swift and expeditious withdrawal.
What's the alternative, kill all men? That does seem to be the plan.
0 Replies
 
Aris
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 Nov, 2004 05:37 am
You gotta love this:

http://www.underthesamesun.org/images/rosary%20machine%20gun.jpg

"By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another." (John 13:15).
0 Replies
 
dlowan
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 Nov, 2004 02:36 pm
Do you have some confirmation of desertions Aris?
0 Replies
 
dlowan
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 Nov, 2004 02:37 pm
Reactions from Iraqi press:
Iraq press attacks Falluja assault
Several Iraqi newspapers have criticised the government for sanctioning the operation to dislodge rebels in the city of Falluja.

Some believe not enough efforts were made to resolve the situation through dialogue.

The Baghdad daily Al-Dustur describes the operation as "an attempt at applying US democracy at any price".

"The government and its US ally will storm Falluja and use all military capabilities at their disposal to crush the armed groups," it continues.

What could be gained through fighting could also be gained through politics

Al-Manarah
"What is happening is governed by reason and fanaticism, good and evil, peace and war, decision and indecision, freedom and slavery, democracy and dictatorship, unity and division. It is a battle of slogans in which Iraqis remain the only losers."


The Basra daily Al-Manarah calls on the government to call off the dogs of war and resort to dialogue:

"What could be gained through fighting could also be gained through politics. There is still enough time to end the suffering of Falluja and stop the destruction of the city.

"The government should spare no effort to reach an agreement and save the blood of our brothers there."

Bush effect

Al-Manarah believes the US election result "with Bush today having plenty of time before leaving the White House" is one reason the US is gung ho about Falluja.

Iraq will remain a sleeping volcano, even if the state of emergency is extended for ever

Al-Zaman
It also urges the people of Falluja to "throw [insurgent leader and kidnapper Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi and his aides out of the city because their presence there is not in their favour".

Baghdad's Al-Zaman also believes that dialogue would have proved more beneficial than force.

"History repeats itself when Iyad Allawi declares a state of emergency in the country after a government announcement that negotiations have failed to find a peaceful way out of the Falluja crisis.

"The government should have entered into dialogue with the national forces that have made public their intention to boycott the forthcoming elections, which are illegitimate under the occupation.

"The occupiers, for their part, should realise that if a government has been elected, they should define a deadline for their withdrawal, otherwise matters will get out of control.

"This means Iraq will remain a sleeping volcano, even if the state of emergency is extended for ever."

One dissenting voice, in the liberal As-Sabah, feels that the Iraqi government had no choice but to try to restore control over Falluja.
0 Replies
 
dlowan
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 Nov, 2004 02:38 pm
BBC report on the battle:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3998049.stm
0 Replies
 
msolga
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 Nov, 2004 07:10 pm
http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2004/11/11/cartoon-11-11,0.jpg
0 Replies
 
msolga
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 Nov, 2004 07:15 pm
A letter to the editor. From the AGE, Melbourne, Oz:

Good morning, Vietnam!

As the US-led attack on Fallujah continues, the chilling parallels between Iraq in 2004 and Vietnam in 1967 become ever more clear. Here are just a few:

- In Iraq, the grinning Iyad Allawi, the US-installed interim Prime Minister, greets his troops (The Age, 10/11). He could be the grinning Nguyen Van Thieu, CIA-installed puppet president, with ARVN troops in the '60s.

- Orwellian language lives on in the famous phrase coined by a US officer in Vietnam: "We had to destroy the town in order to save it."

- For "mujahideen" and "insurgents", read "Vietcong" and "gooks".

- For "Fallujah", read "Ben Tre", "Xom Lang" or any multitude of Vietnamese towns and cities destroyed in US-led onslaughts. - For "depleted uranium weapons" and "cluster bombs" in Iraq, read "Agent Orange", "napalm" and "air-deployed mines", still killing thousands in Vietnam.

- For 100,000 civilian deaths to date in Iraq, read 4 million civilian deaths in Vietnam.

- And of course, for "Australian involvement in this slaughter ordered by a compliant Liberal government led by an obsequious prime minister", read: "Australian involvement in this slaughter ordered by a compliant Liberal government led by an obsequious prime minister".

