U.S. drives into heart of Fallujah - 15年戦争資料 @wiki

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/11/10/MNG6P9P3ER1.DTL

U.S. drives into heart of Fallujah / Army, Marines face rockets and bombs in battle to take insurgents' stronghold

ADVANCING: 70% of city reported under American control
Chronicle news services

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

(11-10) 04:00 PST Fallujah, Iraq -- U.S. Marines said American forces had taken control today of 70 percent of Fallujah in the third day of a major offensive to retake the insurgent stronghold.

Maj. Francis Piccoli of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force said enemy fighters were bottled up in a strip of the city flanking the major east-west highway that splits Fallujah.

Army and Marine units had pushed south to the highway overnight, Piccoli said. They encountered roadside bombs, rockets and gunfire along the way.

"There's going to be a movement today in those areas. The heart of the city is what's in focus now," he said.

The American military said that by Tuesday evening, at least 10 American service members and two Iraqi soldiers had been killed in the assault on Fallujah. In the 24-hour period ending at 2 a.m. this morning, 31 American and Iraqi troops had been wounded and more than 100 insurgents killed, military officials said. No further information was immediately available.

Soldiers with the Army's 1st Infantry Division made their way to the southeastern part of the city, a neighborhood of factories and warehouses where they expected to find guerrillas waiting for them. Instead, the district was relatively quiet, though the units reported being fired on by women and children armed with assault rifles.

"There were multiple groups running around shooting at us," said Air Force Senior Airman Michael Smyre, 26, of Hickory, N.C., an air strike spotter attached to the 1st Infantry who was wounded when a rocket hit his armored vehicle. "You could see a lot of rubble, trash everywhere. It was real nasty- looking."

Marines fighting to the west of the Army units advanced to the main east- west highway that divides Fallujah and reported persistent resistance from insurgents firing from mosques.

In the first major political backlash over the assault on Fallujah, the country's most prominent Sunni political organization, the Iraqi Islamic Party, said Tuesday that it was withdrawing from the interim Iraqi government, while the leading group of Sunni clerics called for Iraqis to boycott the nationwide elections scheduled for early next year.

"The clerics call on honorable Iraqis to boycott the upcoming election that is to be held over the bodies of the dead and the blood of the wounded in cities like Fallujah," said Harith Dhari, director of the Muslim Scholars Association, a group of Sunni clerics that says it represents 3,000 mosques.

The moves seemed to promise that popular protest against the U.S.-led attack on the city, which is predominantly Sunni, is likely to grow in coming days.

A widespread Sunni boycott of the January elections would threaten the legitimacy of the outcome. It would also undermine the main rationale for the attack on Fallujah: to drive insurgents out of the city so that residents could freely take part in the elections.

Insurgents elsewhere in Iraq, meanwhile, continued a strategy of mounting attacks. In Baquba, a restive city northeast of Baghdad, armed bands attacked two police stations. Police officials and the U.S. military said the attacks had been beaten back. A car bomb at an Iraqi national guard camp outside the northern city of Kirkuk killed three people and wounded two. And two U.S. service members were killed in a mortar attack on a base in Mosul, also in the north.

In Baghdad, where insurgents detonated a car bomb Monday night outside a hospital treating victims of two car bombs outside churches, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi imposed a curfew from 10:30 p.m. to 4 a.m. U.S. fighter jets made low passes over the capital, a show of strength rarely seen since the 2003 invasion.

At a news conference in Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the commander of foreign military operations in Iraq, said the assault on Fallujah had so far "achieved our objectives on or ahead of schedule." He added, "I think we're looking at several more days of tough urban fighting."

The general said the battle plan as a whole was on course. "We felt like the enemy would form an outer crust in defense of Fallujah," Metz said. "We broke through that pretty quickly and easily."

Witnesses said that by Tuesday night, U.S. and Iraqi forces controlled the Jolan, Mualimeen and Askali neighborhoods in the north of Fallujah. They also held the Rawdha Muhammediya mosque, headquarters of the insurgent fighters and the mujahedeen shura, the city's self-appointed government.

The assault pushed insurgents into Shuhada and other neighborhoods in the southernmost part of the city, where they are fighting and hiding behind buildings and houses, witnesses said.

Metz said that because U.S. forces formed a "very tight" cordon around the city Sunday night, the enemy "doesn't have an escape route" and eventually would be cornered.

But Sheikh Abdul-Sattar Edatha, the spokesman for the shura council, said most foreign fighters had already left the city. The U.S. military had estimated that there were 2,000 to 3,000 foreign fighters in the city, many of them part of a network linked to Jordanian-born guerrilla leader Abu Musab al- Zarqawi.

"Militarily speaking, the city falls under the U.S. forces' control," Edatha said. "The foreign fighters won't stay here and die. They lost the battle. They spread in other places."

On Tuesday night, Fallujah's eerily empty streets were littered with shattered concrete and dead bodies, said a resident shaken by a missile strike on the second story of his family home. Insurgents cloaked in checkered head scarves carried wounded fellow fighters to mosques.

Civilians caught in the cross fire were gathered in a hospital donated by the United Arab Emirates and flying a blue and white UNICEF banner. There, medical workers low on bandages and antiseptic bound wounds in ripped sheets and cleaned torn skin with hot water.

The Jolan and Askali neighborhoods seemed particularly hard hit, with more than half of the houses destroyed. Dead bodies were scattered on the streets and narrow alleys of Jolan, one of Fallujah's oldest neighborhoods. Blood and flesh were splattered on the walls of some of the houses, witnesses said, and the streets were full of holes.

Some of the heaviest damage apparently was incurred Monday night by air and artillery attacks that coincided with the entry of ground troops into the city. U.S. warplanes dropped eight 2,000-pound bombs on the city overnight, and artillery boomed throughout the night and into the morning.

"Usually we keep the gloves on," said Army Capt. Erik Krivda, of Gaithersburg, Md., the senior officer in charge of the 1st Infantry Division's Task Force 2-2 tactical operations command center. "For this operation, we took the gloves off."

Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns.

Kamal Hadeethi, a physician at a regional hospital, said, "The corpses of the mujahedeen which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted."

Iraq's new army, formed after occupation authorities dismantled the armed forces that had served during the rule of Saddam Hussein, is taking part in the fight against insurgents in Fallujah, primarily as a rear element to help clear areas once U.S. forces have moved through.

Iraqi Brig. Gen. Abdul-Qadir Muhammed Jasim said that resistance had been lighter than expected and that the Iraqi soldiers were in good spirits and eager to finish the operation.

"The operation is going very precise and with a very small number of casualties," he said. "In every place, we finish an operation, our forces start to distribute aid, food, clothes, blankets and even money. ... We are very sure that we are moving in the right way and will do the tasks we are asked to do very precisely."