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November 14, 2004
U.S. Armored Forces Blast Their Way Into Rebel Nest in FallujaBy DEXTER FILKINS and ROBERT F. WORTH
ALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 13 - Army tanks and fighting vehicles blasted their way into the last main rebel stronghold in Falluja at sundown on Saturday after American warplanes and artillery prepared the way with a savage barrage on the district.
Earlier in the afternoon, 10 separate plumes of smoke rose from southern Falluja, as if etched against the desert sky, and probably exclaiming catastrophe for the insurgents.
"It's a broad attack against the entire southern front," said Col. Michael D. Formica, the Army commander in charge of the cordon effort around the city. "We're just pushing them against an anvil."
The assault progressed enough for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to conclude that "coalition and Iraqi forces have completed the move, for all practical purposes, from the north of town to the south" of Falluja.
"Needless to say, there still will be pockets of resistance and areas that will be difficult, so I don't mean to suggest that it's complete ," he said during a visit to Panama. "Clearly there's a large number of terrorists that have been killed or captured, and that is a good thing for the people of Iraq."
But as the battle intensified in Falluja, insurgents roamed the streets of the important northern city of Mosul and the nearby town of Ramadi.
In Mosul, a city with a diverse population of three million, American and Iraqi forces tried to quell a three-day-old uprising apparently set off by the battle in Falluja. Kurdish militiamen have been appearing on the streets to take on insurgents, and many residents have begun to wonder whether ethnic conflict could soon break out.
American commanders said security was also worsening in Ramadi, the provincial capital 30 miles west of Falluja. Insurgents flooded Ramadi before the Falluja conflict began. Guerrillas have been attacking from mosques, the commanders said, and roadside bomb attacks have increased.
In Falluja, mechanized units, mainly M1A2 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, entered the southern district, Shuhada, on Saturday, with muzzles blazing, blowing apart buildings, rolling over barriers and confronting insurgents holed up in mosques and other refuges. It was the sixth day of the battle in Falluja.
From the city's southeast perimeter, the sound of heavy artillery and machine-gun fire was almost continuous throughout the afternoon, when M1 tanks and Bradleys could be seen pounding rebel positions near the city's southern end.
In the direction of Shuhada, a battle could be seen raging between an American M1 tank and a group of insurgents holed up in buildings around the minarets of a mosque, about 100 yards away. Muzzle flashes from AK-47 fire could be seen around the minarets.
The tank, with its rear less than a block from the desert's edge, repeatedly fired its 120-millimeter cannon at the insurgents, sending a sudden dust cloud into the sky as sections of the building's masonry collapsed.
In Baghdad, consequences of the battle for Falluja rippled across the political landscape. A senior aide to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who has already led two uprisings against the Americans, said in a televised statement on Saturday that Mr. Sadr would not take part in elections scheduled for January while "Iraqi cities are under attack."
Drawing Mr. Sadr into the political process has been one of the most pressing goals of the Americans and the interim Iraqi government. Mr. Sadr is mercurial, and the practical impact of his statement remains unclear. Until now, he has appeared to be committed to the political process, and the statement could be a way for him to build his support in the period leading up to the elections.
The Iraqi government announced in Baghdad on Saturday that it was indefinitely shutting down commercial flights at the airport because of the hostilities. Gunmen also killed the Shiite mayor of the suburb of Dora, and the Foreign Ministry said a Lebanese man had been abducted, Reuters reported.
The American military said that a soldier in Baghdad was killed by "indirect fire," probably referring to a mortar or rocket attack.
Arrests of senior Sunni clerics continued in the capital. A leading Sunni clerics' group, the Muslim Scholars Association, said Dhari, a Baghdad suburb, was still surrounded by American troops. Earlier this week, American and Iraqi forces stormed the home of Harith al-Dhari, the group's staunchly anti-American leader, and arrested him.
The Associated Press reported that near Falluja itself, four American helicopters had been hit by fire from the ground in two incidents, but that their pilots had been able to fly the craft safely back to their bases.
