Insurgent Alliance Fraying In Fallujah

NATO AIR

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Jun 25, 2004
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USS Abraham Lincoln
good news for the marines and iraqi forces who will be taking the city in november/december

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6229305/

Insurgent alliance fraying in Fallujah
Locals, fearing invasion, turn against foreign Arabs

Bilal Hussein / AP
Fallujah residents search through the rubble of a building Tuesday after a U.S. air strike.
By Karl Vick

Updated: 12:45 a.m. ET Oct. 13, 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Local insurgents in the city of Fallujah are turning against the foreign fighters who have been their allies in the rebellion that has held the U.S. military at bay in parts of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, according to Fallujah residents, insurgent leaders and Iraqi and U.S. officials.

Relations are deteriorating as local fighters negotiate to avoid a U.S.-led military offensive against Fallujah, while foreign fighters press to attack Americans and their Iraqi supporters. The disputes have spilled over into harsh words and sporadic violence, with Fallujans killing at least five foreign Arabs in recent weeks, according to witnesses.

"If the Arabs will not leave willingly, we will make them leave by force," said Jamal Adnan, a taxi driver who left his house in Fallujah's Shurta neighborhood a month ago after the house next door was bombed by U.S. aircraft targeting foreign insurgents.

Located 35 miles west of Baghdad in Iraq's Sunni Triangle, Fallujah has been outside the control of Iraqi authorities and U.S. military forces since April, when a siege by U.S. Marines was lifted and Iraqi security forces were given responsibility for the city's security. Local and foreign insurgents gradually gained control, and Iraqi and U.S. officials say Fallujah has become a principal source of instability in the country.

U.S. and Iraqi authorities together have insisted that if Fallujah is to avoid an all-out assault aimed at regaining control of the city, foreign fighters must be ejected. Several local leaders of the insurgency say they, too, want to expel the foreigners, whom they scorn as terrorists. They heap particular contempt on Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose Monotheism and Jihad group has asserted responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks across Iraq, including videotaped beheadings.

"He is mentally deranged, has distorted the image of the resistance and defamed it. I believe his end is near," Abu Abdalla Dulaimy, military commander of the First Army of Mohammad, said recently.

One of the foreign guerrillas killed by local fighters was Abu Abdallah Suri, a Syrian and a prominent member of Zarqawi's group, whose body was discovered Sunday. Suri was shot in the head and chest while being chased by a carload of tribesmen, according to a security guard who said he witnessed the killing.

Denied shelter
Residents say foreign fighters recently have taken to gathering in Fallujah's grimy commercial district after being denied shelter in residential neighborhoods because their presence so often attracts U.S. warplanes. The airstrikes and the turmoil in the streets have spurred perhaps half of the city's 300,000 residents to flee, residents and officials said.

U.S. aircraft hit Fallujah twice on Tuesday. An airstrike just after midnight destroyed the city's best-known restaurant, a kebab house that a military statement said was used as an arms depot, citing "numerous secondary explosions." A second strike at 4 a.m. destroyed "a known terrorist safe house" in the northeast of the city, the statement said.

Adnan, the taxi driver who moved his panicked wife and four children to another town, said attitudes toward the foreign fighters have changed dramatically since they poured into Fallujah after the Marines' siege ended in April. "We were deceived by them," he said. "We welcomed them first because we thought they came to support us, but now everything is clear."

Among the tensions dividing the locals and the foreigners is religion. People in Fallujah, known as the city of mosques, have chafed at the stern brand of Islam that the newcomers brought with them. The non-Iraqi Arabs berated women who did not cover themselves head-to-toe in black -- very rare in Iraq -- and violently opposed local customs rooted in the town's more mystical religious tradition. One Fallujah man killed a Kuwaiti who said he could not pray at the grave of an ancestor.

Residents said the overwhelming majority of Fallujah's people also have been repulsed by the atrocities that Zarqawi and other extremists have made commonplace in Iraq. The foreign militants are thought to produce the car bombs that now explode around Iraq several times a day, and Zarqawi's organization has asserted responsibility for the slayings of several Westerners, some of which were shown in videos posted on the Internet.

