August 28, 2005

FALLUJAH, Iraq - Insurgents in Anbar province, the center of guerrilla resistance in Iraq, are fighting the U.S. military to a standstill.

After repeated major offensives in Fallujah and Ramadi, and after the loss of hundreds of soldiers and Marines in Anbar during the last two years - including 75 since June 1 - many U.S. officers and enlisted men have stopped talking about winning a military victory in Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland.

Instead, they are trying to hold on to a handful of population centers and hit smaller towns in a series of quick-strike operations designed to disrupt insurgent activities. The insurgency has made rebuilding Anbar's war-damaged cities into a daunting task.

"I don't think of this in terms of winning," said Col. Stephen Davis, who commands a task force of about 5,000 Marines in an area of 24,000 square miles in the western portion of Anbar.

Americans following the war from home are frustrated, he acknowledged.

"They want finality," Davis added. "They want a fight for the town and in the end the guy with the white hat wins."

That's unlikely in Anbar, Davis said. He expects the insurgency to last for years, hitting U.S. and Iraqi forces with quick ambushes, bombs and mines. Roadside bombs have hit vehicles Davis was riding in three times this year already.

"We understand counterinsurgency... . We paid for these lessons in blood in Vietnam," Davis said. "You'll get killed on a nice day when everything is quiet."

Most of Iraq is far quieter than Anbar. But Anbar is Iraq's largest province in area, and home to about a million members of the Sunni Arab minority that dominated the government under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. It is the strategic center of the country, and failure to secure it could thwart the Bush administration's hopes of helping to create a functioning Iraqi democracy.

Some military officials now frequently compare the fight in Anbar to the Vietnam War, saying that guerrilla fighters, who blend back into the population, are trying to break the will of the U.S. military - rather than defeat it outright - and to erode public support for the war back home.

"If it were just killing people that would win this, it'd be easy," said Marine Maj. Nicholas Visconti, 35, of Brookfield, Conn., who served in southern Iraq in 2003. "It's just like in Vietnam. They won a long, protracted fight that the American public did not have the stomach for... . Killing people is not the answer; rebuilding the cities is."

Military officials offered three primary reasons that guerrilla fighters have held and gained ground: the enemy's growing sophistication, insufficient numbers of U.S. troops, and the lack of trained and reliable Iraqi security forces.

The insurgents

The U.S. military in Anbar, officers and enlisted troops alike, described their enemy as intelligent and adaptive.

Officers in Ramadi said insurgents there had learned the times of their patrol shift changes. When one group of vehicles comes to relieve another, civilian traffic is pushed to the side of the road to allow the military to pass. Insurgents plan and use that opportunity, surrounded by other cars, to drop homemade bombs out their windows or through holes cut in the rear floor.

The insurgents have figured out by trial and error the different viewing ranges of the optics systems in American tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and humvees.

"They've mapped it out. They go into the road and try to draw fire to see what our range is, and then they make a note of it and start putting IEDs that far out," said Army Maj. Jason Pelletier, 32, of the 28th Infantry Division, referring to improvised explosive devices, the military's term for homemade bombs.

"It's that cat-and-mouse game. They do something, we react and they note our reaction," said Pelletier, of Milton, Vt.

Faced with the U.S. military's technological might, guerrilla fighters have relied on gathering intelligence and using cheap, effective devices to kill and maim.

Marines raided a home near their base in Hit and found three Sudanese insurgents with a crude map they had drawn of the American base, including notes detailing when patrols left the gate, whether they were on foot or in vehicles, and the numbers of Marines on the patrols. The three men also had $11,000 in cash in an area in which insurgents pay locals $50 to plant bombs in the road.

The guerrilla fighters in Hit have used small, yellow and pink, star-shaped Japanese alarm clocks - similar to those popular with little girls in the United States - as timers to detonate rocket launchers and mortar systems aimed at Marine positions.

Instead of referring to the enemy derisively as "terrorists" - as they used to - Marines and soldiers now give the insurgents a measure of respect by calling them "mujahideen," an Arabic term meaning "holy warrior" that became popular during the Afghan guerrilla campaign against the Soviet Union.

Insurgents attack about 77 times a day in Iraq. In the Ramadi area alone, which has about 400,000 people, there are eight to 10 attacks daily, according to the office of Col. John Gronski, 49, of Moosic, Pa., who commands the Army task force that's responsible for Ramadi.

