Fallujah: The first Iraqi
intifada By David Isenberg
WASHINGTON - Anyone remember the first
battle of Fallujah? Codenamed Operation Vigilant
Resolve, it was launched by US Marines on April 4,
2004, four days after four Blackwater contractors
were killed there. Fallujah, and associated
fighting in other parts of the country, can be
considered the first Iraqi intifada against the US
in Iraq.
Amid all the killing that has
gone on in Iraq since then, the battle has largely
faded from public memory. But for those seeking to
understand the past effectiveness of Iraqi
insurgent forces, that first battle of Fallujah
was highly significant. That is the
conclusion of a secret
intelligence assessment [1], first reported on by
United Press International, which was prepared by
the US Army's National Ground Intelligence Center
and was recently leaked to Wikileaks, a web site
version of Wikipedia for untraceable document
leaking and analysis.
The assessment says:
Enemy employment of asymmetric
tactics, techniques, and procedures during the
Battle of Fallujah in April 2004 offers many
useful lessons learned in how a relatively weak
adversary can prevent the United States from
accomplishing its military
objectives.
To read the assessment is
to be reminded of how ill-prepared the US military
was in those days to conduct counter-insurgency
operations. The US military knew that Fallujah was
a critical stronghold for the insurgents. General
James Conway, then commander of the 1st Marine
Expeditionary Force (MEF), whose troops conducted
the first Fallujah offensive, said in an interview
the day before the killing of the Blackwater
contractors that "Fallujah is probably our center
of gravity. We know that there are more bad guys
around Fallujah than anywhere else in our whole
area of operations."
Fallujah was an early
example of what the military calls MOUT (Military
Operations in Urban Terrain) and such operations
are generally regarded as the bloodiest and most
difficult.
Speaking on April 7 on the
News Hour with Jim Lehrer, John
Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of
Chicago, said:
The United States is basically in a
situation where it's damned if it does and
damned if it doesn't. If we get tough on the
Iraqis as we're doing now, tough on the
insurgents, it's likely to backfire on us.
While the marines were largely
successful in their military operations in
Fallujah, there were a number of political and
informational developments which resulted in the
operation's overall failure.
These
included Muqtada al-Sadr's militia, the Mahdi
Army, which began attacking coalition forces on
April 2 in response to the coalition's move to
shut down his newspaper Hawza and the arrest of
one of his top aides. This simultaneous uprising
added to the pressure to resolve the Fallujah
fight as quickly as possible.
Other Sunni
cells and groups escalated their attacks in areas
outside Fallujah, especially in Ramadi, prompting
the British to argue for a halt of the attack. At
the same time, the news agency al-Jazeera was
claiming that up to 600 Iraqi civilians had been
killed by the US offensive. Images of dead
children were being displayed repeatedly on
televisions around the world.
Because of
these factors, by April 9 , just five days after
the start of the offensive, US proconsul L Paul
Bremer prevailed on General John Abizaid, the head
of the US Central Command, to order a halt to
offensive ground operations. This marked the start
of an American unilateral ceasefire that lasted
until the end of April, although clashes initiated
by insurgents continued. Actually, that may give
Bremer more credit than he deserves. A footnote at
the very end the intelligence assessment notes
that:
The deal struck by MEF commander
Conway (it was unusual for a field commander to
be given negotiating responsibility) with the
Fallujah Brigade was approved by Generals
Ricardo Sanchez and Abizaid but not coordinated
with the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Bremer was furious when he found out
about it, but he was in little position to
overturn it since he had insisted on the
ceasefire in the first place. Complicating
matters was the fact that the Abu Abu Ghraib
prisoner abuse scandal broke on April 29,
consuming the attention of senior leaders in the
US government. Bremer could not organize a
consensus to overturn the Fallujah Brigade
decision.
The Fallujah Brigade was a
Sunni militia unit led by former Iraqi army
officers to which the marines turned over their
responsibility for Fallujah. Many insurgents were
incorporated into this unit, and its affect on the
security situation in the city was negligible.
Aside from the political developments, the
insurgents showed skill and competence in their
choice of tactics while fighting the marines. They
demonstrated operational freedom of movement by
infiltrating fighters and supplies through the
marine cordon around Fallujah. Small mobile combat
cells conducted a fluid defense using hit-and-run
attacks, ambushes, and standoff attacks using
mortars and improvised explosive devices.
The insurgents also showed they could
adapt and learn as the battle raged. They noted
the vulnerabilities of M1A1 tanks, for example,
and waited to attack until the main gun was raised
or used feints and ruses to expose the rear armor.
Additionally, they would initiate an ambush with
small-arms fire on one side of a tank in order to
get the tank crew to turn its armor into the
direction of fire. They would then fire a
coordinated rocket-propelled grenade salvo into
the exposed rear of the tank.
They also
allowed marine units to penetrate deeply into
their territory so they could set up ambush
opportunities on isolated targets. Once a marine
unit was isolated, the insurgents would swarm from
all directions to destroy them. Insurgents also
exploited coalition adherence to the Law of Armed
Conflict to gain a tactical advantage. They
employed human shields, positioned themselves in
protected structures such as mosques and schools,
and appeared to be well aware of the rules of
engagement that controlled marine return fire.
Controlled or not, however, some marine
weaponry could be devastating. The assessment
confirms that the marines used 2.75-inch flechette
rockets for close air support provided by Cobra
helicopters. The flechette warhead, used for
anti-personnel operations, is essentially a steel
dart that looks very much like steel nails with
fins stamped into its back. The WDU-4A/A warhead,
commonly used on the Hydra rockets carried by
Cobra attack helicopters, contains about 2,200
flechettes.
Nevertheless, the most
successful accomplishment of the insurgents was
their ability to use the media. The assessment
notes that the insurgents demonstrated a keen
understanding of the value of information
operations (IO).
IO was one of the insurgents' most
effective levers to raise political pressure for
a ceasefire. They fed disinformation to
television networks, posted propaganda on the
Internet to recruit volunteers and solicit
financial donations, and spread rumors through
the street. Sympathetic imams calling for jihad
in their mosque sermons also helped to win
support for the insurgency.
The
assessment found that the relative failure of the
first battle of Fallujah compared to the more
successful second battle of Fallujah (November
2004) offers useful political-military lessons for
how to defeat asymmetric adversaries in complex
environments.
The enemy will seek to utilize the human,
informational and physical complexity of urban
areas to avoid direct military confrontation and
exploit American political and informational
vulnerabilities.
The media presence on the battlefield was
controlled by the enemy; consequently, they
shaped much of the information the world viewed
during the fight. In Vigilant Resolve there were
few reporters embedded in marine infantry units;
in Operation al-Fajr there were 91 embeds
representing 60 media outlets. False allegations
of noncombatant casualties were made by Arab
media in both campaigns, but in the second case
embedded Western reporters offered a rebuttal.
The Iraqi government was nascent and weak
and it offered no political cover for US
commanders to finish the operation in a
reasonable time period. Without domestic Iraqi
political support, offensive operations were
halted after five days of combat.
David
Isenberg is a an analyst in national and
international security affairs,
sento@earthlink.net. He is also a member of the
Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, an
adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute,
contributor to the Straus Military Reform Project,
a research fellow at the Independent Institute,
and a US Navy veteran. The views expressed are his
own.
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