BAGHDAD, 12 November 2004 — US forces backed by an air and artillery barrage launched a major attack yesterday into the southern half of Fallujah, trying to choke insurgents in a shrinking cordon. The military estimated 600 militants have been killed in the offensive but said success in the city won’t break Iraq’s insurgency.
The military said 18 Americans have been killed and 69 wounded in the Fallujah campaign along with five allied Iraqi soldiers killed and 34 wounded. With the Fallujah battle and increased attacks elsewhere, around 100 wounded Americans — more than twice the usual daily number — were flown to Landstuhl, Germany, the main US military hospital in Europe.
In northern Iraq, violence escalated dramatically in Mosul, the country’s third biggest city, amid a campaign of stepped-up attacks by insurgents aimed at diverting US-Iraqi forces from Fallujah.
Gunmen in Mosul attacked and overwhelmed several police stations and battled US and Iraqi troops around bridges across the Tigris River, the military said. A Kurdish official said some Mosul police were cooperating with the militants. A US military spokeswoman Capt. Angela Bowman said it could take “some time until we fully secure the city,” where a curfew was imposed a day earlier.
In the capital, a car bomb ripped through a crowded commercial street, killing 17 people, police said — the second deadly car bomb here in as many days. People pulled bodies and bloodied survivors from the rubble a dozen mangled vehicles burned after the blast went off on Saadoun Street, moments after a US patrol passed.
Since Monday, US and Iraqi troops have been fighting their way through the northern half of Fallujah, reaching the east-west highway that bisects the city and battling pockets of fighters trapped in the north while other insurgents fell back into the south.
After sunset yesterday, US soldiers and Marines launched their main assault across the central highway into Fallujah’s southern half after air and artillery barrages pummeled the sector throughout the day, the military said.
The militants in the sector appear to be trying desperately to break open an escape route through the US-Iraqi cordon closing off Fallujah’s southern edge, commanders said. Insurgent mortar fire and attacks have focused on bridges and roads out of the city more than on US troops descending from the north, they said.
Commanders say that since the offensive began, their seal around the city is tight and that militants still inside have little chance of escape. Some 15,000 US and Iraqi troops are involved in the cordon and the assault inside the city.
Military officials cautioned that the figure of 600 insurgents killed in the city was only a rough estimate. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, said yesterday that “hundreds and hundreds of insurgents” have been killed and captured.
Commanders said before the offensive that 1,200 to 3,000 fighters were believed holed up in the city. But the speed of the US advance has led some officers on the ground to conclude that many guerrillas abandoned the city before the attack so they could fight elsewhere.
Gen. Myers, speaking on NBC’s “Today” show, called the offensive “very, very successful.”
But he acknowledged that guerrillas will move their fight. “If anybody thinks that Fallujah is going to be the end of the insurgency in Iraq, that was never the objective, never our intention, and even never our hope.”
Maj. Gen. Richard Natonski, commander of the 1st Marine Division in Fallujah, said the operation was “ahead of schedule.”
“Today our forces are conducting deliberate clearing operations within the city, moving from house to house, building to building, looking for arms caches” and fighters, he said.
Two Marine Super Cobra attack helicopters were hit by ground fire and forced to land in separate incidents near Fallujah, the military said yesterday. The crews were not injured and were rescued.
Maj. Gen. Natonski announced the US and Iraqi military casualty figures. At the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, staff were expanding bed capacity as 102 wounded US service members were flown in yesterday — up from the usual 30 to 50 a day the US military hospital receives. A day earlier, 69 wounded were brought in.
Staff said they assumed most of the wounded were from Fallujah fighting, but did not know the exact number.
Maj. Gen. Natonski said he toured a house in Fallujah’s northern Jolan neighborhood where foreign hostages had been held and possibly killed by militants. Maj. Gen. Natonski described a small, windowless room with straw mats covered with blood on the floor. Also found were a computer and a wheelchair, likely used to move bound hostages, he said.
In one building, troops also discovered an Iraqi man chained to a wall, the military said yesterday. The man, who was shackled at the ankles and wrists, bruised and starving, told Marines he was a taxi driver abducted 10 days ago and that his captors had beat him with cables.
The assault into southern Fallujah follows a day of sometimes fierce firefights as troops tried to clear bands of gunmen in the north.
— Additional input from Associated Press
