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The fighters of Falluja
Charles Clover
5/1/2004
A gas lantern is hissing and splaying an arc of shadow and light across the wall opposite Lieutenant Colonel Brian Drinkwine and his interpreter as they stand in a living room in Falluja looking like starship troopers dropped on to a planet of aboriginal life. Soldiers of Bravo Company, in hulking body armour and night optics, have to contort themselves to fit through the narrow doors and passages as they search the cramped house for any trace of their quarry. A kerosene heater, mattresses and children's schoolwork seem to be the only possessions of the family whose home they invaded just after 11pm.
That night's mission was a "prisoner snatch" directed against a key guerrilla fighter, and took place on January 10. I watched the operation while I was embedded with US forces in Iraq during my year-long assignment there. It would turn out to be one of the last instances I had to see the city from the viewpoint of these men, and one of the last such missions to be carried out in the city by coalition troops.
The half dozen trips I had made to Falluja since the end of the war had shown me one side of this, the bloodiest, most violently anti- coalition city in Iraq. I had asked to embed with the 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry regiment because I wanted to see Falluja through the eyes of the soldiers, these Kevlar-plated stewards of a modern-day manifest destiny. This month's collapse of order was foretold during my week with these soldiers, captured in their bloodshot stares and in the expressionless, brooding hatred they evoked from the city's inhabitants.
The colonel's interpreter stands over a woman sitting on the floor. In the dim light she gathers her purple robe and seven children around her. He still wears his night vision goggles that telescope from a clip on his helmet into a single alien looking eye, which seems to hold the woman speechless.
"Where is your husband, Jassem?" he says at last.
The woman, Bshara, tries to gauge her counterpart. He speaks in a Bedouin dialect of Arabic that he learned in his native Jordan. But as an Arab-American his perfect syntax is accompanied by no sing- song creole or trace of emotion.
"He's in Basra," she says.
"What is he doing in Basra?"
"I don't know."
"How long has he been in Basra?"
"Fifteen days."
He translates this to Col Drinkwine, who is kneeling.
"Tell her that her husband was seen in Falluja yesterday," says the colonel. The translation follows.
"Well, he must have a second wife and hasn't told me." Her face at last breaks into a nervous smile.
"My sister, why don't you know what he is doing? Don't you ask?"
"As long as he brings home food for the house, we don't ask questions. Your women ask their husbands such questions, not Iraqi women." She draws a finger across her mouth.
"Maybe the Iraqi woman doesn't ask, but she always knows everything anyway?"
"Well, I must not be like the rest of Iraqi women then. Maybe that is why he went off and married another one... " She manages a giggle and squeezes her nearest daughter.
The soldier translates. The colonel's head sinks. "Ask her when she is going to stop lying to us?" he says.
"Look, my sister, we think your husband was just here."
"Tell her we'll stay until she tells us," says Col Drinkwine. But he knows it is an empty threat. After a moment, he says "the problem is that the longer we're here... " Then he stops. His men know they cannot stay in one place in the city for more than half an hour at night if they want to avoid a fight. Outside, the soldiers of Bravo Company are scattered along the narrow alleyways on walls and vehicles, scanning the rooftops and skyline. The colonel, frustrated, finally says: "Tell her we are sorry to disturb her. Tell her when her husband Jassem comes back, if he is a good man he should come talk to us."
The men file out of the house silently.
The kerosene fumes give way to cold night air as the soldiers make their way to the Humvees ranged out along the narrow streets of the neighbourhood. They have already been there 45 minutes, a dangerously long time. The streets are blacked out and the soldiers are under strict orders to use no white light. Cautiously, they mount up. At the last minute, a prisoner is brought to 2nd platoon's Humvee.
"He answers to Jassem," says the soldier. The frail young man is flexicuffed and looks shaken. Asked his name in Arabic, he says quietly, "Qusay Ahmed". He is told to sit on the Humvee's rear door. A soldier brings his face close to the prisoner's and shouts "Jassem?" Then he laughs to his fellows and repeats: "Jism? Jism? Jism? Is 'at yer name?"
A sergeant waves off the soldier and puts a cloth bag over Qusay's head. "Let's get your special hat on. It's the hottest thing in town, everyone's wearing it."
