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‘Mission accomplished’ in Fallujah but fighting continues as aid agencies warn of crisis
THE United States and the Iraqi interim government have claimed “mission accomplished” in the battle for the rebel stronghold of Fallujah.
But even as the victory was declared, with estimates of 1000 insurgents killed, fighting continued inside the city yesterday as aid agencies warned of an unfolding humanitarian disaster and outbreaks of typhoid and other diseases.
But even as the victory was declared, with estimates of 1000 insurgents killed, fighting continued inside the city yesterday as aid agencies warned of an unfolding humanitarian disaster and outbreaks of typhoid and other diseases.
Violence also erupted throughout the rest of Iraq, especially around Mosul, forcing the US military to detach and rush part of its Fallujah force to the northern city.
Inside Fallujah, two mosques were hit by air strikes after troops reported sniper fire coming from them.
Two US marines were killed by a homemade bomb and a US warplane dropped a 500lb bomb to destroy what the military said was an insurgent tunnel network.
People leaving the city described rotting dead bodies piling up in the streets, and injured civilians with no access to medical help.
Aid agencies issued a joint letter in which they said there were now 200,000 refugees who have fled the fighting to live without food, water or shelter, and civilians remained trapped inside.
Yesterday, after prolonged negotiations with American troops, a convoy of emergency supplies from the Iraqi Red Crescent entered Fallujah with the first supplies of aid to reach the city since US-led forces began to blast their way in five days ago.
“Conditions … are catastrophic,” said Red Crescent spokeswoman, Fardous al-Ubaidi. “The people inside Fallujah are dying and starving, they need us. It is our duty as a humanitarian agency to do our job for these people in these circumstances.”
Civilians who remained in the city stayed indoors, frightened by the noise of battle, said an Iraqi journalist who left on Friday.
“If the fighters fire a mortar, US forces respond with huge force,” said the journalist, who asked not to be named.
The city had been without power or water for days. Frozen food had spoiled and people could not charge their mobile phones.
“Some people hadn’t prepared well. They didn’t stock up on tinned food. They didn’t think it would be this bad,” he said.
Iraqi health minister Alaa Alwan said the government had begun transferring “significant numbers” of injured to hospitals in Baghdad, but could not say how many.
Lieutenant Colonel Pete Newell, of the US Army in Fallujah, said that resistance fighters had been confined to “a box 1000 metres by 500 metres and that will be gone” in a few hours.
In Baghdad, Qassem Daoud, the Iraq interim government’s security advisor said: “Operation Fajr (dawn) has been achieved and only the malignant pockets remain that we are dealing with through a clean-up operation.
“The mission is accomplished and there only remains these few pockets, which are being cleaned up. The number of killed has risen to more than 1000 and we have arrested more than 200 so far.”
However, the authorities said afterwards that only 14 of the prisoners taken were foreigners, and 10 of them were Iranians. Daoud also said that the wanted terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was not in Fallujah
Islamist groups, including the one led by al-Zarqawi, vowed in a video obtained by the Reuters news agency yesterday to take their battle in Fallujah to all corners of Iraq.
A masked gunman reading a joint statement from several militant groups also warned that Iraqi government workers and soldiers would be targeted unless they stopped work immediately. The video could not be immediately authenticated.
The US military said up to 2000 insurgents are attempting to escape from Fallujah and the likely route would be through the south of the city, where the Black Watch battle group is based. It emerged yesterday that their forward base is at al-Qaqa’a military complex, which was looted last year after US soldiers failed to secure it. Weapons and explosives from al-Qaqa’a have been used, it is believed, in the recent attacks on the Black Watch.
In Mosul, meanwhile, masked gunmen took over banks and government buildings without interference from either newly dispatched US forces or Iraqi government troops. US warplanes had bombed the city 24 hours earlier and the police chief had been sacked after being accused of colluding with rebels. But yesterday there were reports of policemen changing their uniforms for civilian clothes and joining the insurgents.
Duriad Kashmoula, the governor of Mosul, blamed the uprising on “the betrayal of some police members”. In other districts, vigilantes set up road blocks and patrolled neighbourhoods.
There was also street fighting in Baghdad, and mortar rounds fired at the Green Zone, the heavily barricaded heart of US power in Iraq. The interim government indefinitely extended the closure of Baghdad’s international airport.
http://www.sundayherald.com/46084
Inside Fallujah, two mosques were hit by air strikes after troops reported sniper fire coming from them.