Chris Gymer, Surrey Hills

~

I have been thinking the same. <sigh>
0 Replies
 
msolga
 
  1  
Reply Wed 10 Nov, 2004 07:32 pm
Readers' poll from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Attack on Falluja

What do you think of the attack on Falluja?

It will end the insurgency - 20%

It will create more instability - 41%

Whatever the result, it's not worth the cost - 27%

I don't know - 10%


Total Votes: 9682
0 Replies
 
Aris
 
  1  
Reply Thu 11 Nov, 2004 04:00 am
dlowan wrote:
Do you have some confirmation of desertions Aris?

Sure thing.

Quote:
Iraqi backup troops

BY RICHARD SISK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

New York Daily News - Iraqi backup troops back out of assault

WASHINGTON - Rambos they're not - yet.
Hundreds of troops from Iraq's new army that U.S. forces were relying upon to help in taking Fallujah have either failed to show up for the battle or deserted after they arrived.

"I do have reports of Iraqis not making the movement to Fallujah," said Army Gen. George Casey, overall commander of U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq.

In a phone link to the Pentagon, Casey said he could not confirm the accounts of journalists with U.S. forces at Fallujah that more than 300 troops from an Iraqi battalion of 500 deserted.

But without confirming the reports, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "One ought to expect from time to time you're going to see this type of thing."

U.S. troops were leading the way into Fallujah, trailed by Iraqi units, Casey said. Iraqi forces took over a hospital and a railway station yesterday after U.S. troops drove off defenders.

Both Rumsfeld and Casey said Iraqi forces performed well in recent fighting in Najaf and other insurgent strongholds, but Rumsfeld said, "There have been incidents when they have not performed so well."

In April, Marines stopped their assault on Fallujah to allow a "Fallujah Brigade" of Iraqis to take control, but the Iraqi force dissolved or went over to the insurgents. Rumsfeld said it was "hard stuff" to develop noncommissioned and junior officers to instill morale and cohesion in new Iraqi troops.

The Iraqis also come under pressure from their ethnic and religious groups to reject cooperation with the Americans.

Iraq's Muslim Clerics Association issued a statement warning Iraqi troops outside Fallujah that "history will record every drop of blood you spill in oppressing the people of your nation."

Casey and Rumsfeld said training Iraqis to provide their own security is the cornerstone of U.S. policy in Iraq. Once the city falls to the coalition, Casey said, U.S. troops will patrol with Iraqis, but the goal is to have "Iraqi security forces take over the presence in Fallujah."


Furthermore, I just came across an article regarding how an Iraqi commander has deserted as well. He may be only one commander but this development, along with desertions of Iraqi troops by the hundreds is newsworthy:

[quote]Officer deserts with battle plan

news.com.au - Officer deserts with battle plan

From correspondents in Baghdad
November 7, 2004

AN Iraqi military commander deserted US forces hours after he received a full briefing on US military plans to storm the rebel-held city of Fallujah, CNN reported today.

But a report sent to Reuters and other media from a marine unit quoted US officers as saying the desertion of the unidentified captain, a Kurdish company commander, would not change plans to retake the city before Iraqi elections scheduled for January 27.

They said they believe the officer, who commanded 160 Iraqi soldiers training with US marines at a base on the outskirts of Fallujah, was not likely to hand over battle plans to rebels in the Sunni Muslim city, where Saddam Hussein loyalists and supporters of al-Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are entrenched.

The officer disappeared one day after US marine officers gave him a full briefing on the battle plans. US officers found his uniform and automatic rifles on his bed.

"This man has no known ties with Fallujah and they (the US military) don't believe in the first instance that he is headed for Fallujah. They believe that since the captain is a Kurd, he is more likely headed up north and going home," the report said. [/quote]
0 Replies
 
dlowan
 
  1  
Reply Thu 11 Nov, 2004 04:19 pm
Pilger's view - of Falluja - and Iraq generally - always polemic, but interesting (should see him attack his home country - oz!)

http://207.44.245.159/article7274.htm

Excerpt:

"Iraq: the unthinkable becomes normal

Mainstream media speak as if Fallujah were populated only by foreign "insurgents". In fact, women and children are being slaughtered in our name.