'Please do not mix the cards'
There was another digital display of a beheading on Tuesday. The victim apparently was a Shiite Muslim Arab, and the group that said it posted the video identified itself as the Ansar al-Sunna Army.

Abu Barra, commander of a group of native insurgents called the Allahu Akbar Battalions, said: "Please do not mix the cards. There is an Iraqi resistance, a genuine resistance, and there are other groups trying to settle accounts. There is also terror targeting Iraqis.

President Bush, he said, "knows that and so does the government, but they purposely group all three under the tag of 'terrorism.' "

Barra and other insurgent leaders said the "genuine resistance" is a disciplined force that restricts its attacks to military targets, chiefly U.S. forces. It is motivated, they say, by Iraqi nationalism and humiliation over what it regards as a foreign occupation.

"The others," Barra said, "are Arab Salafis who claim that any Iraqi or Muslim not willing to carry arms is an infidel. They are the crux of our ailment. Most of them are Saudis, Syrians" and North Africans. Salafism is a strain of Islam that seeks to restore the faith to the way it was in the days of the prophet Muhammad, 14 centuries ago.

"It is the Zarqawis and his Salafi group who are going to lead Fallujah, Samarra, Baqubah, Mosul and even some parts of Baghdad to disaster and death," Barra said.

Such worries are encouraged by U.S. and Iraqi officials, who together have mounted offensives in recent weeks to reclaim areas held by insurgents. U.S. forces have led battles to take Najaf, Tall Afar, Samarra and, last week, a string of towns southwest of Baghdad. The operations are intended to establish government control over the entire country before nationwide elections promised for January.

But they also serve, officials say, as a psychological lever on Fallujah, long considered the toughest insurgent outpost.

"The pressure is certainly going up, both as a result of our airstrikes and as a result of their seeing Najaf, Tall Afar, Samarra giving a sense this whole thing is serious," a senior U.S. official in Baghdad said. "There's a lot of fear in Fallujah."

Many residents say the same. A delegation of six prominent Fallujans began negotiating with Iraq's interim government late last month. But senior government officials said it was only after the Oct. 1 assault on Samarra that the Fallujah delegation approached the task with new zeal.

The proposal the delegation took back to Fallujah calls for surrendering control of the city to the Iraqi National Guard. U.S. forces would remain outside the city unless the lightly armed government forces were attacked.

Blamed for cease-fire violation
But first, all foreign fighters must leave the city, and the foreigners are adamantly and publicly opposed to the plan. Their representative voted against it in a meeting last week of the city's ruling mujaheddin shura, or council of holy warriors, which supported the peace proposal, 10 to 2. The local insurgent who cast the other negative vote was later persuaded to change his mind, residents say.

Foreign fighters already are blamed for violating a cease-fire in April and prompting a Marine offensive that killed hundreds. Dulaimy said a Syrian was slain by local insurgents "after he fired on American forces during the last truce." In remarks broadcast from one of the city's main mosques on Thursday, an insurgent negotiator, Khalid Hamoud Jumaili, said a city of several hundred thousand should not be sacrificed for a handful of foreign fighters.

Meanwhile, U.S. forces kept up military pressure Tuesday in several nearby cities. Marines raided eight mosques allegedly used as armed bases in Ramadi, a provincial capital about 25 miles west of Fallujah, and called in airstrikes in the town of Hit, about 60 miles to the northwest.

"I think there is unquestionably a fissure and there are probably several different splits based on different groups," said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his remarks were not cleared by Washington. But "whether any of the townspeople have enough force to make this fissure into something that changes the complexion of things" remains to be seen, the official said.

The assault on Samarra was mounted after a more unified local establishment headed by tribal leaders failed in a similar bid to eject a far smaller band of insurgents and foreign fighters than are holding Fallujah, the official noted.

Maki Nazzal, a Fallujah native who travels into the city frequently as an aid worker, said substantial support remains for the foreigners, especially given the number of civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes.

"Not all the people in Fallujah want these people to leave," Nazzal said. "They always have the explanation of Americans bringing people from Spain, Salvador, Poland and over the world to help them and why can't our brothers help us?"

Some foreign fighters already have left, at least for now. The fighting Tuesday in Hit erupted as Marines pursued insurgents who had recently arrived in the city from Fallujah, residents said.

