G.I.'s Open Attack to Take Falluja From Iraq Rebels
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: November 8, 2004


ALLUJA, Iraq, Monday, Nov. 8 - Explosions and heavy gunfire thundered across Falluja on Sunday night and early Monday as American troops seized control of two strategic bridges, a hospital and other objectives in the first stage of a long-expected invasion of the city, considered the center of the Iraqi insurgency.

Hours earlier, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, faced with an expanding outbreak of insurgent violence across the country, formally proclaimed a state of emergency for 60 days across most of Iraq. The proclamation gave him broad powers that allow him to impose curfews, order house-to-house searches and detain suspected criminals and insurgents.

Between 10,000 and 15,000 American soldiers and marines backed by newly trained Iraqi forces were besieging Falluja for what American commanders said was likely to be a brutal, block-by-block battle to retake control and capture, kill or disperse an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 hard-core insurgent fighters.

The battle for Falluja, the most important since the American invasion of Iraq 19 months ago, was joined. Troops were on the move by 9 p.m. Sunday to the west and south of Falluja, just across the Euphrates River. After two hours of steady pounding by American guns, tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and AC-130 gunships, at least one objective - a hospital less than a mile west of downtown Falluja - was secured by American Special Forces and the Iraqi 36th Commando Battalion. Hours later, the first of several thousand marines in tanks, humvees and armored personnel carriers were moving from their base to a point north of Falluja.

Tracer fire lighted up the sky as the operation began, helicopters crisscrossed the battlefield, and at least one American vehicle was fired upon with a rocket-propelled grenade as American and Iraqi forces converged on the hospital, called Falluja General Hospital. Shortly before midnight, American forces were exchanging gunfire across a bridge near the hospital with several insurgent positions on the other side.

"There has been extensive gunfire going across the river," said the American commander of the Special Forces operation at the hospital. "Bradleys have been shooting over to the east of us, and there has been extensive machine gun fire to the southwest of us," the commander said.

As that firefight raged, extensive airstrikes and artillery fire pummeled the northern and western sections of Falluja, with great blossoms of flame brightening and then fading with each boom of the heavy cannons on the AC-130 gunships, circling over the city like birds of prey.

A huge fire burned in the midst of the city. The streets themselves, as seen through the powerful night-vision optical equipment aboard one Bradley fighting vehicle southeast of Falluja, appeared eerily deserted.

By midnight, the bridge near the hospital and a second strategic bridge, slightly to the south, had been secured.

In Washington, Pentagon officials said Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were monitoring the preparations and updated combat reports.

Most civilians in Falluja, a city of about 250,000 people 35 miles west of Baghdad, were believed to have left by the time the invasion began.

It was the second time in six months that a battle had raged in Falluja. In April, American troops were closing in on the city center when popular uprisings broke out in cities across Iraq. The anger was fed by mostly unconfirmed reports of large civilian casualties, forcing the Americans to withdraw.

American commanders regarded the reports as inflated, but it was impossible to determine independently how many civilians had been killed. The hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties.

"It's a center of propaganda," a senior American officer said Sunday.

This time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons. The military hopes that if it can hold its own in that war, then the armed invasion - involving as many as 25,000 American and Iraqi troops, all told - will smash what has become the largest remaining insurgent stronghold in Iraq.

And with only three months to go until the country's first democratic elections, American and Iraqi officials are grasping for any tool at their command to bring the insurgency under control.




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