Two US marines were killed by a homemade bomb and a US warplane dropped a 500lb bomb to destroy what the military said was an insurgent tunnel network.
People leaving the city described rotting dead bodies piling up in the streets, and injured civilians with no access to medical help.
Aid agencies issued a joint letter in which they said there were now 200,000 refugees who have fled the fighting to live without food, water or shelter, and civilians remained trapped inside.
Yesterday, after prolonged negotiations with American troops, a convoy of emergency supplies from the Iraqi Red Crescent entered Fallujah with the first supplies of aid to reach the city since US-led forces began to blast their way in five days ago.
“Conditions … are catastrophic,” said Red Crescent spokeswoman, Fardous al-Ubaidi. “The people inside Fallujah are dying and starving, they need us. It is our duty as a humanitarian agency to do our job for these people in these circumstances.”
Civilians who remained in the city stayed indoors, frightened by the noise of battle, said an Iraqi journalist who left on Friday.
“If the fighters fire a mortar, US forces respond with huge force,” said the journalist, who asked not to be named.
The city had been without power or water for days. Frozen food had spoiled and people could not charge their mobile phones.
“Some people hadn’t prepared well. They didn’t stock up on tinned food. They didn’t think it would be this bad,” he said.
Iraqi health minister Alaa Alwan said the government had begun transferring “significant numbers” of injured to hospitals in Baghdad, but could not say how many.
Lieutenant Colonel Pete Newell, of the US Army in Fallujah, said that resistance fighters had been confined to “a box 1000 metres by 500 metres and that will be gone” in a few hours.
In Baghdad, Qassem Daoud, the Iraq interim government’s security advisor said: “Operation Fajr (dawn) has been achieved and only the malignant pockets remain that we are dealing with through a clean-up operation.
“The mission is accomplished and there only remains these few pockets, which are being cleaned up. The number of killed has risen to more than 1000 and we have arrested more than 200 so far.”
However, the authorities said afterwards that only 14 of the prisoners taken were foreigners, and 10 of them were Iranians. Daoud also said that the wanted terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was not in Fallujah
Islamist groups, including the one led by al-Zarqawi, vowed in a video obtained by the Reuters news agency yesterday to take their battle in Fallujah to all corners of Iraq.
A masked gunman reading a joint statement from several militant groups also warned that Iraqi government workers and soldiers would be targeted unless they stopped work immediately. The video could not be immediately authenticated.
The US military said up to 2000 insurgents are attempting to escape from Fallujah and the likely route would be through the south of the city, where the Black Watch battle group is based. It emerged yesterday that their forward base is at al-Qaqa’a military complex, which was looted last year after US soldiers failed to secure it. Weapons and explosives from al-Qaqa’a have been used, it is believed, in the recent attacks on the Black Watch.
In Mosul, meanwhile, masked gunmen took over banks and government buildings without interference from either newly dispatched US forces or Iraqi government troops. US warplanes had bombed the city 24 hours earlier and the police chief had been sacked after being accused of colluding with rebels. But yesterday there were reports of policemen changing their uniforms for civilian clothes and joining the insurgents.
Duriad Kashmoula, the governor of Mosul, blamed the uprising on “the betrayal of some police members”. In other districts, vigilantes set up road blocks and patrolled neighbourhoods.
There was also street fighting in Baghdad, and mortar rounds fired at the Green Zone, the heavily barricaded heart of US power in Iraq. The interim government indefinitely extended the closure of Baghdad’s international airport.
http://www.sundayherald.com/46084
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BAGHDAD, Nov. 14 - The fighting started in Mosul two days after U.S. tanks entered Fallujah. Armed men appeared in a sudden tide on a main street in Iraq's third-largest city, a wide avenue where so many American convoys had been ambushed that locals nicknamed it "Death Street."
At 11 a.m. Thursday, the target was an armored SUV. Witnesses said that after its Western passengers were chased into a police station, the driver was burned alive atop the vehicle as the attackers shouted "Jew!" The city of 1.8 million people then devolved into chaos. Thousands of police officers abandoned their precinct houses. The governor's house was set alight. Insurgents took the police chief's brother, himself a senior officer, into his front yard and shot him dead.
