Falluja and the Iraqi Insurgency - Middle East Institute

[TomClash]

November 4th, 2004 -- In all likelihood, American troops and the nascent Iraqi military will storm the rebel city of Falluja in the very near future. Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi warned on 1 November that negotiations for a peaceful settlement were in their “final phase” and that he would shortly authorize a “military solution”. The “City of Mosques” has been subject to almost daily air strikes for weeks and is presently encircled by US forces. In peril of the coming storm, hundreds of thousands of its residents have fled their homes.

US commanders had spoken openly of a looming offensive for some time before Allawi's warning. “It’s a long time in coming,” Marine Lt. Lyle Gilbert told CNN on 15 October, alluding to the aborted US offensive on the city last April, “and this operation is going to set the stage for Fallujans and for the Iraqi people to go out and elect their government and live in freedom and security as they deserve.”

Lt. Gilbert’s optimism may be somewhat misplaced, however. It was, after all, last April’s offensive, when 800 Iraqis were killed (600 of them civilians), that solidified Iraqi opposition to the US occupation and boosted support for the insurgency. Another bloody offensive now could have similar consequences, potentially igniting a wider conflagration — Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has hinted that his Mahdi Army could rise in response, as it did last spring — and threatening the legitimacy of the elections scheduled for January.

The fact that the Bush Administration is even contemplating a new offensive suggests it has not re-evaluated the reliance on military force that has characterized its failed counter-insurgency strategy to date. Intensive US military operations and insurgent attacks killed some 3,040 Iraqis from April to September, according to the Iraqi Health Ministry, and a study published on 28 October in the Lancet medical journal puts overall deaths as a result of violence since the US invasion at 100,000, mostly civilians (other estimates put the total at 15-30,000). Whatever the true figure, the violence has undoubtedly engendered enmity and inflamed the insurgency.

http://meionline.com/features/293.shtml