Falluja's message of hate for US troops By Charles Clover in Falluja
Until last Friday, a sign reading "Welcome To Falluja" greeted US soldiers arriving in the Iraqi city along highway 10. But the cheerful bilingual message carried hidden menace: remote-controlled bombs were often concealed in its cement base.
After being hit by at least five bombs in as many months, US commanders decided last week they had had enough of the Iraqi guerrillas' sense of humour and began to remove the sign and nearby guard rails.
But the scale of the operation indicated the size of the task facing the US-led coalition in Falluja and other cities in Iraq's troubled Sunni Arab heartland.
Falluja has been a bastion of resistance to the US since early May. Four of the six helicopters shot down by guerrillas in Iraq have been downed in the vicinity of the city of 250,000, including the Blackhawk hit last Thursday with the loss of nine lives.
And while US commanders report a fall in the number of attacks in the city, by the end of the three-hour operation on Friday US forces had lost one Bradley infantry fighting vehicle to a rocket-propelled grenade and one Iraqi policeman had been lightly injured by another RPG.
Protecting the team of bulldozers required the better part of a battalion of paratroopers, several Bradleys, two observation helicopters and an F-18 fighter jet slicing lazily through the heavens overhead.
"The city is more coalition friendly than when we got here. But it is still a war. There is still an enemy out there," said Capt Scott Kirkpatrick, who leads a rifle company from the 10th Mountain Division which participated in Friday's operation.
Capt Kirkpatrick's soldiers take an even starker view. "What they're doing as far as guerrilla warfare has gotten worse," said a team leader from the division. "We are fighting the local population here."
US troops say they do not enter Falluja in less than a platoon-sized force (six vehicles), and usually accompanied by air support. The soldiers know they cannot stay in one place inside the city for longer than an hour before guerrillas start to stake them out and ambush them.
Sure enough, an hour into the operation a white flare arced up over the city's central mosque and radio chatter among US troops became increasingly frantic.
Five minutes later three RPGs crashed into the street along highway 10, evidently aimed at a pair of Iraqi police pick-up trucks parked on the central reservation.
One of two vehicles apparently used in the attack was eventually located in a sidestreet, searched and left. Two companies of US soldiers tried to cordon off the neighbourhood, but the chase was unsuccessful.
An hour later guerrillas fired another five RPGs at a separate company, hitting a Bradley with an armour-piercing round and knocking it out. The crew escaped serious injury. The guerrillas escaped, but soldiers arrested the owner of the house from which they had fired.
Time and time again the US troops' training and firepower has saved them from the worst. "Why did we get out of there with no casualties? Because everyone was where they needed to be," Lt Kyle Walton of the 82nd Airborne, whose platoon was targeted in the second attack, told his men at a debriefing
Lt Col Brian Drinkwine, head of a battalion of the 82nd Airborne, is the third US commander to take charge in the city since the end of the war in April. The primary obstacle each has had to face has been the attitude of the local population, who allow the guerrillas to move freely among them.
When asked whether his forces controlled the city, Col Drinkwine hedged, saying his primary goal was to leave Falluja "a better place than we found it". At the end of March a US Marine regiment will be taking over responsibility for the area from the paratroopers.
His forces have arrested more than 500 suspected "ACF" (anti-coalition forces) since September. But the main problem US forces face is personified by Khalid Ibrahim Mijbil, who owns a plot of land along highway 10.
After his home was searched on Friday by US troops, Capt Kirkpatrick apologised for the inconvenience and asked him if he had seen any "bad people".
"Security is a collective duty, and America is our friend," Mr Mijbil told Capt Kirkpatrick. "This land belongs to my tribe, and I will personally shoot any bad people that come here."
A minute later, however, Capt Kirkpatrick was out of earshot and Mr Mijbil was speaking to a UK television interviewer. "We in Falluja reject foreign rule," he said. "We will never allow the foreigners to rule us, nor the foreign Iraqis. We will drive them out."