By Sunday, the dawn of a three-day festival celebrating the end of Ramadan, control over sections of the city remained in doubt. In streets emptied by fear and gunfire, insurgents battled hundreds of Iraqi National Guard reinforcements dispatched by the interim government to quell an uprising that was at once largely expected and disquieting.
U.S. and Iraqi officials said they knew that Ramadan would bring attacks, and that the widely publicized offensive in Fallujah would spark violent provocations in other predominantly Sunni Muslim centers. But the scale of the Mosul attack surprised the U.S. forces in the city. And the disintegration of the city's police force recalled the debacles of April, when a suddenly rampant insurgency shattered faith in the security forces that are expected to assume the ever-more difficult task of making Iraq at least reasonably safe.
"They were scaring us, and we are from Mosul, so we withdrew to our houses," said Yusuf Rashid, a police officer in a Mosul neighborhood named "Justice."
As fighting winds down in a Fallujah that has been returned by overwhelming force to the sovereignty of the new Iraq, U.S. forces are turning to the many other cities besieged by a fresh wave of insurgent attacks. The resistance remains concentrated in regions dominated by the Sunni Muslim minority, and further complicates the interim government's stated desire to include Iraq's entire population in January elections.
Bands of armed men
U.S. tanks and attack helicopters on Sunday swooped into Baiji, the midway point between Mosul and Baghdad, where insurgents destroyed a key highway bridge and claimed the city. Masked men carried guns aloft in a protest Sunday in Baqubah, a chronic trouble spot for U.S. forces just northeast of the capital. U.S. forces also engaged fighters in Tall Afar, a largely Turkmen city west of Mosul, and in Hawija, northwest of Baghdad.
Bands of armed men moved freely at night in several neighborhoods of Baghdad, where the number of attacks on U.S. forces has more than doubled from a week ago. Ramadi, 30 miles west of Fallujah, remains a rebel stronghold.
And U.S. and Iraqi forces continue to fight in Samarra, the city advertised as a model for the assault on Fallujah when 1st Infantry Division tanks rolled there six weeks ago to reclaim the city from insurgents. Under the curfew again in effect there, Samarra residents are allowed on the street for only four hours each morning, and over the weekend its latest police chief, installed just last month, quit.
"We never believed a fight in Fallujah would mean an end to the insurgency," a U.S. Embassy official in Baghdad said. "We've never defined success that way.
"We still have the very difficult problem of a Sunni insurgency."
Just how much the move on Fallujah is roiling the rest of Iraq is a matter still being assessed by Iraqi and U.S. officials. They appear heartened that the country's Shiite majority remains quiescent and largely animated by the prospect of asserting power through the ballot. That marks the sharpest contrast with the April uprising, when militias loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr took control of cities across the country's south, opening a vast new military front just as Marines assaulted Fallujah the first time.
Sadr's defeat in August by a U.S. offensive in the holy city of Najaf, followed by weeks of grinding assault in the Baghdad slum named for his father, did much to persuade the radical cleric to shift his energies to politics. For Iraqi and U.S. decision-makers, it also reinforced the decision to confront the Sunni insurgency in its own strongholds.
'City is a mess'
But if the tactical battle was won in Fallujah -- removing both a symbol of successful resistance and a genuine paramilitary base -- it remains far from clear who will prevail in the larger strategic fight to make the interim government credible to a Sunni population embittered by the loss of influence it enjoyed under the government of former president Saddam Hussein.
The attacks in Mosul did not signal imminent success, at least not to its residents.
"The city is a mess," said Bahaa Aldeen Abdulaziz, owner of the Casablanca Hotel. "The shops are closed. There's no security. And the reason for all this is because the Americans invaded Fallujah.
"And Fallujah will never finish. It has gotten into people's blood."
"I believe the situation will continue like this, and Mosul will become another Fallujah," said Noofel Mohammed Amen, a shoe salesman. "And later on all the cities of Iraq will be Fallujah."
The most immediate concern for the interim government is manpower. Iraq has no more than eight battalions of the newly trained troops, whose main job is to occupy cities after U.S. forces defeat insurgents. Duty in Samarra and Fallujah, which have about a half million people between them, already was stretching that force thin. Adding duty in Mosul "means you're operating right out on the edge of what forces you have -- Iraqi forces," the U.S. official said.
