My Share of the Task (74 page)

“‘as if they were lollipops'”:
Quoted in Alissa J. Rubin and Doyle McManus, “Why America Has Waged a Losing Battle on Fallouja,”
Los Angeles Times
, October 24, 2004.

seat of the
lead vehicle:
Price et al., “The Bridge: Chapter 6.”

city of 285,000:
Rubin and McManus, “Why America Has Waged.”

boasting 133 of them:
Multi-National Forces–Iraq, “Operation Al Fajr: Roll Up” (briefing), November 28, 2004.

produced chemical weapons:
Jon Lee Anderson, “Letter from Baghdad: Invasions,”
New Yorker
, March 24, 2003.

a long, combustible history:
Iraqis with a better historical memory than our own knew this was not the first time the Fallujah area had been scene to a murder that drew the ire of a superpower and altered geopolitics. Much of this story is found in H. V. F. Winstone,
Leachman: “O.C. Desert”: The Life of Lieutenant-Colonel Gerard Leachman DSO
(Quartet Books, 1982), 215–20.

In August 1920, eighty-four years before the contractors' SUVs merged onto the asphalt of Highway 10, a British lieutenant colonel named Gerard Leachman and his Iraqi driver motored the same road from Baghdad toward Fallujah, stopping at a police station outside the city. A contemporary of T. E. Lawrence, Leachman was a skilled Arabist who had been deployed to the Middle East during the First World War. Now, with Mesopotamia under British control, Leachman was the political officer responsible for a stretch from Najaf to Ramadi in Anbar, or as the desert district was known then, due to its largest confederation, Dulaim. With what Lawrence described as “a plucked face and neck,” Leachman “was full of courage” but had “an abiding contempt for everything native,” (T.E. Lawrence to Alec Dixon,
The Letters of T. E. Lawrence,
ed. David Garnett [Jonathan Cape, 1938], 489–91). Years earlier, in the midst of the First World War, Lawrence had sent Leachman away from his desert camp because he treated his Arab servant “so unmercifully.”

On the day the thin tires of Leachman's armored Rolls-Royce scratched to a stop in the sandy lot of a police station outside Fallujah, Iraq was upset by revolt. The Shia tribes in the south were rising against British occupation following their exclusion from the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, which had given the British mandate over the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra—thus creating Iraq. Hostility toward the British occupation had blown north, and some of the Sunni sheikhs in the Anbar stretch were considering joining the revolt alongside the southern Shias. Leachman was there to meet with a local tribal leader, Sheikh Dhari. The meeting did not go well: Dhari had just met in secret with “hostile shaikhs,” while Leachman was now advocating “wholesale slaughter” against insurrecting tribes. Whether the sheikh or his son fired the shot isn't clear, but Leachman took a bullet in the back and died. News of Leachman's murder uncorked the rebellion, and within two weeks the upper Euphrates was under revolt.

The revolt inaugurated a long and uncomfortable relationship between Iraqis and foreign forces. By the time Britain regained control of the provinces, it had deployed one hundred thousand British and Indian troops and spent tens of millions of pounds sterling. Faced with the rising cost of occupation and a diminishing defense budget, then–War Secretary Winston Churchill suggested that employing the Royal Air Force would offer “a prompt and drastic curtailment of expenditure” in Iraq. (Martin Gilbert,
Winston S. Churchill: Volume IV Companion,
Part Z, Documents July 1919–March 1921 [William Heinemann, 1977], 1078). For the rest of the mandate, the British policed Iraq's vaster tribal areas through aerial surveillance and bombing runs.

