The 9/11 Wars (24 page)

A third major factor was the simple conservatism and xenophobia of the Sunni communities beyond the elite circles from amongst whom the majority of Western interlocutors were drawn. Falluja, a city of 400,000 at a strategic crossing point on the Euphrates surrounded by rich farmland which was to become the centre of the Sunni insurgency during 2004, had always been one of the most conservative communities in Iraq. Unlike somewhere like Tikrit, where the tribes were relatively urbanized, the tribes of Falluja were concentrated in the rural areas surrounding the city and were still heavily influenced by decades or centuries-old tribal traditions and customs.
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Like so many towns, Falluja had also liberated itself, with local sheikhs and clerics establishing a series of management councils largely based in the many mosques in the city after the fall of the regime. These had successfully prevented any looting and made sure that if anyone was going to raid traffic on the major highways leading west which passed the city it was locals.
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‘We all know one another here, there were no problems,’ said shopkeeper Abdul Kadeer.
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Falluja was thus another one of those cities like Majjar al-Kabir whose inhabitants did not consider themselves to have been defeated and who believed that they had a right to govern themselves according to their own customs. Powerful and well-armed local tribes with their own wealth from agriculture and smuggling such as the al-Dulaimi had been treated warily by Saddam Hussein even as they remained one of his most important bases of support.
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Though some experts made efforts to point out these crucial elements to key individuals in the Pentagon or the White House itself – some featured in the vast multi-volume work produced by the State Department before the invasion – their warnings were largely dismissed. American strategic thinking was conventional. Objectives were seen in terms of individuals – particularly those with political power such as Saddam and his clique – or geography – crucial terrain features or facilities such as airports or roads. As had been the case in Afghanistan, there was no concept of populations like the Sunnis of the western provinces or the Baghdad hinterland as objectives in their own right. Such communities nonetheless constituted ‘terrain’ of the highest strategic importance.

This inevitably contributed to a final factor: the counter-productive behaviour of the occupiers. It was not just the well-reported civilian casualties or the looting of the invasion itself. Within weeks of the invasion, there had been a series of incidents in or around Falluja in which American troops had killed significant numbers of local people. American commanders denied frequent accusations that they were trigger-happy, but anyone accompanying their troops on raids could see the impact their tactics had on local populations. When men from the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment in Falluja and its nearby smaller twin Ramadi set out on an operation to round up suspected insurgents in June 2003 they blasted the doors of the suspects’ homes off their hinges with explosives, ransacked rooms and forced scores of men to squat with bags over their heads for hours in the sun waiting to be ‘processed’. Returning to their base in a commandeered palace outside Ramadi, troops played gangster rap at high volume through speakers mounted on their armoured vehicles. ‘It’s good for morale,’ Lieutenant Colonel Hector Mirabile explained to the author. On patrol at night the soldiers, mainly reservists from Florida, came under sniper and mortar fire while locals made mock howling noises in the dark and shouted that the ‘amriki’ would ‘die like dogs’. The soldiers replied with insults they had picked from interpreters. On the streets that had been raided the anger was palpable. Few hid their sentiments. ‘I am not sorry for the US dead. They cross the ocean to come here to plunder our wealth not to help us,’ said Jamal Nawaf, a sixty-year-old shopkeeper. ‘They don’t respect old people. I can’t sleep because of the helicopters. If even the kids throw stones they shoot. They have taken my Kalashnikov, they have taken money from my house, they have taken my pride.’
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Yet it would be a mistake to see the growing insurgency in Iraq as either homogeneous or particularly organized. General John Abizaid, appointed commander of US Central Command in the aftermath of the campaign of 2003, described the conflict in Iraq his troops were engaged on in Iraq as a ‘classical guerrilla-type campaign’.