A Red Crescent spokeswoman in Baghdad said Saturday that the group had dispatched a convoy of cars carrying medical supplies to try to enter Falluja. Several international aid organizations have said in recent days that a crisis could be developing among city residents, though most of the 300,000 residents fled before the offensive. It was unclear how the Red Crescent convoy would enter Falluja as American forces had set up a tight cordon.
Hospitals in Baghdad began receiving civilian casualties from the fighting in Falluja. In Numaan General Hospital, a taxi driver, Farhan Khalaf, 45, stared at two bedridden sons who had been wounded by shrapnel. Alaa, 11, was hit in the chest, and Nafe, 7, lost one of his legs.
"Everything was so quiet," Mr. Khalaf said. "Offices and shops were open, police were in the city. I didn't see anyone carrying guns. Now the Americans are shooting randomly at anything that moves."
"Our houses are completely deserted now," he said. "Look at that child. Does that child look like Zarqawi?"
In Mosul, 225 miles north of the capital, sporadic fighting erupted Saturday, but clashes were smaller than on Thursday, when groups of insurgents overran at least a half-dozen police stations, said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, a spokesman for Task Force Olympia, assigned to control the northern region. Hundreds of policemen fled the guerrillas that day, and the Iraqi government fired the city's police chief on Friday.
Mosul has sizable numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Christians, and ethnic tensions have run high since the Americans invaded Iraq. It is clear that the Sunni Arabs are leading the insurgency here, while the Kurds and Christians are more sympathetic to the American forces.
A car bomb exploded next to a Kurdish patrol in the afternoon, killing at least six militiamen, witnesses said. The city's health bureau said that at least 25 people were killed and 62 wounded in violence on Thursday and Friday, though it was unknown how many of them were civilians and how many were guerrillas.
It is clear that the American-led forces were taken by surprise by the magnitude of the uprising. The Stryker Brigade, a light-armored mechanized unit based in Mosul, had to recall a battalion from the fighting in Falluja. The Iraqi government ordered four battalions of national guardsmen, all Kurds, to the city.
Up to 500 insurgents, far more than American and Iraqi intelligence had predicted, carried out the first big wave of attacks on police stations on Thursday by working in groups of 15 to 50, Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, commander of the Stryker Brigade, said in a telephone interview late Friday.
The general said he believed that the insurgency was being organized by former members of Saddam Hussein's security forces.
The Iraqi Interior Ministry appointed a new police chief in Mosul on Saturday, and police officers were returning to the stations, some of which had been set afire, Colonel Hastings said. But the police were being confined to security duties at six sites, he added, because American soldiers might not be able to tell the real police from insurgents who could be roaming the city in stolen police uniforms or body armor.
In Al Wehda, a neighborhood of Mosul, insurgents slit the throats of two Iraqi National Guardsmen in the street, witnesses said.
"When I was driving back to my house, I saw a huge gathering of people, so I stopped the car and went to see what was the matter," said Muhammad Hazim, a resident. "I saw a number of insurgents holding two Iraqi National Guard soldiers and reading a statement calling them traitors and collaborators with the enemy, and then they slaughtered them by slitting their throats and yelling, 'God is great!' ''
General Ham, the commander in Mosul, said the performance of the Iraqi policemen on Thursday had been "very disappointing." While raiding six or seven of the city's 33 police stations, the insurgents made off with up to 40 police vehicles, hundreds of weapons, handheld radios, computers, telephones, police uniforms and body armor.
Two marines were killed Saturday morning when a roadside bomb exploded as they stood next to a vehicle in Zaidon, south of Falluja.
Kassim Daoud, the Iraqi national security advisor, estimated at a news conference that at least 1,000 insurgents had been killed in Falluja.
Reporting for this article was contributed by James Glanz and Edward Wong from Baghdad; Eric Schmitt from Washington; Thom Shanker from Panama, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Baghdad and Mosul.
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