"There are Arab fighters and Iraqis too," said Omar Jabbawi, 23, an engineering student at Anbar University. "They are supplied with modern weapons which even the modern army didn't have. They killed some of the people the moment they came, saying that they were spies for the Americans."

The blend of insurgents held the town, some patrolling a street of shuttered stores, others praying on the sidewalk.

"Most of the people of the city knew that after Fallujah, the fighters will come to Hit because it is an open city and has many wide woods in which maneuvering is easy," said Abeer Fadhill, 32, a traffic policeman.

A woman in Hit said one fighter had said they had come to liberate Hit as they had Fallujah.

"We don't want to be another Fallujah," said the woman, 45, who gave her name as Umm Hussein. "Ramadan is coming, and we don't have any will to lose a father, a son, a relative or even a friend. Let them leave in peace and fight in a desert away from houses and people."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company
 
NATO AIR said:
good news for the marines and iraqi forces who will be taking the city in november/december

Looks like it might be decision time for some people---perhaps they could "unmix the cards" and decide whose side they are on. I like the word "Arabian Fighters". Think I'll use it for awhile to differentiate them from Iraqis.
 
dilloduck said:
Looks like it might be decision time for some people---perhaps they could "unmix the cards" and decide whose side they are on. I like the word "Arabian Fighters". Think I'll use it for awhile to differentiate them from Iraqis.

"arabian fighters" i concur dilloduck
 
NATO AIR said:
"arabian fighters" i concur dilloduck
The Arbian fighters are the hard core elements, As in Belsan, Russia, Afganistan, Somolia, Cosovo, Chechneya. The have been accredited with doing the worst acts.
 
It might be good to imply a distinction in our rhetoric, while simultaneously making it clear neither groups' actions are acceptable. Stress that terrorists will be destroyed but insurgent Iraqis who want to participate in Iraqi democracy must disarm and surrender.

Either way, now is the time to squeeze them even harder, get the 'insurgents' to rat the Salafists out, and generally breed more dissension amongst them.
 
Will ISIS make a comeback?...
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Freed Fallujah Not Leveled, as Iraqi Army Learns Lesson of Ramadi
Jul 01, 2016 | The long-awaited liberation of Fallujah this week came with minimal damage to the city's infrastructure, Iraqi officials claim, unlike the disastrous campaign to free Ramadi from ISIS, in which bomb damage and civilian casualties amounted to a Pyrrhic victory.
Backed by U.S. air power -- which on Wednesday took out a convoy of 250 fleeing ISIS fighters on the outskirts of the city -- government forces carefully recaptured Fallujah over a five-week period. Photos obtained by FoxNews.com show damage to the city, but nothing like the destruction seen in last December's retaking of Ramadi, some 30 miles west. "The city is damaged, but nothing like [others where ISIS has been dislodged]," said an Iraqi with direct knowledge of the Fallujah campaign. "This was a well-planned operation, led by [Iraq's U.S.-trained] Golden Division."

Grateful residents are eager to move back into their city to rebuild it, as well as their lives. "Many sacrifices have been made by the army, police and the crowd," said Mojtahid Alanbar, a Fallujah resident who survived the two-year occupation by ISIS. "If the decision was mine I would have made a statue for every fighter in the [battle] against terrorism. These heroes are examples of courage when faced with Da'esh." Most of the city's population, which once numbered more than 300,000, is being housed in desert camps outside its borders while the army clears streets and buildings of mines and booby traps. That work could only begin after the last of the ISIS fighters were driven from the city that once served as the jihadist army's Anbar Province stronghold. "It is fully liberated, with all of it under the control of Golden Division [soldiers] and tribal fighters now," the source said. "But there are too many explosives in there for civilians to go back. It should be a few more weeks."

fallujah-iraq-flag-600-20-jun-2016.jpeg

Tthe national flag flies in Fallujah, Iraq after forces re-took the city center​

Key bridges, roads and government buildings were largely spared, according to military sources who have been in Fallujah city limits in recent days. Power plants and utilities are believed to be mostly intact. Fallujah, the scene of fierce fighting between U.S. forces and insurgents in the Iraq War, in 2014 became the first city to fall to ISIS. Ramadi, a similar-size city that lies west along the corridor between Baghdad and Raqqa, was captured by ISIS in May 2015. Eight months later, Ramadi was freed, but at a high cost. More than 3,000 buildings and nearly 400 roads and bridges were destroyed, and in the once-thriving Haji Ziad Square, not a single structure stands.