American forces may be stretched thin as well. A battalion deployed outside Fallujah raced back to its Mosul base when insurgents struck, attacking in groups as large as 50 at a time, numbers not previously seen in the city, said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings of Task Force Olympia, the brigade that in February replaced a much larger unit, the 101st Airborne Division.
The magnitude of the assault generated a wave of excited reports that officials feared would further undermine public order elsewhere in Iraq. Mosul's governor went on state television to attack "lies" on Arabic-language satellite news channels, which at one point reported that U.S. forces had evacuated one of their main bases. On Sunday, the interim Interior Ministry issued a statement denying that insurgents had overrun two police stations in northern Baghdad.
The news was not all bad for the government. Also Sunday, Najaf buzzed with the news that local tribesmen had carried out three days of devastating attacks in the town of Latifiyah. Located on the exceedingly dangerous road between Baghdad and Najaf, the town harbors extremists blamed for killing 18 young Iraqi men returning from Najaf after signing up for the National Guard earlier this month. The victims' tribal leaders, incensed after extremists demanded payment before handing over the bodies, last week sent fighters north to burn farms and carry out revenge killings, officials in Najaf said.
'It is our fault'
But in the Sunni Triangle west and north of Baghdad, the insurgency regularly demonstrates its resilience. In Samarra, local insurgents and foreign fighters driven from the city Oct. 1 began trickling back a month later. A wave of car bombs and mortar attacks Nov. 6 killed 17 Iraqi police and made the city a combat zone once more.
Residents assembled each day at the bridge leading from the main highway across the Tigris River into town, shut down by U.S. forces.
"It is our fault," said Abu Muhammed, stranded on the wrong side. "We sold the city to those terrorists and let them enter, and now we cannot enter because of them."
"They made it hard to live till the army came and freed the city," said another man, who gave his name as Abu Omar. "We were able to move around freely and stay out late at night. But now they are back."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6486511/
At 11 a.m. Thursday, the target was an armored SUV. Witnesses said that after its Western passengers were chased into a police station, the driver was burned alive atop the vehicle as the attackers shouted "Jew!" The city of 1.8 million people then devolved into chaos. Thousands of police officers abandoned their precinct houses. The governor's house was set alight. Insurgents took the police chief's brother, himself a senior officer, into his front yard and shot him dead.
By Sunday, the dawn of a three-day festival celebrating the end of Ramadan, control over sections of the city remained in doubt. In streets emptied by fear and gunfire, insurgents battled hundreds of Iraqi National Guard reinforcements dispatched by the interim government to quell an uprising that was at once largely expected and disquieting.
U.S. and Iraqi officials said they knew that Ramadan would bring attacks, and that the widely publicized offensive in Fallujah would spark violent provocations in other predominantly Sunni Muslim centers. But the scale of the Mosul attack surprised the U.S. forces in the city. And the disintegration of the city's police force recalled the debacles of April, when a suddenly rampant insurgency shattered faith in the security forces that are expected to assume the ever-more difficult task of making Iraq at least reasonably safe.
"They were scaring us, and we are from Mosul, so we withdrew to our houses," said Yusuf Rashid, a police officer in a Mosul neighborhood named "Justice."
As fighting winds down in a Fallujah that has been returned by overwhelming force to the sovereignty of the new Iraq, U.S. forces are turning to the many other cities besieged by a fresh wave of insurgent attacks. The resistance remains concentrated in regions dominated by the Sunni Muslim minority, and further complicates the interim government's stated desire to include Iraq's entire population in January elections.
Bands of armed men
U.S. tanks and attack helicopters on Sunday swooped into Baiji, the midway point between Mosul and Baghdad, where insurgents destroyed a key highway bridge and claimed the city. Masked men carried guns aloft in a protest Sunday in Baqubah, a chronic trouble spot for U.S. forces just northeast of the capital. U.S. forces also engaged fighters in Tall Afar, a largely Turkmen city west of Mosul, and in Hawija, northwest of Baghdad.
Bands of armed men moved freely at night in several neighborhoods of Baghdad, where the number of attacks on U.S. forces has more than doubled from a week ago. Ramadi, 30 miles west of Fallujah, remains a rebel stronghold.