The struggle to rebuild

Military commanders in Anbar hope to combat the insurgency through a multipronged strategy of political progress, reconstruction, and training Iraqi security forces.

However, there's been less political progress in Anbar than in Iraq's Kurdish north and Shiite Muslim south. The violence there has stymied progress in rebuilding towns destroyed in the fighting, and Iraqi forces are still a long way from being able to secure the province.

U.S. officials hope that a strong turnout in national elections in December will turn people away from violence. They expressed similar hopes before January's elections. However, while those elections were a success in many parts of the nation, in Anbar the turnout was less than 10 percent.

Fighting has badly damaged many towns and precluded widespread reconstruction efforts, but Marines in Fallujah are working to make that city a centerpiece of rebuilding. Fallujah residences sustained an estimated $225 million in damage in November during a U.S. assault aimed at clearing the city of insurgents, according to Marine Lt. Col. Jim Haldeman, who oversees the civil military operations center in Fallujah.

Homeowners have received 20 percent of that amount to rebuild homes and will get another 20 percent in the coming weeks, Haldeman said. Families are walking the streets once again, and shops have reopened. The sound of hammers is constant, and men line the streets mixing concrete and laying bricks out to dry.

Even so, of the 250,000 who lived there before the fighting, just 150,000 residents have returned. And the insurgency has come back to the area.

Ramadi, the provincial capital, had a functioning downtown corridor two years ago, where parents walked with children and ate lunch at tables outside kabob shops.

The wreckage from war

Today, the street is pocked with holes left by bombs intended for U.S. convoys, storefronts are ripped by shrapnel, bullet holes tattoo walls, buildings have been blown to rubble by U.S. missile strikes and insurgent mortar volleys, and roofs are caved in by U.S. bombing. At the main U.S. base in Ramadi, artillery booms every night, sending more shells to pound insurgent positions in and around the city.

Iraqis are still a long way from being able to provide their own security in Anbar. As with much of the province, Fallujah has no functioning police force. Police in Ramadi are confined to two heavily fortified stations, after insurgents destroyed or seriously damaged eight others.

The Iraqi national guard, heralded last year as the answer to local security, was dissolved because of incompetence and insurgent infiltration, as was the guard's predecessor, the civil defense corps.

The new Iraqi army has participated in all the Marines' recent sweeps in Anbar, in a limited way. While the Iraqi soldiers haven't thrown down their weapons and run, as they have in the past, many of them are still unable to operate without close U.S. supervision.

In northern Anbar, Marines have made a series of quick raids on such towns as Karabilah, Haditha and Haqlaniyah. But as soon as the Marines leave, typically after about a week of sweeping through houses, the insurgents filter back in and set up base again, military officials said.

"If you go to an area and you don't stay in that area, the insurgency will return to that area and intimidate the local population," said Lt. Col Lionel Urquhart, who commands the Third Battalion of the 25th Marine Regiment.

Urquhart said he did not have enough men to maintain a permanent presence in places such as Haditha.

"You're going to have this constant need to go back in and clean it up again... . We have to go back in and make it clear to everybody that the insurgency does not control this country," said Urquhart, 44, of Akron, Ohio. "Is that a good way of doing business? I'm not going to say that."

Since March, insurgents have killed or wounded more than a third of the men in the two companies in Urquhart's battalion that have been his main fighting forces for the last six months. Lima Company, with 156 men, has seen 22 killed in action and 31 wounded. Kilo Company, with about 150 men, has seen four killed and at least 50 wounded.

Many of the injuries have been serious: Only 47 of the 98 wounded men in Urquhart's battalion have returned to duty.

Down the Euphrates River from Urquhart, Army Sgt. First Class Tom Coffey commands a platoon from the Army's 28th Infantry Division along Ramadi's southern border. His men are hit by roadside bombs almost every day.

"There's no way I can control this area with the men I have," said Coffey, 37, of Burlington, Vt. "The reports are that the insurgents are using these southern control points because they're open. We can't keep them closed because I don't have the manpower."

How This Article Was Reported

Tom Lasseter of The Inquirer's foreign staff spent the first three weeks of August in Anbar province's Euphrates River Valley, embedded with Marine and Army units in Haqlaniyah, Haditha, Hit, Ramadi and Fallujah. He previously reported from the area in the summer and winter of 2003, early 2004, and, most recently, in November, during the U.S. offensive in Fallujah.