Iraq: Urban Warfare: 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--U.S. troops bypassed Iraqi cities on their way to Baghdad and didn't even pass through Sunni-dominated Fallujah--it has allowed the insurgency to fester. The Marines came to the Euphrates River town last month hoping to show a kinder face to residents than they had experienced at the hands of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. But after the slaughter of four American contractors in Fallujah early this month, U.S. commanders decided to reclaim the city. Last Monday about 1,500 Marines of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and some Army special forces--along with 2,000 Iraqi security troops and about 50 U.S.-trained Iraqi commandos--began debriding Fallujah of its guerrillas as part of Operation Vigilant Resolve. In the first five days of fighting alone, as many as 300 civilians died in block-to-block combat, according to doctors at Fallujah's main hospital. "It's 17th century tactics," says Staff Sergeant Michael Ventrone, a Marine inside Fallujah. "It's under siege."

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.