My Share of the Task(75)
This was the most grievous display of overt resistance to American control since the war began. It hit close to home: One of the contractors was a former Navy SEAL, and the other three were former Rangers. Wes Batalona, who had been our operations sergeant at the 3rd Ranger Battalion in 1988 and 1989, was in the driver seat of the lead vehicle. The images recalled the decade-old videos showing the bodies of men from our command being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
Even before this event—and the two subsequent loud, dusty, bitter urban battles fought in the city—gave the name “Fallujah” a sinister if vague ring to Americans, the place had been tinder under the American occupation. I had visited a few times that spring and knew the city of 285,000 was a religious place. Once an ancient nexus of trade routes, it was now a tough trucker town and a smuggling hub. But it was also deeply conservative and proud of its moniker “city of mosques,” boasting 133 of them. Industrial compounds just north of the city had produced chemical weapons for Saddam, drawing the suspicion of the U.N. inspectors.
By the time I arrived in Baghdad on Monday, April 5, Marine battalions had breached Fallujah’s outer rim, entering all four quadrants of the city in the opening stage of what became known as the First Battle of Fallujah. They began their assault at 1:00 A.M., having cordoned the city the night before. Others have well documented the grinding, costly battles for Fallujah, waged largely by the Marines. But unknown to most, the events there shaped TF 714 and changed our story, as we accepted an expanded role in the fight. Even then I didn’t know the city would take center stage—and that events there would alter the course of the war. Nor did I fully understand the conditions in the city that would vault Zarqawi and his network, in turn spurring our force’s evolution to contain the jihadists’ violent expansion.
The city that would host this first clash between TF 714 and Al Qaeda in Iraq had a long, combustible history. To limit resistance to his control in Fallujah, Saddam established a system of patronage with the Sunni tribesmen of the town, frequently recruiting his government officials from the city, which was home to many military officers. Many of these Baathists returned to Fallujah after their army was disbanded in May 2003, seeding the city with disgruntled, trained military men. The city’s complex social mixture, relatively inert under Saddam, grew more combustible due to American actions.
The 82nd Airborne was responsible for the city following the fall of Saddam in April 2003, but the population quickly turned against them. In truth, the people may never have been theirs to win. Rumors—like that suggesting that the paratroopers’ night-vision goggles allowed them to see through the garments of Fallujah’s women—increased distrust and hostility. On April 28, 2003, soon after the U.S. invasion, a crowd of about 150 Fallujans marched on a school the 82nd had occupied, demanding the paratroopers vacate. Reports differ as to what provoked the violent clash that followed. According to the 82nd, they returned fire after being shot at by youths in the crowd. Fallujans claimed the crowd had no guns and called it an atrocity. In the end, seventeen Iraqis were dead and another seventy-five injured. They remembered that the Americans offered no apology, no monetary compensation even as a gesture. Fallujans would refer to the shooting as “the massacre” for years afterward, and although the Marines who took over from the 82nd sought to dispense money for the damages, many of the proud Fallujans rejected it.
A year later, during the final week of March 2004, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was set to take over all of Anbar. In the weeks leading up to the transfer, Fallujah had become increasingly hostile. In addition to the unsuccessful night raid described in the previous chapter, I had gone to the city several other times to meet with 82nd Airborne leadership. Stretched thin, the 82nd ran only limited patrols through the city. On February 12, General Abizaid had gone with the division commander to visit a new Iraqi army unit organized in Fallujah. As John and the Iraqi boss of the unit chatted in Arabic, rocket-propelled grenades hit their compound, fired by insurgents from nearby rooftops. John left calm and unscathed, but two days later the same compound was hit again. In a sophisticated assault, fifty insurgents spread across the city and attacked that Iraqi army compound to prevent its soldiers from coming to the rescue of the much less fortified mayor’s office and police station, which another group of insurgents was striking. They freed eighty-seven prisoners and killed at least twenty Iraqi policemen. As insurgents gained a foothold in Fallujah, they used it as a base of operations. From there, earlier that March, Sunni insurgents had dispatched the suicide bombers to Karbala and Baghdad for the attacks on the Ashura procession. Later that spring, a jihadist tape surfaced. “If John Abizaid escaped our swords this time,” said the speaker, believed to be Zarqawi, “we will be lying in wait for him.”