With the unlucky Qusay secure in the back of a Humvee and the soldiers mounted up, the exfiltration begins. At night the Humvees drive blacked out, virtually bumper to bumper and at very high speeds. This means crossing several busy intersections, without lights, and without even slowing down. On the way in, half the column had to pull over to the side and wait until a near- collision was sorted out. On the way out, the column has to backtrack six times after it gets lost amid the winding streets.
"The captain's inventing new words," observes the radioman, after eight Humvees, ploughing through an unknown neighbourhood hung low with telephone wires and furrowed with gated mud walls, must laboriously turn and drive back the way they came. A steady stream of obscenities pours out of the radio.
Once the assemblage of vehicles clears the town's outskirts, the adrenaline and the euphoria take over. A private with an Irish last name seated next to me reaches across the seats and grabs Qusay roughly by the neck "Hey Hadji! Hadji! Hey Hadji!" he shouts, shaking him. Qusay is crying softly.
The elusive Jassem, meanwhile, has slipped through the dragnet. It was reckoned that he could lead the troops to the hideout of his boss, Khamis Sirhan, whose face adorned playing card Number 54 in the coalition's deck of Ba'ath party criminals, along with every lamppost in Falluja. Sirhan was thought to be leading the anti- coalition resistance in the province of al-Anbar, where Falluja is located, and that his arrest would break the back of the guerrillas.
US Special Forces troops in fact arrested Sirhan four days later. But the resistance did not stop. In the following months, despite relentlessly positive reports from US military spokesmen and ground commanders, Falluja gradually became worse, not better.
Just an hour west of Baghdad on Highway 1, Falluja (population 300,000) is set in a picturesque bend in the Euphrates river, lush with date palm groves and sawgrass. The city was never considered a Ba'ath Party stronghold, as the US military has alleged, but was instead a resort town, with many guest houses lining the river. The city itself is spread out beneath the cloverleaf interchange between Highway 1 which continues on to Jordan, and Highway 10, which runs through the centre of town, made up of uniform, two- storey cement buildings. Minarets and mosque domes shape the skyline.
American troops are based across the cloverleaf in a former holiday resort used by the Ba'athist regime. A vast walled compound, it is known now as FOB (Forward Operating Base) Volturno. The soldiers live in converted holiday bungalows winding along a silted-up artificial lake. On the wall of the Tactical Operations Centre (TOC), there is an aerial photograph of Falluja. It is divided neatly into sectors by a grease pencil - "Queens", "East Manhattan" and others. The bridge over the Euphrates is known as the "George Washington Bridge".
If the labels are an attempt to make the town more comprehensible to an American mind, it is not working. Four US commanders have presided over Falluja since the city fell last April. According to Sami Obeidi, a former member of the city's 22-member administrative council, the first thing each does is call a meeting with tribal leaders, like himself, and the first question each asks the assembled sheikhs is this: "What is the problem with your city?"
When I visited Falluja for the third time last September, Obeidi was still a councilman. He was no radical, and in fact his salary as a councilman was paid by the coalition. Nevertheless, he took pride in his city's reputation for bloodshed, and told me the answer to the commanders' question was simple: "Al-Anbar province has a bigger nationalist consciousness than the rest of Iraq. We are also more religious. We consider this resistance a religious duty, and a nationalist one as well. Everyone knows this to be true."
Each new level in the Iraq insurgency seems to be tested first in Falluja. It was the first city in which US troops came under sustained attack from guerrillas after the formal end of the war. Between November and January, it became a no-go area for helicopter pilots after six choppers were shot down there. On March 31, the killing and mutilation by an enraged mob of four private US security guards preceded a generalised revolt throughout Iraq, after it was demonstrated that US forces could not control the town. This month it became a killing zone, where at least a dozen Marines and up to 600 civilians have been killed in a two-week siege of the city.
The bloodshed began as a cycle of killing and revenge a year ago. On April 29 2003, US troops occupying a school in the city say they were fired at by snipers in a largely peaceful crowd demonstrating against their presence. Townspeople say there was no provocation on their side. Whatever the case, the soldiers fired back, killing 15 demonstrators.
Captain Khalid Rashid of the Iraqi police told me that those killings turned the town decisively against the Americans. Over the next two days, US troops, when fired at, responded by shooting indiscriminately. "After that, they killed a little girl. Then it was two brothers, then it was this and then that. It started to add up. The people said it was enough killing."
