COMBAT
After Falluja, U.S. Troops Wage a New Battle Just as Important, and Just as Tough
By JOHN F. BURNS - NYT
CAMP KALSU, Iraq, Nov. 27 - As American commanders turn their concentration toward the area of sullen towns and villages that straddle the southern approaches to Baghdad, they face a battle that is in many ways as crucial to their hopes as Falluja has been. And they enter a battleground where loyalties to Saddam Hussein and the burning enmity for America are at least as intense.
Without a major success here, the battle for Falluja, 50 miles to the northwest, could come to be seen as a Pyrrhic victory, one that reduced much of the city to rubble, cost more than 50 American combat deaths and prompted many insurgents to move on and regroup for yet more chapters in an ever-lengthening war.
The first days of the new campaign suggest it may outstrip Falluja in the demands it will make on American patience and tactical skills.
Once again, marines are leading the fight here, with the best of Iraq's American-trained troops alongside them. But in this area, known for its ceaseless round of suicide bombings and ambushes, there will be no knockout blows with tanks and bombs. Rather, as Marine commanders emphasized when 5,000 troops began the offensive this week, success will be built raid by raid, arrest by arrest, until the latticework of rebel cells in virtually every village and town is weakened and the will to sustain the insurgency is broken.
Commanders expect the main offensive to last another week. But nobody is talking about quick victories, rather of the new raids setting the scene for more later on.
A chart of suspected rebels that was developed over months by American intelligence officers and Iraqi undercover agents, laid out like a genealogical table, measures 10 feet by 4 feet. Unrolled in the command center at this Marine base in the desert southeast of the town of Iskandariya, it lists hundreds of rebel leaders, financiers and fighters, grouped together by family, by tribe and by past links in Mr. Hussein's military, political and intelligence apparatus.
"Every day, we have to stay the course," said Col. Ron Johnson, 48, a native of Duxbury, Mass., who commands the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, whose operational area covers parts of three Iraqi provinces with a combined population of 1.2 million.
Like many American officers these days, the colonel makes no pretense, in the wake of the insurgents' crushing defeat in Falluja, and a series of raids in recent nights that have captured dozens of suspected "bad guys," as American soldiers call the insurgents, that the day when America can withdraw its troops is on the horizon. "We're in here for the long haul," he said.
Still, the mood among Marine officers is cautiously upbeat, and the belief, as put to reporters embedded for the offensive, is that the war here can still be won. The immediate objective is to deal a hard enough blow to the insurgents that plans can proceed for the election scheduled for Jan. 30, to choose an assembly that will appoint a provisional government and oversee the drafting of a constitution.
On its face, this area, the southernmost extension of the Sunni triangle, running about 60 miles south of Baghdad and about 80 miles across, with the Euphrates river to the west and the Tigris to the east, is about as unpromising a political terrain for those favoring elections as any region in Iraq.
About 60 percent of the population living here, in towns like Mahmudiya, Latifiya, Yusufiya, Iskandariya, Musayyib and Hilla, are Sunnis. The rest are Shiite, a group that accounts for about 60 percent of the Iraqi population and strongly favors the election as a way station to Shiite majority rule.
But the religious breakdown alone cannot explain the insurgency's intensity. Sunnis here were favored for decades by Mr. Hussein, who made the area immediately south of Baghdad into a strategic bedrock of his rule. Many of his Republican Guard units were based here and were locally recruited. Weapons research establishments like the vast Tuwaitha nuclear facility southeast of Baghdad were concentrated here. Many of the country's main munitions plants were here, too.
The American-led invasion 18 months ago destroyed those privileges, and left many local people unemployed. The disbanding of the Mr. Hussein's army made things worse. The insurgency spread rapidly in the months after Mr. Hussein was toppled, feeding off the combination of idled military skills, huge stockpiles of weapons and ammunition and Sunni resentments at the prospect of being politically usurped.
With a similar matrix of rebellion in Falluja, and with the two areas linked by desert roads, railways and canals, as well as the southward course of the Euphrates, the insurgency had a natural base in an arc of territory west and south of Baghdad.
Early on in American military planning, commanders knew that a campaign to wrest Falluja from the insurgents would necessitate an offensive here, but limitations of logistics, airpower and troops dictated the two offensives be staged sequentially. One disadvantage was that this gave the Falluja rebels a ready refuge, one that American generals sought to inhibit by asking Britain to move an 850-soldier battalion of the Black Watch north from Basra to a base just west of the Euphrates. From that base, the British troops have mounted operations across the river to the east seeking to intercept the shadowy transfers of weapons and fighters that Marine commanders call "rat runs."
Those efforts appear to have been only partly successful. Early in their new deployment, the Black Watch lost three soldiers killed when they crossed the river, set up a checkpoint, and were attacked by a suicide car bomber. Marine intelligence officers estimate that from 200 to 500 rebels from Falluja, many of them natives of the region south of Baghdad that is the focus of the new offensive, have returned in the past few weeks; some officers think those estimates are too low, as they also think official estimates of 1,200 insurgents killed in Falluja are too high.
Marine intelligence officers say there are 400 to 500 "core leaders" of the Sunni insurgency in the area, many of them ranking members of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party or senior officers in his military. Although they describe the insurgency as heavily decentralized, they have identified two new political groups that knit together these rebel leaders, one of them known as the Return or Restoration party. These men, they say, have made common cause in the insurgency with the numerous criminal gangs in the area, who also have much to lose in the new American push. The intelligence estimates say that insurgent attacks in the area are carried out by 2,000 to 6,000 rebels, many of them unemployed youths or criminals released from jail by Mr. Hussein in the fall before he was driven from power. In many cases, American officers say, captured men have told them that they were paid sums ranging from $20 to $200 to stage ambushes or plant explosives that are detonated by "part-time triggermen," many of them also paid. If correct, the estimates make for a startling contrast with the American estimates a year ago, when commanders said they believed that there were no more than 5,000 insurgents across the whole of Iraq.
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