[Shadow_Group] Hollow victory for US army - Iraq

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

Hollow victory for US army  
By Independent Foreign Service, Sapa-AP
November 15, 2004

FROM:
http://www.dailynews.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=501&fArticleId=2300015<http://www.dailynews.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=501&fArticleId=2300015>
US and Iraqi authorities announced that Fallujah had
been pacified yesterday, saying they had smashed
through the last lines of resistance and killed more
than 1 200 fighters.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, said allied
forces had "completed the move, for all practical
purposes, from the north of the town to the south".
Iraq's interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said there
had been "a clear-cut win over the insurgents and the
terrorists".

But the pacification of the rebel stronghold could be
a
hollow victory. The Americans will leave behind a
shattered city, having unleashed the full might of the
US military against an estimated 6 000 insurgents.

There was plenty of evidence across Iraq that the war
is far from over, and the devastation of Fallujah is
likely to have fuelled the resistance.

American and Iraqi forces were still "mopping up"
pockets of resistance yesterday and conducting
house-to-house searches. A US commander recognised
that the city had been "occupied but not subdued".

The US military also acknowledged that the Jordanian
militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other
prominent members of the insurgency had escaped from
Fallujah. Allawi said: "Fallujah is no longer a safe
haven for terrorists", but he admitted that it would
take "some days" to clear remaining nests of
resistance.

The six-day air and ground offensive left 38 Americans
and six Iraqi government soldiers dead, according to
the US military. More than 200 US soldiers have been
wounded in the operation. Two hundred of the
insurgents who were killed were foreigners, the
Americans said.

After failing in April to wrest Fallujah from the
insurgents in a three-week assault, this time the US
military expressed pride in the speed of the
operation, which deployed six times the number of
troops dispatched to the city seven months ago.

But the number of Iraqi civilians killed or wounded in
the fighting was not mentioned. Allawi said on
Saturday that no civilian casualties had been
reported.

Rumsfeld confidently asserted last week that civilians
had been given guidance on how to avoid getting
injured. He predicted that there would not be large
numbers of civilians killed, and "certainly not by US
forces".

Up to half of the city's 300 000 residents had fled
before or during the military operation aimed at
pacifying the city to enable elections to be held in
January. But thousands remained trapped. Yesterday
charred bodies were scattered in the streets, where
rows of buildings lay in ruins.

People in the city said they had no water and no food,
and aid agencies warned that Fallujah and surrounding
areas were facing a humanitarian catastrophe. There
have been outbreaks of typhoid and other diseases.
Some people leaving the city told of rotting corpses
being piled up and thousands of people trapped, many
of them wounded without access to medical aid.  


An aid convoy was held up at the city's main hospital
in the western outskirts. Capt Adam Collier of the US
Army cited security reasons as he explained that the
seven trucks and ambulances sent by the Iraqi Red
Crescent to Fallujah with medicine, food, blankets and
water purification tablets would not be allowed
through. US Marines Col Mike Shupp said: "There is no
need to bring supplies in because we have supplies of
our own for the people. Now the bridge is open, I will
bring out casualties and all aid work can be done
here."

Battles raged across Iraq yesterday. American
helicopter gunships attacked Baiji in the north, and
tanks moved into the centre of the city. In the
northern city of Mosul, US and Iraqi security forces
struggled to retake a police station that had been
overrun by insurgents. They said the local security
forces had lost control of much of Mosul, Iraq's
third-largest city with an estimated population of 1.8
million Arabs, Kurds, Turkomen and Assyrian
Christians. 

Also in the Kurdish-dominated region, gunmen ambushed
and killed a senior official of the Iraqi Communist
Party and member of the national assembly, Waddah
Hassan Abdel Amir, on the road to Arbil. There were
further gun attacks in Baghdad.

There was also an ominous political unravelling as a
direct consequence of the Fallujah operation. A senior
aide to Muqtada Sadr, the Shia cleric who has led two
uprisings against the Americans, said he would not
take part in the elections while "Iraqi cities are
under attack".

Meanwhile, an Islamist group has freed two women
related to Allawi but is still holding his male cousin
hostage, two Arab satellite channels said yesterday. A
previously unknown group seized Allawi's 75-year-old
cousin Ghazi Allawi, along with Ghazi's wife and their
daughter-in-law in Baghdad last Tuesday.

Meanwhile, US Marines found the mutilated body of a
Western woman yesterday as they searched for militants
still holding out in Fallujah. The woman could not be
immediately identified, but a British aide worker and
a Pole are the only Western women known to have been
taken hostage.

Sunni Muslim militants have cut a swath of terror
across the country with a string of recent
high-profile kidnappings.

The disembowelled body of the woman was wrapped in a
blood-soaked blanket on a street in Fallujah, Marines
said. Margaret Hassan, 59, director of CARE
international in Iraq, and Teresa Borcz Khalifa, 54, a
Polish-born longtime resident of Iraq, were abducted
last month, but the body could not be identified
without further tests. 




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