FALLUJAH, Iraq, 5 May 2004 — Troops from the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps took up positions alongside US Marines on the volatile northern edge of this Sunni stronghold yesterday in line with a new security pact designed to end weeks of fighting.
Former Iraqi Army general Muhammad Latif escorted about three dozen soldiers into positions next to Marines at the railway station, which was rocked by heavy fighting last week. The move comes ahead of a possible US withdrawal from the city’s northern front, which includes the Jolan district, considered the den of local fighters.
The Marines have already pulled out of the city’s southern industrial zone, where they had their biggest toe-hold in Fallujah after launching an all-out invasion on April 5 following the brutal murder of four US contractors days earlier.
Latif, dressed in a gray suit, dismissed concerns about his role in the new security force, known as the Fallujah Brigade, and his past as a top officer in jailed dictator Saddam Hussein’s army.
“I am the Fallujah commander,” Latif said, answering his detractors in Washington who have questioned his track record and that of Gen. Jassim Muhammad Saleh, who is tapped to lead the brigade’s first battalion.
“Gen. Saleh is on my staff,” Latif said. Latif said he doubted any foreign fighters were left in the city, although the Marines have demanded the Fallujah Brigade hand over foreigners they blame for leading the fight against them last month that left hundreds of Iraqis dead.
Tracking down the foreigners was one of the main tasks given to the Fallujah Brigade when its formation was announced last week in a bid to avoid a resumption of US offensive operations, which were unilaterally suspended in mid-April after the fiercest fighting of the yearlong US-led occupation.
“There are no foreign fighters in Fallujah” Latif said. “Maybe there were some a month ago. Now there are none.” Fallujah Brigade members were also believed to be positioned in the city center. “It is very critical at this critical time to put Iraqi soldiers at the front and your soldiers behind,” Latif told Marine Capt. Jeff Stevenson, the senior US officer at the station.
Meanwhile, US soldiers set up a checkpoint again in front of their base in Najaf yesterday hours after a spokesman for wanted Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr warned that his militia would attack them. Clashes in the same area Monday killed five Iraqis and wounded 20 and a spokesman for Sadr said the violence was the result of the US presence, designed to cut the flow of weapons to the cleric’s Mehdi Army.
Three more fighters were killed yesterday at 7:00 a.m. (0300 GMT) by coalition troops who fired back when they were shot at near Najaf, a US military spokeswoman said. The US checkpoint reappeared at about 3:00 p.m. on the main road between Najaf and Kufa, a short distance away to the north.
In another development, the French cable television station Canal Plus will broadcast images, stolen in Iraq, of a US Army helicopter killing three Iraqis, one of them wounded, who do not appear to be posing any threat. The show “Merci pour l’Info” (Thanks for the News) obtained the footage, seen by an AFP correspondent, from what the network described as a “European working as a subcontractor for the US Army” who left Iraq two weeks ago.
US television network ABC aired the same images on Jan. 9, and the footage has been available on the Internet for several weeks.
The Canal Plus source claims to have hidden the tape — dated Dec. 1, 2003, and filmed at an unidentified location in Iraq — at the US base where he lived and worked.
A French lawyer and member of the International Federation for Human Rights, Patrick Baudouin, said that knowingly killing an enemy who is wounded constitutes a war crime under international law.