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In fact, the opposite was true. As Professor Bruce Hoffman pointed out after a visit to Iraq, what the US and their allies were facing there was anything but classical. Hoffman observed that the Iraq insurgency had no center of gravity, no clear leader or leadership, made no attempt to seize and actually hold territory, had no single, defined, or unifying ideology or identifiable organization. Iraq, Hoffman argued, was a ‘loose, ambiguous, and constantly shifting environment, [where] constellations of cells or collections of individuals gravitate toward one another to carry out armed attacks, exchange intelligence, trade weapons, or engage in joint training and then disperse at times never to operate together again.’
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What this structure, or lack of structure, brought the insurgents was a formidable ability to adapt and evolve. Networks of fighters were not only able to form but to change their tactics, adapting to unpredictable events and unforeseen opportunities with extraordinary rapidity. Their evolution was more the result of fragmentary connections between semi-autonomous parts or ‘localized tinkering’ than hierarchical command and control or intelligent design and was thus much better suited to fast-changing local circumstances than the ponderous and structured organizations, whether military or other, trying to eliminate them.
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The insurgency was adaptive, social, informal and dynamic. It was perfectly suited to and a perfect product of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Nothing illustrated this better than the rapid adoption of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) as a weapon of choice. That the IEDs became the preferred arm of the insurgents was, unless one believed the rhetoric about ‘loving death more than you love life’, hardly surprising. Insurgents soon worked out that IEDs, though once disdained as somehow unmanly, gave them a much better chance of causing casualties and of escaping unscathed than taking on heavily armed allied soldiers conventionally. The tactic thus combined the two qualities sought by all those who use political violence: capability, in that they were effective, and resilience, in that they did not expose those using them to excessive risk.
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But no one commander in chief took a decision to adopt the use of IEDs as a primary tactic. The process by which cells came together to build and place IEDs was chaotic and haphazard. This was one reason it was so hard to counter. If the militants themselves did not know where they were to meet or when an attack was to take place, it was inevitably impossible for those hunting them to focus the undoubted firepower they had at their disposal. During 2003 an average of less than a dozen US troops had been killed by roadside or other bombs detonated from a distance each month. In 2004 every single month saw at least twenty killed by such devices with significant spikes in such attacks (and resultant casualties) whenever a major conventional operation was underway.
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In Falluja particularly, any vision of a broader, united, strategically directed movement broke down entirely. The growing insurgency against the occupiers developed in tandem with growing civil conflict in which the Americans had only a background role. The city was rent by the firefights and score-settling that went with the ferocious and fast-moving manoeuvring for power between sheikhs and a variety of tribal and political factions all looking to exploit the collapse of Saddam’s regime. Among the contenders were the Association of Muslim Clerics, who represented the extremist neo-traditionalist ‘Salafist’ tendency closest to al-Qaeda’s or the Taliban’s style of Islam, and the Iraqi Islamic Party, who were the local branch of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. These two tendencies clashed repeatedly. What Hoffman had seen among insurgents attacking American forces was equally true of groups of Iraqis attacking one another. Tribal groups formed, launched an attack against their rivals and then dispersed with bewildering rapidity. Some tribes showed themselves more amenable to the occupiers, often looking for lucrative contracts for reconstruction work. Others shot, kidnapped or threatened anyone cooperating with the Americans or their allies. It was difficult to tell exactly who was in charge in Falluja, though it was evident that it was not the CPA or the American army. As it became obvious that Saddam’s capture had not ended the insurgency, Falluja began to shift to the forefront of American strategic thinking about Iraq. Dealing with Falluja, it was reasoned by Abizaid and others, would definitively end the resistance in the country. Months before the first battle for the city it was clear a major confrontation was inevitable.

The American commanders were not, however, able to choose the moment of that confrontation. A division of US Marines, better trained for lighter, faster expeditionary and irregular warfare than their regular army counterparts, had taken over responsibility for Anbar, the western province that was becoming the heart of the insurgency, in March 2004, and their commander on the ground, Major General James Mattis, a loud-talking but deep-thinking bachelor with a passion for military history, had drawn up a careful and long-term strategy based on sound counter-insurgency theory that he hoped would allow him to win over the city and its hinterland through a careful mixture of big, ‘kinetic’ stick and financial and developmental carrot.
