Doug Lorimer
According to the September 11 Washington Post, Colonel Peter Devlin, chief of intelligence for the US Marine Corps in Iraq, sent a secret report to the Pentagon on August 16 saying that the 30,000 US marines, soldiers and sailors deployed in Iraq's western Anbar province had been fought to a stalemate and lost political control of the province to anti-US "insurgents".
"Anbar", the Post noted, "is a key province". It includes the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, which along with Baghdad "pose the greatest challenge US forces have faced in Iraq". "It accounts for 30% of Iraq's land mass, encompassing the vast area from the capital to the borders of Syria and Jordan, including much of the area that has come to be known as the Sunni Triangle.
"The insurgency arguably began there with fighting in Fallujah not long after US troops arrived in April 2003, and fighting has since continued. Thirty-three US military personnel died there in August ..."
This was half the total number of US troops killed in Iraq in August. Of the 3000 US-led occupation troops who have died in Iraq since the US-British-Australian occupation began in March 2003, one-third of them have been killed in Anbar, which is inhabited by only 5% of Iraq's total population of 26 million.
The Post reported that a US Army officer who had seen Devlin's paper said it reported that there were no functioning central Iraqi government institutions in Anbar and that local governments were under the "control of the insurgents".
According to the Post, "Devlin's paper has been widely disseminated in military and intelligence circles. It is provoking intense debate over the key finding that in Anbar, the US effort to clear and hold major cities and the upper Euphrates valley has failed."
The Post article claimed that some marine officers view the report as "a cry for help from an area where fighting remains intense, yet which recently has been neglected by top commanders and Bush administration officials as they focus on bringing a sense of security to Baghdad. An army unit of Stryker light armored vehicles [and 3500 soldiers] that had been slated to replace another unit in Anbar was sent to reinforce operations in Baghdad, leaving commanders in the west scrambling to move around other troops to fill the gap."
The September 16 Washington Post reported that US Army General Peter Chiarelli, the commander of the US-led coalition forces in Iraq, told journalists that Devlin's analysis was "right on target". But "when asked for his reaction to the report's conclusion that another full US ground division — about 10,000 troops — is needed to achieve success in Anbar, Chiarelli stated: 'That's Pete's opinion.' Troop levels in Anbar are appropriate, he said, 'given conditions in Baghdad'."
The White House and the Pentagon have publicly disputed claims by civilian analysts that Washington has too few combat troops in Iraq to successfully defeat the anti-occupation resistance — described to the August 16 New York Times by an unnamed "senior" Pentagon official as having "more public support", and being "more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time".
However, since mid-July the Pentagon has significantly increased the size of its occupation force through indefinitely extending beyond the usual 12 months the length of many units' tours of duty. The September 13 Army Times reported that US troop numbers in Iraq had reached 147,000 — "a 16% increase over the number of troops reported by the Pentagon in late July, when it was around 127,000".
On September 18, General John Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, said that the US occupation would remain at this level well into next year, or possibly be further increased. "If it's necessary to do that because the military situation on the ground requires that, we'll do it", he told journalists.
The Inter Press Service news agency reported on September 13 from Fallujah, 50 kilometres west of Baghdad, that despite a massive US military assault in November 2004 that "destroyed 75% of Fallujah's infrastructure and killed at least 5000 of its residents", the Iraqi resistance has continued to mount attacks in the city on US-led forces.
"Fallujah remains under tight security", IPS reported, "with the US military using biometric identification, full body searches and bar-coded identification cards for residents to enter and leave their city. 'The Iraqi resistance has not stopped for a single day despite the huge US Army activities', a city police captain said, speaking on condition of anonymity."
On September 17, Reuters reported that "mortars and car bombs killed five in the city of Fallujah ... The US military called the mortar and car bomb attacks directed at a US military centre ... in Fallujah 'complex and coordinated'. The five killed there included two Iraqi police and one Iraqi soldier. No US casualties were reported." Later that day, the US military reported that a US sailor attached to the marines in Anbar had died of wounds "sustained by enemy action".