By re-taking Ramadi first, the Iraqi government left fleeing ISIS fighters no way to escape to the caliphate stronghold of Raqqa. Unconfirmed reports say fighters who instead fled north to Mosul, where ISIS still controls the nation's second-largest city, have been executed by their leaders. The efforts to drive ISIS from Anbar, the Sunni-populated province west of Baghdad which includes Fallujah and Ramadi, is a prelude to a looming and daunting campaign to retake Mosul. There, Iraqi forces are working with Kurdish fighters and coalition air power to retake surrounding villages and cut off the black-clad jihadist army's supply routes.

Freed Fallujah Not Leveled, as Iraqi Army Learns Lesson of Ramadi | Military.com

See also:

IS Fled Last Stand in Fallujah but Fears of Comeback Linger
JULY 1, 2016 — Clumps of hair from hastily shaven beards littered floors and filled wastebaskets in houses in the Iraqi city of Fallujah's western neighborhood, a dense block of low-rise homes that were the Islamic State militants' last stand before they largely fled, melting into the sprawling Anbar desert in the face of advancing Iraqi ground forces.
Iraqi officers said they bombed convoys of fleeing militants this week, destroying dozens of vehicles and purportedly killing scores of IS fighters. But the way IS abandoned the long-held urban stronghold also underscores the group's ability to adapt and regroup, long after defeat on the battlefield. In the city's Julan neighborhood, Iraqi Cpl. Sahar Najim kicked through the refuse of facial hair with his boot, saying that he has seen similar scenes in other cities and towns retaken from IS. As the militants realize they are losing, they quickly shave off their beards to disguise themselves and escape among fleeing civilians, he said. Losing Fallujah, 65 kilometers (40 miles) west of Baghdad, was a huge blow to the Sunni militant group, depriving it of bomb-making facilities, a safe haven for training recruits and sources of income through taxing the local population.

To the east, in the city's industrial neighborhood, dozens of car repair shops had been converted into car bomb factories. A garage still advertising Toyota car repairs was stocked with plastic jugs filled with chemicals. Iraqi forces declared Fallujah fully liberated on Sunday, after government troops routed the remaining IS fighters from the city's north and west under the close cover of U.S.-led coalition airstrikes. The battle, which began May 22, was the latest in a string of territorial defeats for IS in Iraq over the past year. At the height of the group's power, in 2014, IS rendered nearly a third of the country out of government control, having blitzed across large swaths of the north and west and capturing Iraq's second-largest city of Mosul. Now, it's estimated to control only 14 percent of Iraqi territory, according to the office of Iraq's prime minister.

More than 500 IS fighters managed to flee Fallujah throughout the five-week offensive, an Iraqi officer told The Associated Press on Thursday. Earlier this year, more than 1,000 IS fighters were estimated to have fled the operation that retook Ramadi, the Anbar provincial capital. Coalition officials initially estimated that only 500-700 IS fighters were inside Fallujah, but once the operation began, Iraqi officers said it quickly became evident there were many more. Iraqi Lt. Gen. Abdul Wahab al-Saadi gave an estimate of around 3,000. In the face of battlefield losses, IS has in the past resorted to large-scale bombings in Baghdad and other Iraqi towns, far from the front-line fighting. In May, after IS lost the strategically important town of Hit in Anbar province, a wave of bombings in and around Baghdad killed more than 200 in a single week.

After declaring Fallujah IS-free, coalition and Iraqi planes attacked a series of convoys of suspected IS fighters and their families outside the city. Two convoys were hit by Iraqi and coalition airstrikes, and a third convoy, outside Ramadi, the provincial capital, was also targeted. In total, more than 200 vehicles were estimated to have been destroyed and hundreds of suspected IS fighters were thought to have been killed in the span of three days this week, according to an Iraqi officer who took part in calling in the airstrikes. Both Iraqi officers spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss operational details. IS has made no statements on its Fallujah losses and the numbers could not independently be verified. There are concerns that the militants who got away will regroup.

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