Looking Out on Hostile Territory
Why the Iraqi city the Americans conquered
a year ago is still a threat

Chris Allbritton
Time
14 Nov 2005

The members of Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines, are creeping through the mean streets of Iraq's meanest town when their mission comes in. Intelligence officers at the Marines' headquarters at Firm Base One, at the edge of Fallujah, have zeroed in on an insurgent: a local teacher named Taufiq Latif Saleh, suspected of being the leader of a 10-person bombmaking cell. Fox Company hits two "dry" houses before they find Saleh, a burly, bearded man in a grimy dishdasha. "I am a teacher! I am a teacher!" he protests as the Marines march him out into the courtyard, bind his hands with plastic ties and blindfold him. The Marines order his four young sons to kneel and face the wall as punishment for cracking wise when the troops entered the house. As Saleh is bundled into a waiting truck and taken to a detention facility, Lance Corporal John Hammar, 20, spots the man's daughter in tears and sighs in frustration. "Little kids are crying," he says. "I'm the bad guy now."

For the Americans charged with maintaining order in this roiling, ruined city in western Iraq, it's too late to make friends. One year ago, the Marines launched an assault to take back Fallujah from insurgents, including some loyal to al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, who had overrun the city and used it as a base for spreading mayhem throughout Iraq. A week of house-by-house fighting left hundreds of insurgents dead--and saddled U.S. forces and the Iraqi government with the task of rebuilding a battered city and persuading 210,000 uneasy locals to return home. Some military analysts hoped Fallujah would be where the U.S. could apply the "oil spot" strategy of counterinsurgency, with the aim to spread stability by clearing and securing individual cities and improving the lives of their citizens.

But like much else about the war in Iraq, Fallujah hasn't turned out as the U.S. had hoped. In many respects, the city reflects less the progress of the U.S. enterprise than its troubles. The city's reconstruction has been slowed by a lack of coordination among the military, U.S. aid agencies and the Iraqi government. U.S. officers on the ground say they have denied terrorists a base in Fallujah. But across Iraq, the insurgency hasn't been curbed. October was the fourth deadliest month for U.S. troops since they invaded Iraq in March 2003, and last week 27 more Americans died in insurgent attacks, many of them in Sunni-dominated Anbar province, which includes Fallujah. But Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi security forces aren't ready to assume the burden of imposing order in violent Sunni areas. While the city isn't an outright failure, a military official says the hope that Fallujah could soon serve as a model for U.S. success now looks like "perhaps the result of overzealous expectation."

The landscape of Fallujah today isn't encouraging. Some rebuilding is taking place, and three-quarters of the houses have been reconnected to the electrical grid. But neighborhoods in the northeast and southeast--the two main entry points for last year's invasion--are filled with rubble piles and buildings whose top stories have been blasted off. For every reconstruction project, there is a pile of cinder blocks where a house used to be. The military has closed the city to the outside world, allowing people in only after they show ID cards that they are residents of Fallujah. The Marines man five entry checkpoints, turning away anyone who can't provide proper credentials or who seems suspicious. "Obviously, it's not foolproof," says Captain Chad Walton, spokesman for the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines. "But it's way better than it was."

That may be true, but the Marines acknowledge that they are operating in largely hostile territory. "This place is definitely not safe," says Hammar. "I wouldn't let my sister walk here, ever." When the Marines of Fox Company set out for a night patrol, supporters of the insurgency announce the Americans' movements through the loudspeakers of city mosques. Although direct engagement with the insurgents is rare, the Marines face the constant threat of mortars, car bombs, suicide attacks and ever more sophisticated improvised explosive devices. When the Marines are on patrol, insurgents take potshots and then hide before the Americans can shoot back. They test the troops by seeing how close they can drive to a patrol before the Marines open fire. Lately, troops say, insurgents have begun using a technique called pigeon flipping: while on patrol, the Marines have noticed flocks of pigeons circling above them, leading them to conclude that supporters of the insurgents have somehow trained the birds to signal when troops are in the area. "If it's a game of cat and mouse," says Corporal Richard Bass, "then who's the mouse?"

Marine officers say they aren't surprised by the insurgents' resilience. "I know this counterinsurgency is frustrating," Major Dan Williams tells members of Fox Company after another fruitless day of chasing enemy fighters. "But you've almost had insurgency Darwinism. All the stupid ones are dead." The Marines aren't getting much help in their efforts to outsmart their adversaries. Residents who are reluctant to help the U.S. identify insurgents are equally unwilling to cooperate with the U.S.-trained Iraqi forces, whom some xenophobic Fallujis consider foreigners. The cops are public-order battalions from Baghdad, and the Iraqi army units are made up almost exclusively of Shi'ites from southern Iraq. While locals still refer to U.S. troops as occupiers, some think the Iraqi troops are worse. "When Iraqi soldiers get inside the city, they start frightening the people by attacking them and shooting in the air," says Um Muhammed, 44, a housewife. "The Iraqi army wants revenge on us."

That kind of paranoia is one reason the U.S. troop presence, while an irritant to many Iraqis, may be the only thing preventing a slide into a sectarian bloodbath. The Bush Administration hopes that increased Sunni political participation will help defuse the insurgency. But elections have proved an insufficient antidote to the violence, and the U.S. and Iraq's new leaders have given sullen Sunnis few tangible reasons to support them. Because of security concerns, the State Department has only one envoy and one staff member from the U.S. Agency for International Development for the whole of Anbar province. As a result, reconstruction money isn't being spent in insurgent-friendly places like Fallujah. Says an aid worker in Fallujah who asked not to be named: "It's frustrating that it's taken 30 months to get someone out in the most restive part of the country."

U.S. commanders say rebuilding places like Fallujah will happen only if the insurgency is contained. So don't expect U.S. troops to leave anytime soon. At a recent meeting, city council members pleaded with Lieut. Colonel Bill Mullen to let Fallujah police itself. But Mullen refused and demanded that council members stop turning a blind eye to insurgent activities. "If the security situation does not improve," Mullen said, "guess what? We're not going anywhere."

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Citation: Chris Allbritton, "Looking Out on Hostile Territory," Time, 14 Nov 2005
Original URL: http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1126748,00.html