Doug Lorimer
While 5000 US troops, using armour, artillery and warplanes, continued a three-week battle with Iraqi resistance fighters for control of the city of Tel Afar, 420 kilometres north-west of Baghdad, officials of Washington's puppet Iraqi government told reporters that anti-occupation insurgents had taken control of the town of Qaim, 320km west of Baghdad.
The September 5 English-language online edition of the Baghdad Azzaman daily reported that most of Tel Afar's "300,000 people are said to have fled and are currently living in squalor conditions, some of them in the open desert". The report added that it was "difficult to give a clear picture of what exactly goes on in the besieged city as US troops forbid reporters from entering it. But residents who fled Tel Affar in the past two days speak of horrible scenes resulting from random shelling and street fighting."
After encircling Tel Afar in mid-August, the US military began sustained artillery shelling and aerial bombardment of the predominately Turkomen-inhabited city on August 17, despite warnings against this from Iraqi parliamentary speaker Hajim al Hassani.
The August 21 Azzaman reported: "In interviews with the Azzaman correspondent in Tel Affar, the residents described the US shelling of their city 'as fires of hell'."
While US and Iraqi puppet government officials claimed there were non-Iraqi fighters linked to al Qaeda in Tel Afar, Associated Press reported on September 6 that fleeing residents denied this. "We did not see any strangers like Saudis, Syrians or others", Hazem Mohammed Ali, deputy chairperson of a Turkomen association in Tel Afar, told AP.
The September 5 Azzaman reported, "As the battles raged in Tel Affar, the insurgents took control of Qaim, which US troops were supposed to have 'pacified' a few weeks ago". AP reported the next day that "Iraqi officials said al-Qaeda-linked foreign fighters had taken control of large areas of the strategic city on the Syrian border after weeks of fighting between an Iraqi tribe that supports the insurgents and one that opposes them".
Qaim, close to the Syrian border, lies at the far western end of Iraq's largest province, Anbar, which also includes the city of Fallujah, 55km west of Baghdad.
The US Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRN) news agency reported on August 25 that after "repeated major combat offensives in Fallujah and Ramadi, and after losing hundreds of soldiers and Marines in Anbar during the past two years — including 75 since June 1 — many American officers and enlisted men assigned to Anbar have stopped talking about winning a military victory in Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland. Instead, they're 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 temporarily."
KRN correspondent Tom Lasseter reported that US 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 American 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", US Marine Major Nicholas Visconti told Lasseter. "But look at Vietnam. We killed millions, and they kept coming. It's a war of attrition ... It's just like in Vietnam. They won a long, protracted fight that the American public did not have the stomach for."
Reporting from Fallujah, Lasseter wrote: "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 'mujahedeen', an Arabic term meaning 'holy warrior'."
In an August 28 report from Ramadi, the Anbar provincial capital, Lasseter wrote: "In the cities where US forces have set up bases — such as Ramadi and Fallujah — the fighting has destroyed much of the infrastructure but failed to completely secure the areas. In smaller towns, American forces launch repeated raids to clear the streets of insurgents only to see them return as soon as the Marines and soldiers are gone.
"Three weeks of reporting alongside American troops in Anbar's main centers of guerrilla resistance found that US forces are failing to make headway, and some commanders fear that much of the military effort is wasted ...
"In Fallujah, a city that Marines and soldiers retook from insurgents last November in the heaviest urban combat since Vietnam, fighters have begun to return ... 'As we all know, we have mujahedeen operating in small squads throughout the city', Marine Sgt. Manuel Franquez said before leading a patrol in Fallujah last week ...
"A series of checkpoints locked down the city after November's assault. Military officials called it the safest city in Iraq. Now the area is attacked four to nine times each day, including by roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and sniper fire. Car bombs average two a week."
From Green Left Weekly, September 14, 2005.
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