The Battle for Fallujah and Iraq

Nov. 29 issue - The once flawless green dome of Fallujah's Al Hadhra Mosque is riddled with bullet scars. Neighboring buildings have become scorched, crumbling stumps. About 150 local civilians, mostly haggard-looking men, took shelter there last week, having no safer place to stay in the ruined city. A young man joined the group, unnoticed by U.S. troops guarding the area. One of his hands was swathed in bloody bandages; he kept it hidden inside his checkered shirt as he whispered excitedly to a friend, loudly enough to be overheard by an Iraqi reporter in the crowd: "Five of us were martyred this afternoon." Everyone could see he was an insurgent—but no one told the Americans. The men at the mosque saw nothing to celebrate in the Americans' retaking of the city from terrorist leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi and his insurgent allies, who had ruled the city for the past seven months. "The resistance didn't destroy houses," said shopkeeper Mohammed Ouda, 36. "They didn't harm people."

That claim—absurd but evidently sincere—only underscores the impossibility of America's task. The truth is that Zarqawi and his partners in jihad have been responsible for many hundreds of civilian deaths in Iraq, including a horrific series of mosque bombings in Shiite areas, the August 2003 bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the videotaped beheadings of at least half a dozen Western hostages. One of many grisly discoveries made by U.S. forces in Fallujah last week was the mutilated corpse of a middle-aged woman tentatively identified as Margaret Hassan, 59, the longtime chief of Iraqi operations for the international relief group CARE. She was kidnapped in Baghdad on Oct. 19, and her captors subsequently issued three videotapes of her begging for her life and being abused by her captors. Last week the Arabic TV channel Al-Jazeera said it had received a tape of her apparently being put to death. The station said it would not air the footage for reasons of taste.

Arab broadcasters did air endless reruns of a different on-camera shooting. An embedded TV crew in Fallujah filmed the storming of a mosque by a squad of Marines on Nov. 13. Inside the mosque a Marine is heard shouting, "He's f---ing faking he's dead!" A prisoner, apparently wounded and disarmed, is lying on the floor. Another Marine agrees: "Yeah, he's breathing." "He's faking he's f---ing dead!" the first Marine repeats. An unnamed Marine raises his rifle and fires. "He's dead now," someone says. The shooter reportedly had been wounded in the face the day before, and a friend was killed by a bomb planted on an insurgent's corpse. The military is investigating the incident. That hasn't stopped many Arab viewers from passing quick judgment on the shooting, which they regard as only the latest case in a long history of U.S. abuses against Muslims.

For the insurgents, Iraq has become a war without rules, and yet the militants also score big propaganda victories every time Americans break their own codes of warfare. In the battle for Fallujah the insurgents feigned surrender, waving white flags to approach within killing range of U.S. Marines and Iraqi government forces. They positioned their fighters in mosques, medical centers and civilian neighborhoods. They booby-trapped their fallen comrades' corpses and shot at crews trying to collect the Muslim dead. Practically every taboo has been discarded. Women, children and international relief groups have become deliberate targets. Ambulances are used to smuggle weapons. Torture of hostages has become a public spectacle, with videos passed out like press kits to TV stations, and posted on the Internet when the Arabic channels balk at showing such atrocities.

The insurgents may not win many hearts and minds, but that's not the point. Their fighting force is based on a shamelessly cynical alliance between Qaeda-inspired religious fanatics and the remnants of Saddam Hussein's gang of enforcers. The jihadis have nothing but contempt for Iraq's Shiite majority, and their newfound Baathist friends share that attitude. Their allied forces are waging an extreme form of asymmetric warfare—the weak struggling against the mighty. Sympathizers insist the insurgents have no choice but to break the rules against the Americans' overwhelming firepower. The fighters' ideology, as far as they have one, derives from a doomsday vision known among Islamic experts as the Takfiri philosophy. Adherents consider themselves empowered to decide who is a good Muslim and to exterminate everyone else (the kafirs) in the name of creating a pure Islamic state.

The jihadis' grand strategy is to provoke a war between Islam and the West, as Al Qaeda's leaders have openly boasted. But the more immediate goal is to provoke overreactions like the killing at the mosque. To win, in short, they simply have to keep operating. Unconventional-warfare experts have a saying: when an army fights insurgents, it's like playing chess against an opponent who's playing poker. The Americans may have checkmated the resistance in Fallujah—but the incident at the mosque left the insurgents holding a full house.

The Americans desperately need Iraqi hearts and minds, but their efforts often seem futile. Since the war began, U.S. troops have tried to keep the number of civilian casualties as low as possible. The leading British medical journal, The Lancet, recently published a study that used interviews and extrapolations to estimate the total figure at 100,000 or more, mostly from aerial bombardment. Other statisticians have since dismissed the study's conclusions as unreliable and speculative. An activist group calling itself Iraq Body Count (iraqbodycount.org) has assembled a carefully documented tally of confirmed war deaths. According to the group's research, the killings of between 14,000 and 17,000 civilians have been reported since the conflict's start. Fewer than 4,000 of those deaths have taken place since the official end of major combat in May 2003.

But that's still a lot of innocent dead—far more than were killed, say, on September 11—and many Iraqis accuse the Americans of reckless disregard for civilian lives. A conspiracy-obsessed form of logic has taken over, and every bit of information is evidence of something sinister on the part of the foreign occupiers. Some Iraqis even accuse the Americans of having a "hidden hand" in the CARE director's death. Baghdad schoolteacher Mona Kareem, 47, suspects that the Americans orchestrated the murder as a way of both discrediting the insurgents and keeping the Iraqi people dependent on U.S. assistance. "Killing [Hassan] results in harming the reputation of the resistance and Iraqis in general," Kareem argues. "[It] makes all humanitarian organizations think twice before coming into the country, not to mention investment companies." The bottom line: "Less services and more unemployed people, and an open field for the Americans and Iraqi government to do whatever they want." Such a line of reasoning might leave Americans scratching their heads, but it seems utterly sensible to many Iraqis.

U.S. forces have no choice but to shrug off the craziness and soldier on. In a place like Fallujah, that's not always easy. The main battle was at an end last week, but the sounds of sniper fire and explosions continued to echo across the ruined neighborhoods throughout the day. Stray dogs feasted on the dead in the streets. A local cleric organized a team of volunteers to gather corpses for burial, but they quit after the first day. Too many of the bodies had been booby-trapped. In some ways, holding on to the city is a tougher order than taking it was. "You don't know what to expect," says Lance Cpl. Scott Green, 21, from Mashpee, Mass. "Anyone can pop up with a weapon." An insurgent group's standard objective is to cause ordinary people to lose faith in the authorities through insecurity and fear. Somehow the Americans need to bring normal life back to Fallujah. That's a long way from happening.