Upto 15 thousand US troops from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, assisted by elements from the newly constituted Iraqi National Guard, entered Fallujah, a town some 40km west of Baghdad on the 8th November 2004 as part of Operation Phantom Fury.
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The objective, in the words of the US Commander in charge of all operations is Iraq, General George W. Casey Jnr, was "the elimination of Fallujah as a terrorist safe haven".
An estimated 90 per cent of Fallujah's normal population of 300 thousand fled the city beforehand. The US military estimates the number of insurgents in the city numbered between 2 and 3 thousand.
The fighting claimed the lives of 38 US soldiers. Military officials put the number of insurgents killed at 1200
Tim Lambon is an award winning cameraman and journalist working for Channel 4 News.
In November 2004, along with International Editor Lindsey Hilsum, he spent three weeks embedded with a unit attached to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force as it took part in the assault on Fallujah.
A former soldier, Tim filmed and edited a series of powerful reports for Channel 4 News documenting one of the most controversial, and dangerous, military operations of recent times.
His experiences with the marines offers a rare insight into the way America fights its wars.
The unit was an armoured assault vehicle unit. They were armoured personnel carriers, specifically designed to take marines from ship to shore and not actually go much further into the hinterland but of course now they find themselves nearly two years later way up into the Sunni Triangle in the middle of Iraq. These vehicles have been equipped and re-equipped and maintained but they are essentially amphibious vehicles. They were used by the marines as their main lift force, in other words, they would take up to 20 armed marines in the back, who are essentially infantry soldiers, and move them into a position for the start of a fight where they would either dismount and move on either side of the vehicle and the vehicle would then supply heavy fire support with its turret gun or they would stay in the vehicle as the vehicle proceeded through a fire area.
Yes. The 1st Platoon of 2nd Tracks, which is what we were with, was assigned to India Company of the 1st Batallion of the 5th Marines. India Company had a specific sector of Fallujah up in the north initially which they had certain objectives which they had to achieve within a certain time frame. So, having breached their start line, which was the railway line which runs east-west at the north of the city, they crossed that railway line having actually breached it in two places at night, in the dark, and using their night vision capabilities, then took a small part, probably about two blocks worth – of two city blocks – of Fallujah, and held that until the morning light and then started pushing forward. The way they would push forward, they would select an area that would basically have a east-west running street and they would be facing south, taking two or three lines of advance, which would be streets going down, and they would then proceed down that, clearing houses on either side until they had secured that block and they would stay in that block for that night and the next day they would push on further down.
Going into each room of each house…?
Going into each room of each house. A lot of the time the houses were severely damaged in that process because one of the cardinal rules of the American occupation of Iraq is called “force protection”. The whole idea is that you limit the number of casualties that you take and the number of casualties that you make is immaterial.
There was return fire right from the very first morning. I don’t think there was a single shot fired in reply on the actual entrance to Fallujah, there was a lot of firing laid down but I heard very little coming back in those initial hours of darkness. The next morning there were definitely insurgents operating in areas that had not been cleared. We went up onto a rooftop and what the Americans were doing was bringing in Cobra helicopters, which are relatively armoured but you don’t want to be sitting in a helicopter when there are pieces of lead in the air, you want to get as far away as possible.
But they would use these helicopters to draw the fire with – it’s called “drawing fire”. In other words, they would fly them as if they were going to fly over a piece of unoccupied Fallujah and of course at it started approaching the insurgents could not help themselves but want to open fire on this thing, hoping they would bring it down with their AK-47’s. By doing that of course they give away their positions which spotters on the tops of the buildings were looking for – the puffs of smoke, the flames from the ends of their rifles etc. – and they would then either send out artillery, mortars or get the helicopters themselves to launch missiles at these particular places.
