BAGHDAD, 11 November 2004 — US and Iraqi forces appeared close to gaining full control of the rebel town of Fallujah after a second day of heavy fighting in which the US and its allies lost 10 men and claimed to have killed over 300 insurgents.
Moving from west, north and east of the city, the 6,500-strong US force backed by 2,000 Iraqi Special Forces, swept its way south toward the Euphrates to complete its control of the city.
By noon yesterday an Iraqi unit had captured a district of the city that had become a no-go area after the insurgents seized it last April. There, the Iraqis found what one officer described as “a torture and slaughter house”.
“It was here that many hostages were interrogated, tortured, and then had their heads chopped off,” he said.
It was not clear whether or not the captured buildings, including two mosques and a deserted shopping center had served as the headquarters of the Jordanian terror mastermind Abu-Mussab Al-Zarqawi who is alleged to be leading the non-Iraqi Arab fighters in Iraq.
But as Fallujah appeared to be falling to the US-Iraq force, insurgents appeared to be slipping out of the city to initiate attacks elsewhere.
Insurgents were reported to have attacked and engaged US troops and Iraqi Army and police units in half a dozen localities in the so-called Sunni Triangle, including Baqubah, Ramadi, Samarra, Haditha, Dura, and Balad. There were also bomb and suicide attacks in Baghdad, Karbala and Mosul.
In Baghdad, terrorists struck by kidnapping a cousin of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and two other of his relatives. Allawi, however, told the Arab television channel Al-Arabiya that he was determined to “clean Fallujah” which had become a running sore in Iraq’s body.
The terrorists called on Allawi to halt the Fallujah operations and release all Iraqi prisoners or risk having the hostages put to death in 48 hours
“It is like hell here,” a Fallujah resident said over a satellite telephone. “The Americans are moving with a sea of fire ahead of them.”
US commanders, however, said the operation, codenamed “Phantom Fury” was ahead of schedule, and that the coalition force was facing a much lighter resistance than expected.
They also said that large numbers of insurgents had surrendered while many others, including non-Iraqi fighters, had been captured.
In Baghdad, Charles Duleffer, head of the coalition’s weapons inspection team, escaped a car bomb attack that wounded two of his bodyguards.
The Fallujah insurgents appeared to have adopted the “melt away” tactic often used by guerrillas against superior forces in urban warfare.
The tactic would have some insurgents to hide their weapons and weave into the non-combatant population. At the same time the elite fighters slip out of the area of conflict to regroup and attack elsewhere.
Finally, some guerrillas allow themselves to be captured but pretend to be noncombatant civilians.
Allawi had estimated the number of insurgents in Fallujah at around 3,000. But most reports yesterday indicated that the number might have been closer to 1,500 with large numbers of insurgents having slipped out of the city before the assault started.
The number of civilians left in the city was also much smaller than the estimated 60,000.
US and Iraqi military spokesmen claimed that civilian casualties had been much lighter than feared.
