How To Squeeze A City

The place that corporal Mike Baccellieri and 20 other U.S. Marines were calling home in Fallujah bears witness to the brutality of the fight they are waging. Empty brass casings, cigarette cartons and ammunition boxes lay strewn about the floor of the commandeered house. The Marines were essentially pinned down inside the building for several days last week while insurgents peppered it with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). Whenever U.S. attack helicopters swooped in to fire rockets into the city, they were greeted with gunfire. Marines on the ground spotted the muzzle flashes and called in bombs directed at the shooters. "This big fight had to happen at some point," said Baccellieri, 23, from Portland, Ore., as he leaned against a wall of the house during a lull in the fighting. "Let's get it over with, so we can start rebuilding the place and get out of here."

It may take some time. What unfolded in Fallujah last week is exactly the kind of war the U.S. managed to avoid in toppling Saddam Hussein. While America's strategy worked well at the time

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The Marines have been following a standard script for pacifying a city. First they encircled Fallujah to trap the insurgents inside and prevent reinforcements from coming to their aid. The cordon around Fallujah is an estimated three miles long by two miles across. Supplies of food and medicine are permitted in, and women, children and old men are allowed to flee on foot. A 7 p.m.--to--6 a.m. curfew forces civilians into their houses at night, when the U.S. military, with its night-vision devices, prefers to fight. Leaflets warn residents to gather in a single room if Marines enter their homes.

At first, the going was slow. By Tuesday, Marines entered the city but were stuck in the industrialized north and a few other pockets just inside the cordon. Help from the Iraqi security forces turned out to be minimal: following payday last week, most of them fled. That forced Marines to man the cordon, reducing the number available to scour Fallujah.

But as the Marines penetrate deeper into the city, they have been adopting a divide-and-conquer strategy. "You slice the city like a pie," says Bernard Trainor, a retired Marine lieutenant general. Each neighborhood-size slice is assigned to a Marine unit, whose members work to glean intelligence from pro-U.S. residents about the whereabouts of the insurgents on their "blacklists." The Marines are also carrying photographs of those who desecrated the bodies of the U.S. contractors and are paying informants for intelligence. A telephone hot line has been established for locals to rat out the location of the insurgents.

In their assaults, the U.S. troops are relying as much as possible on arms with thread-the-needle accuracy: rifles and tanks backed up by AH-1 Cobra helicopter gunships and precision-guided bombs. "We want to get the guys we are after," says 2nd Lieut. James Vanzant. "We don't want to go in there with guns blazing." But the tenacity of the insurgents — Pentagon officials estimate they number in the hundreds — has surprised many Marines. They have reported seeing insurgents pop up out of the rubble left from 500-lb. bombs and resume firing at U.S. troops. Armed with AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars, the insurgents have also detonated remote-controlled gasoline bombs, sending massive fireballs hundreds of feet into the nighttime sky. Marines in Fallujah have found belts packed with a blend of explosives and lead fishing weights — the weapon of choice for suicide bombers.

For the Marines and the thousands of civilians trapped in Fallujah, a town of 300,000, it's a harrowing war. Small groups of Marines serve as bait, heading into danger by crossing streets or scampering over rooftops. Their goal is to draw fire from insurgents, betraying guerrilla positions to U.S. tanks and missiles lurking nearby. Cobra gunships have repeatedly rocketed groups of guerrillas, while the insurgents lob mortar shells and rockets at the Marine command post on the northern edge of town. The crackle of machine guns and muffled booms of mortars filled the corpse-littered streets with smoke. Four Marines were confirmed killed by the weekend. Iraqi casualties were heavy: locals said hundreds of civilians have been killed, though the U.S. says most of the dead are insurgents. On Wednesday, a U.S. air strike killed 40 people at the Abdel-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque, according to the Islamic Clerics Group located next to it, but Marine officers said only insurgents had been killed. The dead were buried in a soccer field, because Fallujah's cemeteries are all located outside the cordon.

City combat blunts the Marines' chief advantages: speed and awareness of what is ahead. Buildings create vast "dead spaces" where the enemy can hide. The cityscape hinders communications and prevents anything that flies low, like helicopters, spy drones and warplanes, from assisting friendly forces on the ground for very long. Life-and-death decisions must be made instantly: 90% of the targets are less than 50 yds. away and seen for only seconds. "When they start zinging RPGs in here, you can't really do anything about it," says Staff Sergeant Mike Conran. "It's really just dumb luck if you get hit."

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