John Pilger

11/11/04 "New Statesman" -- Edward S Herman's landmark essay, "The Banality of Evil", has never seemed more apposite. "Doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way rests on 'normalisation'," wrote Herman. "There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals . . . others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public."

On Radio 4's Today (6 November), a BBC reporter in Baghdad referred to the coming attack on the city of Fallujah as "dangerous" and "very dangerous" for the Americans. When asked about civilians, he said, reassuringly, that the US marines were "going about with a Tannoy" telling people to get out. He omitted to say that tens of thousands of people would be left in the city. He mentioned in passing the "most intense bombing" of the city with no suggestion of what that meant for people beneath the bombs.

As for the defenders, those Iraqis who resist in a city that heroically defied Saddam Hussein; they were merely "insurgents holed up in the city", as if they were an alien body, a lesser form of life to be "flushed out" (the Guardian): a suitable quarry for "rat-catchers", which is the term another BBC reporter told us the Black Watch use. According to a senior British officer, the Americans view Iraqis as Untermenschen, a term that Hitler used in Mein Kampf to describe Jews, Romanies and Slavs as sub-humans. This is how the Nazi army laid siege to Russian cities, slaughtering combatants and non-combatants alike.

Normalising colonial crimes like the attack on Fallujah requires such racism, linking our imagination to "the other". The thrust of the reporting is that the "insurgents" are led by sinister foreigners of the kind that behead people: for example, by Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian said to be al-Qaeda's "top operative" in Iraq. This is what the Americans say; it is also Blair's latest lie to parliament. Count the times it is parroted at a camera, at us. No irony is noted that the foreigners in Iraq are overwhelmingly American and, by all indications, loathed. These indications come from apparently credible polling organisations, one of which estimates that of 2,700 attacks every month by the resistance, six can be credited to the infamous al-Zarqawi.

In a letter sent on 14 October to Kofi Annan, the Fallujah Shura Council, which administers the city, said: "In Fallujah, [the Americans] have created a new vague target: al-Zarqawi. Almost a year has elapsed since they created this new pretext and whenever they destroy houses, mosques, restaurants, and kill children and women, they said: 'We have launched a successful operation against al-Zarqawi.' The people of Fallujah assure you that this person, if he exists, is not in Fallujah . . . and we have no links to any groups supporting such inhuman behaviour. We appeal to you to urge the UN [to prevent] the new massacre which the Americans and the puppet government are planning to start soon in Fallujah, as well as many parts of the country."

Not a word of this was reported in the mainstream media in Britain and America.

"What does it take to shock them out of their baffling silence?" asked the playwright Ronan Bennett in April after the US marines, in an act of collective vengeance for the killing of four American mercenaries, killed more than 600 people in Fallujah, a figure that was never denied. Then, as now, they used the ferocious firepower of AC-130 gunships and F-16 fighter-bombers and 500lb bombs against slums. They incinerate children; their snipers boast of killing anyone, as snipers did in Sarajevo.

Bennett was referring to the legion of silent Labour backbenchers, with honourable exceptions, and lobotomised junior ministers (remember Chris Mullin?). He might have added those journalists who strain every sinew to protect "our" side, who normalise the unthinkable by not even gesturing at the demonstrable immorality and criminality. Of course, to be shocked by what "we" do is dangerous, because this can lead to a wider understanding of why "we" are there in the first place and of the grief "we" bring not only to Iraq, but to so many parts of the world: that the terrorism of al-Qaeda is puny by comparison with ours.

There is nothing illicit about this cover-up; it happens in daylight. The most striking recent example followed the announcement, on 29 October, by the prestigious scientific journal, the Lancet, of a study estimating that 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion. Eighty-four per cent of the deaths were caused by the actions of the Americans and the British, and 95 per cent of these were killed by air attacks and artillery fire, most of whom were women and children.