The marines had been in Iraq now since the very beginning. For some this was the second tour - they called this the “second war”, they called the “first war” the actual invasion in 2003. Their attitude towards the Iraqis has not changed in this embed, I’m sure that it has changed since the beginning when they were told initially that the Iraqis were going to be welcoming them and now they’ve found that the Iraqis are in fact just trying to blow them up. So, they now dehumanise the Iraqis, in a way that they don’t recognise them as people or if they do recognise them as people, they are people who are other than themselves.
They call the insurgents “Hajji’s” and basically they treat them like any soldier has to treat the enemy, which is, if you don’t kill him first, he’s going to kill you, which as a former soldier, is a reasonably healthy way to look at life. However, as a former soldier who’s now a journalist, I also understand the Iraqi side and know how the Iraqis live and think. I do not empathise with the insurgents whatsoever, because I think that what they do is pretty wrong, but at the same time they are in a struggle against what they see as occupation forces in their country and they’re giving their best stick.
What’s your opinion of who the insurgents are? Are they local people, Baathists, holy warriors or just patriots?
I think there is a mixture of all of those. I think there’s a normal distribution curve of people involved in the insurgency. Certainly in Fallujah. I think you had a lot of ex-Baathists, a lot of Sunnis who felt disempowered and disinherited by the invasion, after Saddam Hussein’s regime had been removed. If there had been foreign elements a lot of those had left. Certainly of the bodies of insurgents we found none of them had foreign id’s on them although you continually heard rumours “ah we found Chechens here, we found Syrians there, Yemeni’s in another place” – I never saw any of those people and I tend to suspect that information was somewhat tenuous. I’m sure that there were foreigners – there were definitely people from other places, certainly other cities like Ramadi, which is just next to Fallujah. I saw the bodies of five fighters who had Ramadi identification on them so there were people who feel themselves to be patriots as you say who are fighting against what they see as an illegal occupation of their country. There are Wahhabi jihad warriors, people who believe they are fighting for the re-establishment of the Caliphate or the ummah. There are all sorts of people in between, from bandits to hardened fanatics, basically.
I’ve not particularly myself met any of these individuals but other journalists have gone and got a breakdown of who controlled what parts and who the leaders were and all that kind of stuff. As far as the marines were concerned, they don’t need to know who the leader is – all they have to do on the ground is either kill or capture them and the bottom line is to basically free the city up from the scourge of the insurgents, that’s how they see it. So that’s what they did, they just went in there and took these people.
As a former soldier, I feel that their way of prosecuting this thing was not the most intelligent way. To my mind, the most intelligent way is to capture as many alive as possible. Now I know that that is very difficult when people are hell bent on becoming martyrs and do not mind being suicide targets, so it’s difficult to do that but if you can you should capture every single one alive that you can because there’s information, and once you have information then you start to get further down the road of freeing up the whole situation.
What was their (the marines) policy then?
The rules of engagement in this particular situation had been changed. Whereas previously the rules of engagement had been – ‘you had to see a weapon, there had to be a clear intention to harm coalition forces personnel’ - now the rules of engagement had been changed. If you had reason to suspect that an individual may at some stage be involved in harming coalition forces, you could take him out and use whatever force is necessary. And with an M-16 there is only one kind of force and it makes big holes in you.
(Iraqi interim prime minister) Allawi and the US military leadership repeatedly asserted that the majority of civilians had fled the city beforehand, but I do remember some of your footage of women and children. There was a particular episode when you went into a house and there was a very young family there. How many civilians were left in the city ?
Extremely few civilians were left in the city. I think that the government and the US forces were right when they said that the city was deserted. It was pretty much deserted. Those families that were there, and I saw less then 20 individuals all together, including the children and their parents and whatever, in the time that we spent in Fallujah during that operation. They were I think small anomalies and as to the number of insurgents killed – and they claimed that they killed between 1200 and 1600 insurgents – I think that that is a huge over-estimation of the number of people killed.