British planes returned to Fallujah twice more before the century was over. Following a coup in 1941 in which the Iraqi government in Baghdad sought to align with the Axis powers, British relief forces coming east from Palestine through Syria fought a series of battles against the Iraqis, pushing them down through Anbar toward Baghdad. Fighting bunched up at Fallujah, and the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe bombed each other in and around the city, pummeling the area. The British bombed the city again in the 1991 Gulf War, aiming for its bridges across the Euphrates, but an errant bomb reportedly killed scores of civilians. (Ahmed Hashin,
Insurgency and Counter-insurgency in Iraq
[Cornell University Press, 2006], 27).

system of patronage:
Packer,
Assassins' Gate
, 277.

home to many military officers:
Steven Komarow, “Favored by Saddam, Fallujah Seething Since His Fall,”
USA Today,
April 1, 2004.

night-vision goggles:
Rubin and McManus, “Why America Has Waged.”

another seventy-five injured:
“Violent Response: The U.S. Army in al-Fallujah,” Human Rights Watch,
June 2003.

compensation even as a gesture:
Al-Anbar Awakening: U.S. Marines and Counterinsurgency in Iraq, 2004–2009
,
vol. I
, ed. Chief Warrant Officer-4 Timothy S. McWilliams and Lieutenant Colonel Kurtis P. Wheeler (Marine Corps University Press, 2009), 242.

“the massacre” for years afterward:
Ibid., 242.

proud Fallujans rejected it:
Packer,
Assassins' Gate
, 223. By contrast, after the two large urban battles in Fallujah, the Marines undertook a painstaking process to distribute compensation to the families affected by the violence.

rocket-propelled grenades:
Eric Westervelt and Melissa Block, “U.S. General Unhurt as Insurgents Attack Iraqi Facility,”
All Things Considered
, National Public Radio, February 12, 2004.

freed eighty-seven prisoners:
Paul Wiseman, “Beleaguered Police Keep Faces Hidden in Fallujah,”
USA Today
,
February 15, 2004.

twenty Iraqi policemen:
“Fallujah Mayor Questioned in Police Station Attack,” CNN,
February 16, 2004.

“lying in wait for him”:
“New ‘al Qaeda' Warning on Iraq,” BBC,
April 6, 2004.

Los Angeles Police
Department:
Interview with James N. Mattis in
Al-Anbar Awakening, vol. I
, 25.

through a few weeks earlier:
Dexter Filkins, “Up to 16 Die in Gun Battles in Sunni Areas of Iraq,”
New York Times,
March 27, 2004.

two more with
homemade bombs:
Dexter Filkins, “Marine and 11 Iraqis Die During Fighting in Sunni Triangle,”
New York Times
, March 26, 2004.

the cloverleaf to its east:
“Marines of RCT-1 conduct offensive actions at the northeastern sector of the city of Fallujah, succeeded in taking control of the Cloverleaf intersection.” Kenneth W. Estes, “U.S. Marine Corps Operations in Iraq, 2003–2006” (occasional paper), United States Marine Corps History Division, 147.

the detainees got away
:
Interview with task force member.

police chief in Fallujah:
Interview with James T. Conway in
Al-Anbar Awakening, vol. I
, 49.

within seventy-two hours:
Interview with James N. Mattis,
Al-Anbar Awakening
, 34 and 36.

Mosul, Aleppo, and Amman:
Rashid Khalidi,
Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East
(Beacon Press, 2005), xii.

even before the attack began:
Carter Malkasian, “Signaling Resolve, Democratization, and the First Battle of Fallujah,”
The Journal of Strategic Studies
(June 2006), 438.

newspapers repeated these claims:
“After U.S. artillery hit a mosque that the Americans said had been sheltering insurgents, [Al Jazeera reporter Ahmed] Mansur reported that a family had been killed in a car parked behind the mosque. He also said 25 members of a family were killed when their house was hit” (Rubin and McManus, “Why America Has Waged”).

did not shoot any artillery:
Interview with James N. Mattis,
Al-Anbar Awakening
,
36.

momentary period of sympathy:
Details of Shia-Sunni cooperation during Fallujah are drawn from several sources, especially Jon Lee Anderson, “The Uprising: Shia and Sunnis Put Aside Their Differences,”
The New Yorker
,
May 3, 2004.

blood donations for Fallujah:
Shadid,
Night Draws Near
, 451–53.

stop the offensive in Fallujah:
For a description of the mounting political pressure on the Marines and the United States during the battle, see Malkasian,
Signaling Resolve
, 437–41.