Under a steady drumbeat of attacks, US troops withdrew from the town. The last time US soldiers were permanently based in Falluja was at the end of October, when the last units of the 82nd Airborne Division were withdrawn. The progressive withdrawals have been cloaked as handing over security to Iraqi police and civil defence units who were, in reality, ill-equipped and often sympathetic to the guerrillas. During the violence this month, US commanders have been bitterly critical of the performance of the Iraqi police and civil defence units throughout the country.
The shocking images of March 31, when the American security guards were killed and mutilated by a mob, was a turning point in the world's perception of the conflict in Iraq. No Marine units attempted to enter the city for days, Iraqi police and civil defence forces did not interfere either, except to cut down the bodies, wrap them in blankets, and hand them over to the Americans after the day's spectacle. At Friday prayers two days later, Falluja's imams condemned the mutilation of the bodies, but none condemned the killings.
A long-standing myth about the US occupation of Iraq collapsed during that agonising day: that the anti-coalition resistance in Iraq is the work of a small coterie of Ba'ath party loyalists and foreign Islamic radicals with no popular support. Video footage of the day captured a crowd of people, including boys and old men, cheering from the sidelines as what appeared to be ordinary citizens stepped forward to hack at the corpses with knives, smash them with metal poles, loop them with rope and parade what was left through the streets. Cheering and chanting rebel songs, about 70 men followed the carts to the footbridge where the bodies were then hung.
"Eshwaritak ya Bush, halnoob bidirat al Falluja kas al moot nizgee," they sang.
"Who invited you, Oh Bush, to the land of Falluja, which will give you the chalice of death?"
What these lines tell us is profound, not for what they say, but for who said them. The man who penned this line, and more just like it, is Falluja's most famous "maddah" or traditional Sufi singer, Salah Hashem al-Janabi. One of the most revered men in the community, he recently fled to Syria after US troops raided his recording studio at the end of January. His recording "Ghadhab" (Rage) is sold as a video CD throughout Iraq, and has become a virtual anthem for the city's resistance.
"Come and spend this night in Falluja, you will hear the crash of explosions resounding like the waves of a stormy sea/ Come and see the enemy, perched quivering, like birds awaiting the hunter's gun," he sings.
Another stanza from the chant eerily fortells the bloody day: "Their senators will weep for the bodies of soldiers... their corpses will be submerged in blood, and our streets will be splattered red... the men of Falluja will make Bush despair for the lost sons of his land."
The accompanying images of al-Janabi singing and tapping a tabla, or traditional drum, are interspliced with home videos of the resistance: throngs of young Arab men, white-shirted, fists raised, in slow motion hoisting a flag-draped coffin over their heads; an armoured vehicle disappears into a cloud of smoke as a roadside bomb detonates; the corpse of a boy is shown laid out on the floor of a home. Adults point to gunshot wounds in his chest and legs. A young man is shown speaking to the camera. Corpses bound and garbed in white sheets are laid in caskets, prayed over, paraded through the streets by shouting throngs before being handed down into open graves.
Al-Janabi's songs and video are the closest thing to a public statement that Iraq's resistance has yet made. For the first time they have a face and a message, and an ideology of sorts. It is not a political manifesto, more like a jazz improvisation, but in 66 minutes of the CD one can learn a surprising amount about the resistance as a movement - who it is, and what its goals are.
While US spokesmen still insist they are fighting "former regime elements" and al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorists, al-Janabi's target audience are neither hard-core Islamists, nor Ba'athist stalwarts: he is aiming his poetry at Iraq's rural Sunni tribes.
He rarely, if ever, names Saddam Hussein or the Ba'ath Party, or says anything praiseworthy of the former regime, or of Arab nationalism or anything resembling Ba'athist ideas. And his style, while mentioning the prophet Mohammed at every appropriate opportunity, is not fundamentalist: there are no lengthy citations from the Koran, nor does he speak in the inflected classical Arabic of Islamist militant propaganda. Instead, he chants in the sing- song Bedouin local dialect of Falluja.
Hisbaalhum athlal wihna siba'i/ ' idna rijal illi tashik alga'i
"They said we were cowards, but we have proved heroes indeed/ We have men who tear chasms in the earth with their stomping feet."