The editors of the excellent MediaLens observed the rush - no, stampede - to smother this shocking news with "scepticism" and silence. They reported that, by 2 November, the Lancet report had been ignored by the Observer, the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Star, the Sun and many others. The BBC framed the report in terms of the government's "doubts" and Channel 4 News delivered a hatchet job, based on a Downing Street briefing. With one exception, none of the scientists who compiled this rigorously peer-reviewed report was asked to substantiate their work until ten days later when the pro-war Observer published an interview with the editor of the Lancet, slanted so that it appeared he was "answering his critics". David Edwards, a MediaLens editor, asked the researchers to respond to the media criticism; their meticulous demolition can be viewed on the [http://www.medialens.org] alert for 2 November. None of this was published in the mainstream. Thus, the unthinkable that "we" had engaged in such a slaughter was suppressed - normalised. It is reminiscent of the suppression of the death of more than a million Iraqis, including half a million infants under five, as a result of the Anglo-American-driven embargo......


...In contrast, there is no media questioning of the methodology of the Iraqi Special Tribune, which has announced that mass graves contain 300,000 victims of Saddam Hussein. The Special Tribune, a product of the quisling regime in Baghdad, is run by the Americans; respected scientists want nothing to do with it. There is no questioning of what the BBC calls "Iraq's first democratic elections". There is no reporting of how the Americans have assumed control over the electoral process with two decrees passed in June that allow an "electoral commission" in effect to eliminate parties Washington does not like. Time magazine reports that the CIA is buying its preferred candidates, which is how the agency has fixed elections over the world. When or if the elections take place, we will be doused in cliches about the nobility of voting, as America's puppets are "democratically" chosen.

The model for this was the "coverage" of the American presidential election, a blizzard of platitudes normalising the unthinkable: that what happened on 2 November was not democracy in action. With one exception, no one in the flock of pundits flown from London described the circus of Bush and Kerry as the contrivance of fewer than 1 per cent of the population, the ultra-rich and powerful who control and manage a permanent war economy. That the losers were not only the Democrats, but the vast majority of Americans, regardless of whom they voted for, was unmentionable.

No one reported that John Kerry, by contrasting the "war on terror" with Bush's disastrous attack on Iraq, merely exploited public distrust of the invasion to build support for American dominance throughout the world. "I'm not talking about leaving [Iraq]," said Kerry. "I'm talking about winning!" In this way, both he and Bush shifted the agenda even further to the right, so that millions of anti-war Democrats might be persuaded that the US has "the responsibility to finish the job" lest there be "chaos". The issue in the presidential campaign was neither Bush nor Kerry, but a war economy aimed at conquest abroad and economic division at home. The silence on this was comprehensive, both in America and here......"
0 Replies
 
msolga
 
  1  
Reply Thu 11 Nov, 2004 04:26 pm
Bravo John Pilger!
0 Replies
 
dlowan
 
  1  
Reply Thu 11 Nov, 2004 04:38 pm
Aargh - he gets stuff wrong too - ya know - but he is interesting.
0 Replies
 
dlowan
 
  1  
Reply Thu 11 Nov, 2004 04:40 pm
Pilger said: "I'm talking about winning!" In this way, both he and Bush shifted the agenda even further to the right, so that millions of anti-war Democrats might be persuaded that the US has "the responsibility to finish the job" lest there be "chaos"."


That one gets me - what in hell ARE we supposed to do?

Just leave? What would that mean? Would it be worse?
0 Replies
 
lodp
 
  1  
Reply Thu 11 Nov, 2004 06:11 pm
damn, just doubleposted this, nevermind.
0 Replies
 
lodp
 
  1  
Reply Thu 11 Nov, 2004 06:11 pm
Maybe you're interested in this:

ZNet Commentary
Fallujah and the Reality of War November 07, 2004
By Rahul Mahajan

The assault on Fallujah has started. It is being sold as liberation of the people of Fallujah; it is being sold as a necessary step to implementing “democracy” in Iraq. These are lies.

I was in Fallujah during the siege in April, and I want to paint for you a word picture of what such an assault means.

Fallujah is dry and hot; like Southern California, it has been made an agricultural area only by virtue of extensive irrigation. It has been known for years as a particularly devout city; people call it the City of a Thousand Mosques. In the mid-90’s, when Saddam wanted his name to be added to the call to prayer, the imams of Fallujah refused.