Lakhdar Brahimi, threatened to
quit:
Paul Bremer III,
My Year in Iraq
(Threshold, 2006), 326–27; cited in Malkasian,
Signaling Resolve
, 440.

potentially
fatal to a new Iraq:
Interview with senior military official.

Bush ordered the assault stopped:
David Cloud and Greg Jaffe,
The Fourth Star
(Three Rivers, 2009), 153.

the Marines' Camp Fallujah:
Ibid.

knowing they would be irate:
Ibid.

one of his
top aides:
Patrick Cockburn,
Muqtada al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq
(Scribner, 2008), 145; Shadid,
Night Draws Near
, 441.

in honor of Muqtada's martyred father:
Cockburn,
Muqtada al-Sadr
, 91.

continue fighting Sadr's militia:
The letter, dated April 8, was reported on April 9, though the story ran on April 10. Thom Shanker, “Letter Tells Soldiers Their Tour May Extend,”
New York Times
, April 10, 2004.

“one thug to replace another”:
Ibid.

trucks stopped moving:
“One day in mid-April during the Shia uprising in southern Iraq, all 122 Coalition convoys traveling the roads in Iraq were attacked. Worse was the fact that for a short period in April, CJTF-7's supply lines were shut down, including MSR Tampa—the main supply route from Kuwait to Iraq” (Donald P. Wright and Colonel Timothy R. Reese,
The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003–January 2005
(Government Printing Office, June 2008), 506.

more frequently that summer:
Thomas Hegghammer, “The Iraq Hostage Crisis: Abductions in Iraq, April–August 2004,” Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, October 2004.

enemies with
pig carcasses:
See Donald Smythe, “Pershing and the Disarmament of Moros,”
Pacific Historical Review
(August 1962), 244–45 and relevant footnotes.

the Fallujah Brigade:
According to the Marines' history, “On 25 April, both Lieutenant General Conway and Major General Mattis met with former Iraqi Army generals to discuss the possible formation of a military unit in al-Fallujah. . . . By 28 April the Fallujah Brigade had begun assembling and on the 30th, a turnover led to the phased movement of the 1st Marine Division out of al-Fallujah.” Estes, “U.S. Marine Corps Operations,” 37.

ran six times:
Details of the events on April 24 come from interviews with task force members, as well as Oren Dorell and Gregg Zoroya, “Battle for Fallujah Forged Many Heroes,”
USA Today,
November 9, 2006.

alone on the rooftop:
Dorell and Zoroya, “Battle for Fallujah.”

acting like his Salafists:
See Michael Ware's report from that summer: “Meet the New Jihad,”
Time
, June 27, 2004.

AK-47 rifles and munitions:
Additional details of the tracking and intercepting of the trucks come from interviews with task force members.

“get more aggressive here”:
My recollection of the dialogue and details of the meeting with John Abizaid was aided by interviews with him, as well as other military members present.

Marines had promised:
Confirmed with senior Marine official.

mistaken the initial explosions:
“Several cars and nearby buildings were damaged by what witnesses described as two missiles, one of which appeared to have left a 20-foot crater.” Edmund Sanders, “U.S. Airstrike Kills 18 in Fallouja,”
Los Angeles Times
, June 20, 2004.

dolls among the rubble:
Interview with senior military official.

“slogans and vowing revenge”:
Sanders, “U.S. Airstrike Kills 18.”

and we bombed those:
Interviews with task force members.

guesthouses and restaurants:
In addition to open sources, locations of jihadists within Fallujah that summer come from interviews with military intelligence officials.

Brigade was no real challenge:
Malkasian,
Signaling Resolve
, 448–49.

meetings in the backseat:
Interview with task force member.

leaders to be his
deputies:
Hannah Allam, “Fallujah's Real Boss: Omar the Electrician,”
Seattle Times
, November 22, 2004. Some, including the author of this article, suggest that Omar Hadid may even have been more powerful than Zarqawi within Fallujah. Hadid, a Fallujan and member of the Mujahideen Shura Council, was technically Zarqawi's deputy in the city. While Zarqawi leveraged Hadid's local appeal, he also aided Hadid by raising his profile from that of an electrician to that of a feared and famous jihadist.