Also, there was nothing to say who is an insurgent and who is not, because I think that a large number of families had left at least one male member of the family or a servant in houses that had valuables and things like that, to stop any looting. Now those individuals first of all were male, mostly of military age and thirdly, if they were found by the marines, if they were found in circumstances in which the marines thought they might be a threat, they’d just be killed. If they were to walk out on the street in the middle of a firefight they were going to get killed and there were situations where I’m sure people were killed mistakenly or because the marines could not differentiate between them and insurgents.
Was there any sense that many of the insurgents had left the city beforehand knowing that this force was on its way?
Absolutely. I think that there is no question that the majority of the forces had left. The mysterious Mr Al-Zarqawi for instance was nowhere to be found although they believe that they found his headquarters in the south of the city and certainly some of the footage that came from that particular operation tended to indicate that this might have been true.
The places that we went into which the Americans claim to be arms caches and weapons dumps and things like that … I’ve seen a lot of weapons in a lot of places, all over the world, all my life and I have to say that these were not large concentrations of weapons. You would have a few mortar bombs, you would have a couple of bags of anti-aircraft rounds, but you wouldn’t see any weapons to fire them or heavy machine gun rounds or AK-47 ammunition, sometimes 122mm rockets, those sort of things, you know, two’s and three’s here and there, in places. And certainly a lot of it in such bad condition that I would suspect that a preponderance of their material had been moved out of the place a long time before this attack took place.
Did it get dangerous for you at times? Was it ever hairy?
Yeah, whenever you’re in a combat situation it is hairy. There is no way to avoid that. If there is just one bullet that is zinging through the air at 11300 feet per second it is dangerous and there were a lot of rounds. Whether they were friendly rounds from a unit that was just off to your right that was firing across you because they’d seen something moving in the wrong direction, that makes it dangerous. Obviously when you are proceeding down a road of unknown provenance and you are walking in a line with a number of marines, that is dangerous. Even if you’re inside the vehicle, it’s dangerous.
In fact one of the most lethal dangers was not necessarily from small arms fire actually on the ground, what was most dangerous were mortars and rockets which were being lobbed into the city from outside by insurgents beyond the operational limits, and of course these things can be shot from anywhere up to 15-20 kilometres away to fall completely untargeted into the area of operation and a large number of the casualties taken by the unit that we were with actually happened because of this. Nobody targeted these people, they just happened to be standing in the wrong place when something went bang.
I recall one particular bit of footage that you sent out of an air strike being called in, a bomb being released from an aircraft at fairly close range. When you’re using that kind of heavy weaponry, almost indiscriminately it appeared, it seems inevitable that non-combatants are going to get hurt…
Well, that is one of the reasons why they flagged this up beforehand, to try and get people to leave. And I think that they were pretty effective in doing that. One can understand why a member of the family might be left behind to stop looting etc. if they couldn’t take all of their worldly possessions out of their houses and those individuals as I’ve said, were likely to come to grief.
Based on the idea of force protection, in other words not allowing any of your people to get taken out, the best way to prosecute this kind of war is to lay down as much fire as possible to basically either kill or suppress any fire coming back from the insurgents before you then move through an area to search and secure the area and certainly there were moments when at the beginning of an attack in the morning on the baseline, waiting for the lines to advance to start moving forward, every single weapon would open up for, you know, sort of 3 or 4 minutes at a time and they would just take out anything in the distance.
There were occasions when after a firefight had taken place and before they were sure an area was secure they sent two tanks down a particular road, one had its turret one side and the other had it’s turret to the other side, and the commander said “I’m just making sure they put one shell into every house they go past”. So the American forces in Fallujah “destroyed Fallujah in order to save it”, that’s how they would explain it. Every single building I would vouch, if it had been not destroyed then was certainly seriously damaged.
What was the marine’s view of their political leadership? What was morale like?