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The strategy required a long period of preparation and a slow and steady approach once launched. Mattis’ plan was overtaken by events when, on March 31, 2004, four private contractors working for an American security company were ambushed in Falluja, lynched, and their bodies dragged through the streets, mutilated and then torched amid scenes of celebration. The ambush had been the work of insurgents, the lynching was a spontaneous reaction by locals led by day labourers waiting with their tools in the central marketplace to be hired.
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In previous conflicts, perhaps, the violent deaths of four civilians would have had little effect. But the ritualized violence in Falluja was filmed and uploaded on to the internet, and images of the unrecognizable remains of the contractors swinging from a bridge were broadcast by almost all major media outlets within hours. ‘The moment we saw it we knew this was going to be a problem. Everyone from the president down were all shouting “sort this out”,’ Andrew Rathmell, a senior British diplomat attached to the CPA in Baghdad, remembered. Bremer, the British and the CPA’s political officers were all initially against any precipitate action, Rathmell said, some arguing that they had ‘interlocutors’ in the city, others simply pushing for Falluja to be ‘isolated’.
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But no one in the US military, the Pentagon and the White House was interested in ‘half-measures’. Early plans that involved ‘more or less carpet-bombing Falluja’ were shelved after strenuous protests from Downing Street, the British Foreign Office and senior British officers in Baghdad – as well as some American officers on the ground in Iraq – and instead Mattis and his Marines were ordered to move immediately into the city, re-establish order, hunt down the culprits of the killing and expel the insurgents.
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It was a tall order. The Marines had ‘little idea how well organized, armed and determined the insurgents were’, and though they had set out with the intention of avoiding reducing the city to rubble they were eventually forced to call in intensive artillery bombardment of civilian neighbourhoods.
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The fighting was dirty, tough and extremely dangerous work, involving close-quarter combat of a rarely seen intensity. The insurgents, not unreasonably, concluded that the battle was ‘of great importance because the Americans wanted to make an exemplary punishment of all cities’, according to one senior leader, and resisted with determination.
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The Marines, surprised by the sophistication and defences of the 1,000 or so combatants who faced them, took significant casualties as they advanced very gradually into the city. After three weeks of inconclusive urban fighting the Marines were ordered to halt their advance. The American troops had suffered 26 killed and 90 wounded, an estimated 200 insurgents had died. So too had as many as 600 civilians, including at least 300 women and children.
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Though deeply unpopular with troops on the ground, the ceasefire appears to have been agreed by senior military commanders in Iraq, Bremer and the White House.
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Control of the city was ceded to a hastily created ‘Falluja Brigade’ commanded by a former general of Saddam’s Republican Guard, and the Marines pulled out, having failed to fulfil any of their original objectives. This was described by coalition spokesmen as ‘handing over to Iraqi partners’. The ‘Falluja Brigade’ disintegrated a few weeks later, its 800 US-issued AK-47s soon in the hands of the insurgents.

Whatever the spin placed on the outcome, Falluja I was a victory for the insurgents.
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It had been a pitched battle, one of the very few that took place during the 9/11 Wars, and in strategic terms a major check for the occupying authorities. It inspired insurgents all over Iraq, provoking what one officer called ‘a jihad wildfire, spreading mosque to mosque from the Syrian border to Baghdad’.
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Hastily produced DVDs of the fighting, edited to mournful music and melodramatic soundtracks, flooded local markets. With saturation coverage of the fighting across the Islamic world, Falluja had become a household name, a byword for successful Arab and Islamic resistance against the ‘neo-imperialist crusading Americans and their Jewish manipulators’.
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It was equally clear to all parties that a second battle for the city was inevitable. Until that moment, Falluja was left more or less to its own devices, an unofficial ‘free capital’ of the growing Sunni insurgency.