Drones pick off 'rats' of Fallujah
James Hider, Fallujah
November 16, 2004
THE last hours of the mujaheddin are terrifying. With the city they once ruled with the absolute authority of medieval caliphs now overrun by US and Iraqi troops, they have to keep moving. To pause even for a few minutes can mean instant death from an unseen enemy.
A group of 15 fighters dressed in black and carrying an array of weapons ducked into a two-storey house in war-torn southern Fallujah. Their movement was picked up by an unmanned spy plane that beamed back live footage to a control centre on the edge of the city. Within minutes, an airstrike was called and the house disappeared in a giant plume of grey smoke.
From a house across the road, the explosion flushed out another group of guerillas. Deafened by the blast, they stumbled out into the street, formed a ragged line and started off on the marathon to postpone their deaths, the drone dogging their every step.
"The rats are trying to move about," said Major Tim Karcher, of the Second Battalion, Seventh Cavalry, as the figures flitted from street to street, seeking cover close to walls.
Sometimes they can throw off the drone, ducking out of sight of the men with the power to summon FA18 fighter-bombers or 155mm artillery strikes. But they have no way of knowing. And, increasingly, as they run they come into the crosshairs of American snipers, crack shots such as Sergeant Marc Veen and his long-barrelled rifle, Lucille.
Yesterday morning he spotted a black-clad man with an AK47 assault rifle peering round a corner 450m from the villa where Cougar Company of the Seventh Cavalry has set up a forward base. He shot the man in the stomach: he fell, but kept crawling, so Sergeant Veen shot him again in the shoulder. Still the man tried to move away, so the sergeant blasted him with his 50 calibre machinegun.
"There's pretty much no feeling," explained the 24-year-old from Chicago, perched on the parapet of the house, the shell of the killer bullet tucked as a trophy into his flak jacket. "If I didn't get that guy, that guy would get one of my buddies sometime later down the line."
The battle for Fallujah is all but over. The main north-south road in the once-dreaded Jolan district is a US military highway, smothered in dust kicked up by troop carriers and giant bulldozers.
Almost every building is cracked, chipped or holed by the fighting. Any guerilla who could make his way back up from the last pockets of resistance in the south would see the mujaheddin graffiti – "Jihad, jihad jihad, God is Greatest and Islam will win" – replaced by slogans daubed by the US-backed Iraqi Army, posted along the length of the route. Standing on a street reeking of decomposed bodies, the ruins of a five-floor building silhouetted behind him, Lieutenant Fares Ahmed Hassan said the destroyed city would send a strong message to a nation where force has long been the lingua franca of government.
"When the people of Fallujah come back and see their houses, they will kick out any terrorists. This will be an example to all Iraqi cities," the Kurdish officer said.
Apart from a handful of women and children, the only civilians he had encountered were men of fighting age, about 500, detained for vetting. He said that some civilians had said insurgent snipers had shot anyone trying to leave their homes. As US troops sweep through the houses, they are unearthing the insurgents' horrifying secrets – more akin to the handiwork of psychotic serial killers than guerillas or even terrorists – that have shocked the world and explain why this devastating offensive has met with so little opposition from the Arab world. This included the disembowelled and limbless body of a blonde woman, possibly Pole Teresa Borcz, who was married to an Iraqi and abducted two weeks ago.
As the guerillas run their last sprint from death, sympathy for their cause among Iraqis is just as rapidly running out.
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