Posted on 04/29/2004 4:15:58 AM PDT by Eurotwit
FALLUJAH, Iraq - Marines in Fallujah began packing up gear and loading heavy trucks Thursday, saying they had been ordered to leave the southern industrial zone that they have held for weeks and pull away from the city.
It was not immediately known if the move represented a withdrawal of Marines from their siege of the city or if other Marine forces were being rotated in to replace the withdrawing 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment.
Some of the Marines said they had orders to move to the nearby village of Garma.
U.S. forces delayed potentially dangerous joint Iraqi-American patrols in Fallujah after three days of fighting and pressure increased on the United States to prevent an escalation of violence in the besieged city.
Easing the prospect of an assault on Fallujah, a tentative agreement has been reached under which the United States would end its siege of Fallujah and withdraw Marines from around the city over several days, Los Angeles Times reporter Tony Perry told CNN on Thursday.
Perry, who is embedded the U.S. 1st Marine Division, told CNN four former Iraqi generals under Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had come forward and said that Iraq (news - web sites)'s army would be responsible for operations and security in the city. They were working out details of the deal in meetings with U.S. Marines on Thursday.
In violence throughout Iraq, a U.S. soldier was killed in a roadside bombing north of Baghdad, and a foreign civilian was shot to death in an attack on his car in the southern city of Basra. Three members of an Iraqi family were killed when a rocket hit a residential building in the northern city of Beiji.
U.S. troops at the main checkpoint in and out of Fallujah opened fire on a car, killing several Iraqis but there were differing accounts of the circumstances of the attacks.
Marine Capt. James Edge said a car screeched into the razorwire near the main Marine checkpoint into Fallujah and gunmen inside opened fire with assault rifles on the Americans. U.S. troops returned fire with a Humvee-mounted heavy machine gun, killing at least three men in the car, Edge said. A fourth person was wounded but it was not clear if he was in the car or a bystander, Edge said.
An AP reporter, however, saw U.S. soldiers opened fire on a pickup truck at the checkpoint, killing a seven-member family that was trying to flee the city. It was not clear if the accounts referred to separate incidents.
In the south, a U.S. base in the Shiite holy city of Najaf came under mortar fire Thursday in an attack that caused no casualties but showed increasing boldness from Shiite militiamen in the city. Militiamen also attacked a U.S. convoy passing through part of the city overnight, prompting an exchange that killed an Iraqi woman and wounded six people, hospital officials said.
The Fallujah violence, aired live on television screens with images of explosions and burning buildings, increased pressure on the United States to prevent a revival of the heavy bloodshed in Fallujah during the first two weeks of April.
"Violent military action by an occupying power against inhabitants of an occupied country will only make matters worse," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) warned. "It's definitely time, time now for those who prefer restraint and dialogue to make their voices heard."
Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council also called on the United States to stop attacks in Fallujah and said if the United States refused, his Iraqi Islamic Party would consider withdrawing from the council.
"We call on the American troops that are bombing Fallujah to stop immediately and withdraw outside of the city," Abdul-Hamid told al-Jazeera television. "Otherwise, we'll be forced ... to consider the subject of withdrawal."
On Wednesday, U.S. warplanes dropped 500-pound, laser-guided bombs on guerrilla targets as battles broke out in several parts of the city, including areas that had been relatively quiet.
One resident, Hassan al-Maadhidi, returned to Fallujah after fleeing earlier fighting and was distraught Thursday when he saw the destruction from fighting over the past three days.
"I returned yesterday to see houses destroyed, streets empty and shops bombarded," al-Maadhidi said, adding that he may flee the city again.
Witnesses reported at least 25 destroyed buildings. At least 10 people were injured in the fighting, hospital officials said Thursday. There were no reports of guerrilla casualties although insurgents often do not evacuate their casualties to hospitals, fearing that they could be arrested. Hospital officials said ambulances could not reach the areas where many of the battles took place.
In Baghdad, U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said the U.S. strikes were limited and aimed at gunmen who were attacking Americans.
"Even though it may not look like it, there is still a determined aspiration on the part of the coalition to maintain a cease-fire and solve the situation in Fallujah by peaceful means," he said.
The U.S. military announced that joint U.S.-Iraqi patrols into Fallujah would be delayed by a day, to Friday. The patrols were part of an effort to reduce tensions and stop Marine assault of the city.
Marine Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne said that when the patrols begin "we expect hostile fire. There is a cadre of bad guys that are still in Fallujah and anytime people go into Fallujah they get fired at."
In a report explaining the city's fierce resistance to the U.S. occupation, Middle East expert Anthony Cordesman said Fallujah had seen a rise in Islamic extremism even before the war.
Fallujah was a key bastion of support for Saddam Hussein's rule and the loss of vast subsidies it enjoyed under Saddam turned it into a hotbed of resistance, said Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"Such areas had never had any clear economic reason for their privileges and promised to be the permanent losers" in a change in regime, it said.
The death in the roadside bombing Thursday raised to 117 the number of U.S. servicemembers killed in April, the bloodiest month for U.S. forces in Iraq. At least 725 U.S. troops have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003. Up to 1,200 Iraqis also have been killed this month.
A volley of seven mortar rounds Thursday hit in and around the U.S. base in the holy city of Najaf, where anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is based. The attack caused no damage or casualties, but it showed increasing boldness by militiamen. Attackers regularly mortar the camp — held by the Spanish until U.S. troops moved in this week — at night, but rarely during the day.
Apparently it hasn't.
The plan to bring in Iraqi generals is over a year old and probably should have been implemented when our military planners said it was the right thing to do. Let the military run military operations and keep the diplomats at champagne and brie soirees at the U.N.
Only because people grab on to every bit of media speculation like its gospel truth chiseled by our military leadership in granite. Those of us on FreeRepublic, who ought to know better than to bite off on every media report, seem to be the first to take the bait and immediately declare the President and anyone above the rank of Private, a wishy-washy and ignorant sissy.
We are controlling the situation in Fallujah. The adults are in charge. They know what they are doing. Believe it or not, they even know more than media reporters and chicken littles on FR. So if we could all relax just a little, they will continue doing their jobs, and we can go back to sipping coffee and picking apart the idioicy coming out of the press...not our military.
Maybe a Freeper adage could be coined and that would be, "Don't post a reply until you have read the first 50 replies".
It's now being reported that the initial AP report is bogus.
Absolutely correct. I don't know why hysteria breaks out here at every garbled media rumor.
And we're not done yet.
"Does that mean we should all just shut up and trust the people who are running things to do the "right thing"?"
No, but the very fact that you don't have the big picture means you ought to temper your criticism because it is based on guessing. Not fact. So how useful is it, other then to vent. Which isn't very useful.
"perfectly reasonable to gripe that by sitting on our thumbs in Fallujah we're appearing weak and indecisive to our enemies"
Sure, if that's what we are doing. But we aren't. It all goes back to the fact that we don't all have the big picture.
"It's embarrassing to see us crowing "Look! See! We're negotiating with the terrorists, and, um, we didn't hurt the Mosque, so please don't hate us!."
The only people doing that seem to be on FreeRepublic. Even Powell yesterday described why we have every justification to destroy the mosques we've destroyed.
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