Indeed, the art of "madah" is a Sufi tradition, totally at odds with pure Wahabi Islamist ideology. Any self-respecting member of al-Qaeda, for example, would consider Sufis to be idolaters - "Abud al-Qubur" (tomb worshippers), in the words of Osama bin Laden himself. The main point of departure is saint worship, common in many rural Muslim areas. For a strict fundamentalist, it is anathema to call upon the spirit of a dead sheikh or religious leader for help. But al-Janabi's chants are replete with these references, particularly summoning Abdul Qadir al-Gailani, 12th century founder of the Qadiriya Sufi order: "Sheikh Gailani, the atheists are at your tomb, how could you let this happen?" he laments.
Al-Janabi's poetry is a through-the-looking-glass glimpse into the world of Falluja, a land of saints and sacred shrines, of fate as scripted by God, of Zionist conspiracies. The world of Falluja's men is endlessly refracted through the prisms of lineage, honour, bravery and piety.
Throughout, a vague concept of "Watan" or nationhood is always present in the poems, but they are not nationalist lyrics, nor are they religious, but rather they are suffused with elaborately polite tribal custom of Anbar province and Baghdad slums, with hierarchies of greetings and incantations and reminiscences of the historical and the imagined lineages of great sheikhs.
"Show your hands, oh sons of the tribes, and throw out those evil atheist cowards! Whether we die with honour, or manage to live a noble life, our homeland is grateful."
The focus on tribes is not accidental, for the pattern of guerrilla violence in post-war Iraq makes an unmistakable arc through the bastions of these same Sunni Arab tribes. They make up an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of Iraq's population. Since the times of the Ottoman imperial domination, Sunni Arabs have made up the core governing elite of Iraq, despite being outnumbered almost two-to- one by the Shia Arabs to the south.
The Duleim tribal confederation, which controls al-Anbar province, supplied many of the country's ministers and top generals under Saddam Hussein and his predecessors. Today, they feel the whip hand they have long held to be slipping away. A series of decisions made in the immediate aftermath of the war has erased the Sunni superiority and spurred competition for leadership in Sunni areas. In practice, the guerrilla war is inseparable from this struggle for influence in the post-war power vacuum created by the coalition. By American fiat last May, the two institutions that buttressed Sunni Arab power in Iraq - the army and the Ba'ath Party - were dissolved and banned, respectively.
Given their plummeting fortunes, it is not surprising that the Sunnis sought to organise themselves in the only manner that was left available outside of the party and the military structures: the tribe. The Sunni faith does not boast a centralised religious structure comparable to the Marja'ia, or high clergy, in Shi'ism. Thus the bedrock Sunni tribes such as the Duleim, the Jbur, the Shammar and 'Obeid now form the political equivalent of the Shia clergy in the south, presiding over the interests of their kinsmen and squabbling with the coalition over patronage and power.
The most powerful tribe in the Falluja area is the Bu Essa, headed by the elderly Sheikh Khamis. Captain Scott Kirkpatrick, who leads a 10th Mountain Division rifle company, describes the Sheikh as "no more pro- or anti-coalition than anyone else in Falluja". Sheikh Aboud, Sheikh Khamis's son, met me last September in their country house near the Euphrates river, and over sweet tea, complained about the local economy. The resistance was a subject he wanted to steer clear of: "They are not from Falluja," was all he would say.
Most interesting, however, was the fact that sitting with us were two Jordanian men whose car had been stolen at gunpoint that morning. Solving the problem could be done only through the good offices of Sheikh Khamis, as the deed had happened on Bu Essa land, and most probably perpetrated by one of the Sheikh's kinsmen. While a steady stream of mayors and police chiefs have been appointed for Falluja, their usefulness for anything other than cannon fodder is questionable. All problems are solved through the tribes, and that includes all politics.
Choosing a police chief, or a mayor, or a head of a tribal council may seem innocuous but these things are interwoven with age-old feuds and rivalries and, based on this, countless decisions are made about the worthiness of the American project in Iraq. Under the old regime, the retirement of an Iraqi Air Force general required a huge number of reshuffles so as to maintain tribal and ethnic balances. The Americans, over-confident in the wake of the war, thought themselves immune from these calculations, which would have no place in the new Iraq they were trying to build.