I did not meet a marine on the ground in the unit at the enlisted or NCO level who had not said that they would be leaving the armed forces after this particular engagement. Not so much I think from the point of view of disagreement with the politics of the situation but rather the fact that they had not expected when they signed up in the marines to actually have their asses on the line as they found themselves to be. One of the problems with western armies these days is that you sign up to the army thinking that you’re going to get a career and a pension and various pay-outs etc.. But in fact you get thrust into a war situation, a lot of people are dying around you and that’s not what you signed up to the army for and so most people basically after two tours have said, “enough’s enough, I’m outta here”.
Politically, people were pretty benign basically, they were not involved in politics. They said “we are soldiers, this is the job we have been sent in to do and we do it. The thing we signed up to do was to obey and so we’re obeying”.
By and large, they were very happy with the Republican victory in the elections. They were not so happy the day after the election, when instead of the pay rises that they’d been getting for the last 4 years they suddenly only got a three per cent pay rise this year. Interesting that it was released the day after the election. So there was some mumbling about that, but by and large, apart from the older senior NCO’s who are black, the rest of the marines seemed pretty much to be Republican. Those guys (the black NCO’s) were democrats, and they’d say (conspiratorially) “hey listen, whatever you do, don’t tell anybody else, but we’re Democrats, we’re the only Democrats on the base”.
Were there any kind of human moments during this period? Was there any humour, compassion…pity?
I didn’t see any humour compassion or pity involved with dealing with Iraqis. Certainly there’s a lot of humour in dealing with each other and the marines have a patois, a way of speaking, which is extremely amusing and certainly some of the things that they do in their sort of downtime we found quite bizarre, like sitting in a guard vehicle when they were off guard duty watching “South Park”, a very bizarre American cartoon series on a DVD player powered by the batteries of the armoured personnel carrier. I suppose this is just a cultural thing, but they were not involved in compassion for the enemy in any way but there was huge compassion obviously for their own mates and for their own injured. When casualties are heard they were very involved in that.
They did have what I found a slightly bizarre complete horror of anybody filming their comrades when they were wounded or killed, which, having been a soldier, I found very difficult. If anyone had wanted to take photographs of my mates I would have said “go ahead, tell the world what’s going on”, but these guys were very keen we did not film them although it was perfectly legal within the terms of the embed for us to do that so long as we didn’t identify people or release their names before next of kin had been notified.
What will the battle of Fallujah’s legacy be to Iraq in the long term?
You must understand that the high command and politicians said that “what we’re going to do is liberate Fallujah and give it back to the Fallujans”. I think that the Fallujans will be even more determinedly anti a. the government and b. coalition forces than they were previously to that because their property and their tenuous lifestyle had been deeply threatened or destroyed by this operation. I think what you’ll find the assault on Fallujah did was broaden the insurrection, not necessarily in terms of getting people who lived in other places to become more angry about the occupation, I don’t think that’s possible at the moment - there’s a level of disagreement with the occupation that cannot be improved upon - but what it did was disperse a lot of people who were actively involved in the insurgency to other places and I think that as we’ve seen recently the number of incidents as we progress towards the elections of which of course the assault on Fallujah was the start of the pacification process for those elections. What has happened is that the number of incidents has risen dramatically as a result of displacing the insurgents from Fallujah into other parts of the country as far north as Mosul, which is some 4 hours drive away.
Do you think the insurgency requires a military or political solution?
There is never a military solution to anything like this. I have been involved in a guerilla war in which the side I was on lost and the other side is that I’ve been to other people’s guerilla wars and have seen that there is never a military solution to guerilla war. There is only ever talking at the end. Discussion, diplomacy and through that you come to a resolution and the only way to resolve the issue is to include the parties and sometimes that means you have to have the most radical ends of the two spectrums opposing each other come together and eventually when you get those two radical ends together to talk that’s the only time you find peace. It’s happened everywhere, from Lebanon to South Africa to Northern Ireland and it’s only when you get the radicals together to talk … they’ll never find common ground but if the populace gets tired enough of the war it will force the radical ends to talk and once the radical ends talk you then have peace. There is no military solution.
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion ... but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do".
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