Posted on Sun, Aug. 29, 2004 Militias control key routes to Baghdad
AS SHIITES PULL BACK, SUNNI FORCES GAIN By John F. Burns and Erik Eckholm
New York Times
BAGHDAD, Iraq - While U.S. troops have been battling militants to an uncertain outcome in An-Najaf, the Shiite holy city, events in two Sunni Muslim cities that stand astride the crucial western approaches to Baghdad have moved significantly against American plans to build a secular democracy in Iraq.
Both cities, Al-Fallujah and Ar-Ramadi, and much of Anbar province, are now controlled by militias, with U.S. troops confined mainly to heavily protected forts on the desert's edge.
What little influence the Americans have is asserted through wary forays in armored vehicles, and by laser-guided bombs that obliterate enemy refuges identified by scouts who penetrate militant ranks. Even bombing raids appear to strengthen the militants, who blame the Americans for scores of civilian deaths.
U.S. warplanes and tanks bombarded targets in Al-Fallujah on Saturday, and U.S. forces exchanged gunfire with insurgents along the city's eastern outskirts and the main highway running to neighboring Jordan, witnesses said. The fighting left at least 14 people injured, hospital officials said.
Marine Lt. Col. Thomas V. Johnson said U.S. troops were responding with tank and artillery after coming under fire. A blaze in the city was sparked by a strike that apparently hit a ``significant weapons cache,'' he said.
Friday, U.S. airstrikes targeted the same neighborhoods, killing three people, medical officials said.
American efforts to build a government structure around former Baath Party stalwarts -- officials of Saddam Hussein's army, police force and bureaucracy who were willing to work with the United States -- have collapsed.
Instead, the former Saddam loyalists, under threat of beheadings, kidnappings and humiliation, have mostly resigned or defected to the militants, or have been killed. Enforcers for the old government, including former Republican Guard officers, have put themselves in the service of clerics they once tortured at Abu Ghurayb prison.
In the past three weeks, three former Saddam loyalists appointed to important posts in Al-Fallujah and Ar-Ramadi have been eliminated by the militants and their Baathist allies. The chief of a battalion of the U.S.-trained Iraqi national guard in Al-Fallujah was beheaded, prompting the disintegration of guard forces in the city. The Anbar governor resigned after his three sons were kidnapped.
The third official, the provincial police chief in Ar-Ramadi, was lured to his arrest by U.S. Marines after three assassination attempts led him to defect to the rebel cause.
The national guard commander and the governor were both forced into humiliating confessions, denouncing themselves as ``traitors'' on videotapes that sell in the Al-Fallujah marketplace for 50 cents.
The situation across Anbar represents the latest reversal for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which sought to assert control with a spring offensive in Al-Fallujah and Ar-Ramadi that incurred some of the heaviest American casualties of the war, and a far heavier toll, in the hundreds, among Al-Fallujah's militants and civilians.
The offensive ended, mortifyingly for the Marines, in a decision to pull back from both cities and entrust American hopes to the former Baathists.
The American rationale was that military victory would come only by flattening the two cities, and that the better course lay in handing important government positions to former loyalists.
But the forces of the former Baathists are in tatters now, reduced to sharing tented checkpoints on roads into the city with the militants, their headquarters in Al-Fallujah abandoned.
Men assigned to the brigade, and to the two guard battalions, have mostly fled, Iraqis in Al-Fallujah say, taking their families with them, and handing their weapons to the militants. The militants' principal power center is a mosque in Al-Fallujah led by an Iraqi cleric, Abdullah al-Janabi, who has instituted a Taliban-like rule in the city, rounding up people suspected of theft and rape and sentencing them to publicly administered lashes, and, in some cases, beheading.
Janabi appears to have been working in alliance with an Islamist militant group, Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad, that U.S. intelligence has identified as the vehicle of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist with links to Al-Qaida whom the Americans have blamed for many of the suicide bombings in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.
Eventually, Marine officers have said, U.S. hopes of creating stability in Iraq will require a new attack on the city -- this time one that will not be halted before it succeeds.
American commanders confess they have no answers in Anbar, and say their strategy is to curb the militants' ability to project their violence farther afield, especially in Baghdad, only 35 miles east of Al-Fallujah.
American officials say a rapid buildup of the new Iraqi army, the national guard and police, coupled with gathering momentum in ``turning dirt'' on the thousands of reconstruction projects funded by $18 billion in American financing, should eventually improve security across Iraq.
But they acknowledge that a full, nationwide election in January may not be possible. For now, they have identified 15 cities across the Arab parts of Iraq that they contend can be stabilized to make voting in January possible. For the moment, they say, Al-Fallujah and Ar-Ramadi are not among them.