Sa'doun Duleimi, a sociologist and pollster based in Baghdad, estimates that about half the violence in his native Anbar province is the result of local political causes, not organised resistance groups, and hatred for the Americans has been exacerbated by poor political appointment-making at the local level.
He says American over-reliance on exiles and on backing "paramount sheikhs", much as the British did when they moved into Iraq in the early 20th century, has backfired.
When I was last permitted access to US troops in January, the tempo at Volturno was easy. Soldiers ate twice a day in the plywood mess hall, showered on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Otherwise they read books outside their cement bungalows, watched satellite TV inside, or jogged around the silted-up lakes. Every night, a company of 100 men would suit up for a mission - usually a prisoner snatch or a presence patrol (to show they could still go into an area).
The most vivid memory of the many soldiers I interviewed was of a single night, November 2, when they scrambled to create a perimeter around the wreckage of a US Chinook helicopter shot down by a surface-to-air missile near the city. For the paratroopers, the blood and death of that night, spent amid the charred remains of 16 comrades, hardened them to the plight of Falluja's citizens, who complained of few services, no jobs, rising violence and indiscriminate killing by US troops.
The senior officers of the units I rode with in January made an elaborate show of courtesy towards the locals but the rank and file did little to conceal their hostility towards the "Hadjis", as they called Iraqis.
"You should have been there the night that Chinook went down, maybe you'd understand something," said a team leader from the 10th Mountain Division, when I asked him about their aggressiveness towards the Iraqis. It was clear to him, even though it may not be clear to higher ranking briefers eager to spin the guerrilla war in Iraq, that "we are fighting the local population" in Falluja.
The day before the operation to find Jassem, I had a chance to see this first hand. I accompanied the battalion into "Lower Manhattan" during a three-hour operation aimed, somewhat farcically, at removing the English and Arabic sign saying "Welcome to Falluja" that greets vehicles driving into the city on Highway 10. At least five times over as many months, dark- humoured fighters had placed remote controlled bombs in the base of the sign aimed at attacking US vehicles.
The scale of the operation to remove the sign and accompanying guard rails gave an idea of the challenge the unit faced. Just to protect the bulldozers required two-and-a-half full-strength rifle companies, several Bradley fighting vehicles, observation helicopters and even an F-18 fighter jet slicing through skies, on standby.
I had accompanied Capt Kirkpatrick during the operation. His company covered the right flank of the bulldozers and were to search and clear houses along the southern side of Highway 10. Residents were mostly friendly, though complained that this was the third search in a month and they were getting fed up. The soldiers mixed easily with locals on the streets. Then, everything changed: an hour into the operation, a white flare shot over the dome of the central mosque on Highway 10. A few minutes later, three rocket- propelled grenades (RPGs) slammed into the street 100 metres from me, evidently aimed at a group of Iraqi police trucks. One thing I think I noticed, but could be mistaken about, is that after the flare all the civilians melted away from the vicinity of the soldiers. They all knew what was to come next.
Capt Kirkpatrick's company, with me in tow, chased vainly after the perpetrators through a series of two-storey apartment blocks, finding only an abandoned BMW on a side street that appeared to belong to them. The RPG team had melted into the population like ghosts.
An hour later, another four RPGs rained down on two Bradleys in an alleyway. One round went right into the engine block of a Bradley, crippling it. Amazingly, no one - Iraqi or American - was seriously injured or killed on that day.
Lieutenant Kyle Walton, who leads the platoon that took the brunt of the second RPG attack, said the battle was the first time that the insurgents had stood and fought, albeit for only two minutes or so. "Usually it's just a hit and run. Today was the first time that Hadji wanted to stand there and throw down with us," he said. Two months later, his words would seem prophetic.
A day after the battle, I sat with Capt Kirkpatrick outside one of the bungalows at Volturno, in between debriefings.
"What we had was a classic wild west show. Lots of smoke and noise. No bodies," he said, "Everyone was very lucky.
"When you are in that city, you always have to be moving," he said. "If you stay static for any length of time, you have to be patrolling and watching the skylines because the enemy are going to be trying to manoeuvre on you, and that's what they did.
"If we can solve Falluja, we can solve the whole country."
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Charles Clover was the FT's correspondent in Iraq during the war
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