The Green teams reported throughout that week, with some amazement, that fighters had seemingly come out of the woodwork. What disgust Iraqis may have had after seeing their countrymen string up corpses was quickly replaced, a few days later, by a smarting sense of solidarity with the embattled Fallujans. For some Iraqis, the invasion of Fallujah was the American occupation in its ugliest form: they viewed the Marines as acting out of revenge, carrying out collective punishment against many innocents for the crimes of a guilty few.
The perception that Americans were committing widespread atrocities quickly spread, largely through the Arab TV networks that reported significantly inflated civilian casualty figures. There were TV reports of injured civilians in Fallujah even before the attack began, and the networks played stock footage from other battles. Al Jazeera reported that U.S. artillery shells had hit mosques or wiped out whole families of twenty-five, and American newspapers repeated these claims. In reality, the Marines did not shoot any artillery during the entire first battle of Fallujah, using only precision weapons from aircraft. But the rumor resonated.
This feeling was so profound that it brought Sunni and Shia Iraqis together in a momentary period of sympathy and cooperation. Shiites in Baghdad reportedly sent money to the city and took food from their pantries and medicine from their own cabinets to donate. They urged their own brothers and sons to fight while taking in Sunni refugees. Shiite leaders solicited blood donations for Fallujah. Of course, the short spasm of cross-sectarian unity didn’t endure.
Political pressure mounted on the Coalition, which had done little to compete with enemy propaganda, to stop the offensive in Fallujah. The U.N.’s representative to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, threatened to quit. British prime minister Tony Blair implored President Bush to cease the assault. Most vitally, the Iraqi Governing Council, the interim body of Iraqis working with the CPA until Iraq regained sovereignty at the end of June 2004, threatened to disband if the assault did not desist. Its dissolution would have been potentially fatal to a new Iraq. So Bush ordered the assault stopped.
At the time, I was aware of only part of this political maneuvering, so I was surprised to receive a call from Mattis informing me that Washington had halted the assault. I was largely to blame for my own confusion. I had established too few links with the Marine command—a mistake I worked hard not to repeat. Beginning with the Marines, I began sending liaisons to as many units and commands as I could. Those liaisons fed back information, and we quickly set up fusion cells to combine and compare intelligence. Before Fallujah, coordination had been an important but tangential component of TF 714’s effort. Now I learned it was central to our effectiveness.
On Friday, April 9, 2004, John Abizaid flew to Iraq and then out to the Marines’ Camp Fallujah. John had come to tell the Marines in person to cancel the entire offensive, knowing they would be irate. I would join him out in Fallujah later that day, the one-year anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. Things were meant to be going well. Instead, it was arguably the worst day for the Coalition since the invasion had begun, with Sunni and Shia extremists making gains. The Sunni insurgency had won a tactical draw in Fallujah: for them, a triumph of legendary proportions.
The war was not going well elsewhere. Much of the rest of Iraq was erupting. Even with Fallujah teetering, the CPA had, the previous week, chosen to confront Muqtada al-Sadr, the thuggish thirty-year-old son and nephew of a prestigious Shia cleric assassinated by Saddam. Bremer shut down al-Hawza, Sadr’s mouthpiece newspaper, and arrested one of his top aides. In response, Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia rose up in the streets of its Shia strongholds—Najaf, Karbala, Kufa. In Sadr City—the Shia “neighborhood” of Baghdad, home to 2.5 million people and recently renamed from “Saddam City” in honor of Muqtada’s martyred father—JAM attacked soldiers from the 1st Armored Division, commanded by then–Major General Marty Dempsey. By the time I met with Abizaid on Friday, Sadr City was in full revolt. That day, Dempsey’s soldiers in Baghdad read his letter to them, explaining that their yearlong tours would be extended another three months to continue fighting Sadr’s militia. His men had fought too hard, Marty wrote to them, to allow “one thug to replace another.”