And U.S. and Iraqi forces continue to fight in Samarra, the city advertised as a model for the assault on Fallujah when 1st Infantry Division tanks rolled there six weeks ago to reclaim the city from insurgents. Under the curfew again in effect there, Samarra residents are allowed on the street for only four hours each morning, and over the weekend its latest police chief, installed just last month, quit.
"We never believed a fight in Fallujah would mean an end to the insurgency," a U.S. Embassy official in Baghdad said. "We've never defined success that way.
"We still have the very difficult problem of a Sunni insurgency."
Just how much the move on Fallujah is roiling the rest of Iraq is a matter still being assessed by Iraqi and U.S. officials. They appear heartened that the country's Shiite majority remains quiescent and largely animated by the prospect of asserting power through the ballot. That marks the sharpest contrast with the April uprising, when militias loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr took control of cities across the country's south, opening a vast new military front just as Marines assaulted Fallujah the first time.
Sadr's defeat in August by a U.S. offensive in the holy city of Najaf, followed by weeks of grinding assault in the Baghdad slum named for his father, did much to persuade the radical cleric to shift his energies to politics. For Iraqi and U.S. decision-makers, it also reinforced the decision to confront the Sunni insurgency in its own strongholds.
'City is a mess'
But if the tactical battle was won in Fallujah -- removing both a symbol of successful resistance and a genuine paramilitary base -- it remains far from clear who will prevail in the larger strategic fight to make the interim government credible to a Sunni population embittered by the loss of influence it enjoyed under the government of former president Saddam Hussein.
The attacks in Mosul did not signal imminent success, at least not to its residents.
"The city is a mess," said Bahaa Aldeen Abdulaziz, owner of the Casablanca Hotel. "The shops are closed. There's no security. And the reason for all this is because the Americans invaded Fallujah.
"And Fallujah will never finish. It has gotten into people's blood."
"I believe the situation will continue like this, and Mosul will become another Fallujah," said Noofel Mohammed Amen, a shoe salesman. "And later on all the cities of Iraq will be Fallujah."
The most immediate concern for the interim government is manpower. Iraq has no more than eight battalions of the newly trained troops, whose main job is to occupy cities after U.S. forces defeat insurgents. Duty in Samarra and Fallujah, which have about a half million people between them, already was stretching that force thin. Adding duty in Mosul "means you're operating right out on the edge of what forces you have -- Iraqi forces," the U.S. official said.
American forces may be stretched thin as well. A battalion deployed outside Fallujah raced back to its Mosul base when insurgents struck, attacking in groups as large as 50 at a time, numbers not previously seen in the city, said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings of Task Force Olympia, the brigade that in February replaced a much larger unit, the 101st Airborne Division.
The magnitude of the assault generated a wave of excited reports that officials feared would further undermine public order elsewhere in Iraq. Mosul's governor went on state television to attack "lies" on Arabic-language satellite news channels, which at one point reported that U.S. forces had evacuated one of their main bases. On Sunday, the interim Interior Ministry issued a statement denying that insurgents had overrun two police stations in northern Baghdad.
The news was not all bad for the government. Also Sunday, Najaf buzzed with the news that local tribesmen had carried out three days of devastating attacks in the town of Latifiyah. Located on the exceedingly dangerous road between Baghdad and Najaf, the town harbors extremists blamed for killing 18 young Iraqi men returning from Najaf after signing up for the National Guard earlier this month. The victims' tribal leaders, incensed after extremists demanded payment before handing over the bodies, last week sent fighters north to burn farms and carry out revenge killings, officials in Najaf said.
'It is our fault'
But in the Sunni Triangle west and north of Baghdad, the insurgency regularly demonstrates its resilience. In Samarra, local insurgents and foreign fighters driven from the city Oct. 1 began trickling back a month later. A wave of car bombs and mortar attacks Nov. 6 killed 17 Iraqi police and made the city a combat zone once more.
Residents assembled each day at the bridge leading from the main highway across the Tigris River into town, shut down by U.S. forces.
"It is our fault," said Abu Muhammed, stranded on the wrong side. "We sold the city to those terrorists and let them enter, and now we cannot enter because of them."
"They made it hard to live till the army came and freed the city," said another man, who gave his name as Abu Omar. "We were able to move around freely and stay out late at night. But now they are back."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6486511/
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