U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault; for the next several weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with light provided by generators only in critical places like mosques and clinics. The town was placed under siege; the ban on bringing in food, medicine, and other basic items was broken only when Iraqis en masse challenged the roadblocks. The atmosphere was one of pervasive fear, from bombing and the threat of more bombing. Noncombatants and families with sick people, the elderly, and children were leaving in droves. After initial instances in which people were prevented from leaving, U.S. forces began allowing everyone to leave – except for what they called “military age males,” men usually between 15 and 60. Keeping noncombatants from leaving a place under bombardment is a violation of the laws of war. Of course, if you assume that every military age male is an enemy, there can be no better sign that you are in the wrong country, and that, in fact, your war is on the people, not on their oppressors, not a war of liberation.

The main hospital in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from the bulk of the town. Right at the beginning, the Americans shut down the main bridge, cutting off the hospital from the town. Doctors who wanted to treat patients had to leave the hospital, with only the equipment they could carry, and set up in makeshift clinics all over the city; the one I stayed at had been a neighborhood clinic with one room that had four beds, and no operating theater; doctors refrigerated blood in a soft-drink vending machine. Another clinic, I’m told, had been an auto repair shop. This hospital closing (not the only such that I documented in Iraq) also violates the Geneva Convention.

In Fallujah, you were rarely free of the sound of artillery booming in the background, punctuated by the smaller, higher-pitched note of the mujaheddin’s hand-held mortars. After even a few minutes of it, you have to stop paying attention to it – and yet, of course, you never quite stop. Even today, when I hear the roar of thunder, I’m often transported instantly to April 10 and the dusty streets of Fallujah.

In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man’s-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic I observed in a few hours, only five were “military-age males.” I saw old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head; terminal, the doctors told me, although in Baghdad they might have been able to save him.

One thing that snipers were very discriminating about – every single ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two that I inspected bore clear evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out to gather in wounded people were shot at. When we first reported this fact, we came in for near-universal execration. Many just refused to believe it. Some asked me how I knew that it wasn’t the mujaheddin. Interesting question. Had, say, Brownsville, Texas, been encircled by the Vietnamese and bombarded (which, of course, Mr. Bush courageously protected us from during the Vietnam war era) and Brownsville ambulances been shot up, the question of whether the residents were shooting at their own ambulances, I somehow guess, would not have come up. Later, our reports were confirmed by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and even by the U.S. military.

The best estimates are that roughly 900-1000 people were killed directly, blown up, burnt, or shot. Of them, my guess, based on news reports and personal observation, is that 2/3 to 3/4 were noncombatants.

But the damage goes far beyond that. You can read whenever you like about the bombing of so-called Zarqawi safe houses in residential areas in Fallujah, but the reports don’t tell you what that means. You read about precision strikes, and it’s true that America’s GPS-guided bombs are very accurate – when they’re not malfunctioning, the 80 or 85% of the time that they work, their targeting radius is 10 meters, i.e., they hit within 10 meters of the target. Even the smallest of them, however, the 500-pound bomb, has a blast radius of 400 meters; every single bomb shakes the whole neighborhood, breaking windows and smashing crockery. A town under bombardment is a town in constant fear.

You read the reports about X killed and Y wounded. And you should remember those numbers; those numbers are important. But equally important is to remember that those numbers lie – in a war zone, everyone is wounded.

The first assault on Fallujah was a military failure. This time, the resistance is stronger, better-armed, and better-organized; to “win,” the U.S. military will have to pull out all the stops. Even within horror and terror, there are degrees, and we – and the people of Fallujah – ain’t seen nothin’ yet. George W. Bush has just claimed a new mandate – the world has been delivered into his hands.

There will be international condemnation, as there was the first time; but our government won’t listen to it; aside from the resistance, all the people of Fallujah will be able to depend on to try to mitigate the horror will be us, the antiwar movement. We have a responsibility, that we didn’t meet in April and we didn’t meet in August when Najaf was similarly attacked; will we meet it this time?

Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the weblog Empire Notes (http://www.empirenotes.org), with regularly updated commentary on U.S. foreign policy, the occupation of Iraq, and the state of the American Empire. He has been to occupied Iraq twice, and was in Fallujah during the siege in April. His most recent book is Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583225781/empirenotes-20). He can be reached at [email protected]
0 Replies
 
msolga
 
  1  
Reply Thu 11 Nov, 2004 06:31 pm
dlowan wrote:
Aargh - he gets stuff wrong too - ya know - but he is interesting.


But he's generally on the right track, though! Smile
0 Replies
 
dlowan
 
  1  
Reply Fri 12 Nov, 2004 04:14 am
NYT:
Second front???
U.S. Presses Fight in Falluja; Insurgents Strike Other Cities
By ROBERT F. WORTH and JAMES GLANZ

Published: November 12, 2004


FALLUJA, Iraq, Friday, Nov. 12 - Rebels mounted fierce counterattacks Thursday against rapid advances by American troops into the southern part of Falluja, while insurgents elsewhere in Iraq appear to have opened up a second front in the fighting by overrunning police stations and laying siege to the provincial headquarters in Mosul.

The invasion of Falluja, now in its fourth day, is seen by military planners as a way to smash the largest safe haven for the insurgency in Iraq. Since the assault began on Monday, about 600 rebels have been killed, along with 18 American and 5 Iraqi soldiers, military officials said.

American marines and soldiers seem to be carrying out a pincer movement in Falluja, pressing insurgents ever farther south in intense fighting. But the military has been forced to detach an armored battalion from its cordon operation around Falluja to help quell violence in Mosul, about 200 miles to the north, siphoning off about a third of the forces that had been put in place to catch insurgents attempting to flee the fighting here.

[On Friday, United States officers said American-led forces had gained control of most of Falluja and that insurgents were trapped in the southern part of the city, Reuters reported. "They can't go north because that's where we are. They can't go west because of the Euphrates River and they can't go east because we have a huge presence there. So they are cornered in the south," Master Sgt. Roy Meek told Reuters.]

In separate incidents to the north and southeast of Falluja, two Super Cobra helicopters were brought down after being fired on from the ground, military officials said. Both Marine pilots and their two-man crews escaped after being picked up by American troops in the area, and one of the pilots was injured, officials said.

In downtown Baghdad, a powerful suicide car bomb exploded on a busy commercial street Thursday morning, killing at least 17 people and wounding at least 30 others. In the evening, explosions rattled across the capital with a frequency not seen here since August, when American soldiers fought a Shiite uprising in the south.

Violence surged throughout the Sunni triangle west of Baghdad, with ambushes, bombings and mortar attacks jolting Tikrit, Kirkuk, Hawija, Samarra and the provincial capital of Ramadi, just 30 miles west of Falluja. The interim government imposed curfews across the string of cities. American military officials have said in recent days that insurgent leaders probably fled Falluja before the assault on the city began and could be organizing the counteroffensive now unfolding across the country.

The insurgents in Mosul stormed a half-dozen police stations and looted the buildings of weapons, ammunition and body armor, police officials and witnesses said. By the afternoon, they had seized five bridges running across the Tigris River, which splits the city in half.

The American military said it had mounted a major counteroffensive in Mosul hoping to contain the violence before guerrillas could seize the government center. But at nightfall, carloads of guerrillas continued to roam the streets freely, melting away at the approach of American troops.

"It's very fluid," Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, an Army spokesman, said in a telephone interview near midnight. "It's been going on for much of the day, and it's still going on."

Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of American forces in northern Iraq, said in an e-mail message early on Friday from his headquarters in Mosul that there had been "some tough fighting" on Thursday, but that the city was "quite calm" at the moment. "I do expect more attacks on Friday," General Ham said, adding that it was "hard to say if the enemy includes some who may have left Falluja, but clearly they are responding to operations there."

The car bomb in Baghdad exploded on Saddoun Street, a wide avenue running through the heart of downtown, and incinerated a dozen cars and destroyed storefronts along the strip. The bomber had tried ramming into a convoy of three sport utility vehicles traveling south, the type of car favored by Western contractors, said Ali Safi, an Iraqi National Guardsman at the scene..........


Full story: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/middleeast/12iraq.html?th


Thanks Lodp.
0 Replies
 
msolga
 
  1  
Reply Fri 12 Nov, 2004 06:13 am
Thanks for that post, Lodp. It sounds a damn sight more real than many of the reports we're getting from the "embedded" journalists.
0 Replies
 
msolga
 
  1  
Reply Fri 12 Nov, 2004 09:27 pm
http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2004/11/12/cartoon_1311_gallery__550x383,0.jpg
0 Replies
 
 

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