Fundamentalists maintain control of 2 key Iraqi cities

By John F. Burns and Erik Eckholm
The New York Times

ABDUL KADIR SADI / AP An injured girl lies in a hospital in Fallujah, Iraq, yesterday after U.S. warplanes launched a wave of airstrikes Friday,

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BAGHDAD, Iraq — While U.S. troops were battling Shiite militants in Najaf, events in two Sunni Muslim cities that stand astride the crucial western approaches to Baghdad have moved significantly against American plans to build a secular democracy in Iraq.

Both of the cities, Fallujah and Ramadi, and much of surrounding Anbar Province are now controlled by fundamentalist militias, with U.S. troops confined mainly to heavily protected forts on the desert's edge.

What little influence the Americans have is asserted through wary forays in armored vehicles, and by laser-guided bombs that obliterate enemy refuges identified by scouts who penetrate militant ranks. Even bombing raids appear to strengthen the fundamentalists, who blame the Americans for what they claim are scores of civilian deaths.

U.S. efforts to build a government structure around former Baath Party stalwarts — officials of Saddam Hussein's army, police force and bureaucracy who were willing to work with the United States — have collapsed. Instead, the former Saddam loyalists, under threat of beheadings, kidnappings and humiliation, have mostly resigned or defected to the fundamentalists, or been killed.

In the past three weeks, two former Saddam loyalists appointed to important posts in Anbar province have been eliminated by the militants and their Baathist allies. The chief of a battalion of the U.S.-trained Iraqi National Guard in Fallujah was beheaded by the militants, prompting the disintegration of guard forces in the city. The Anbar governor resigned after his three sons were kidnapped.

The national-guard commander and the governor were both forced into humiliating confessions, denouncing themselves as "traitors" on videotapes that sell in the Fallujah marketplace for 50 cents.

Suleiman Marawi, a former officer in Saddam's army with family roots in Fallujah, is seen in his camouflaged national-guard uniform, confessing to his leadership of a plot to stage an uprising in the city Aug. 20 that was to have been coordinated with a U.S. offensive. For that purpose, he says, he recruited defectors among the militants' ranks and met frequently with Marine commanders outside the city to settle details of the attack.

The tapes show masked men ending the guard commander's halting monologue, toppling him to the ground, and sawing off his head, to the accompaniment of recorded Quranic chants ordaining death for those who "make war upon Allah."

U.S. commanders in Baghdad acknowledged ruefully that Marawi had been killed but denied there was any plan for an offensive.
 
The governor, Abdulkarim Berjes, is shown with a photograph of himself with a U.S. officer, sobbing as he repents working with the "infidel Americans," then being rewarded with a weeping reunion with his sons.

In another taped sequence available in the Fallujah market, a mustached man identifying himself as an Egyptian is shown kneeling in a flowered shirt, confessing that he "worked as a spy for the Americans," planting electronic "chips" used for setting targets in American bombing raids.

The man says he was paid $150 for each chip laid, then he, too, is tackled to the ground by masked guards while a third masked man, a burly figure who proclaims himself a dispenser of Islamic justice, pulls a 12-inch knife from a scabbard on his chest, grabs the Egyptian by the scalp, and severs his head.

The situation across Anbar represents the latest reversal for the Marines' First Expeditionary Force, which sought to assert control with a spring offensive in Fallujah and Ramadi that incurred some of the heaviest American casualties of the war, and a far heavier toll, in the hundreds, among Fallujah's resistance fighters and civilians.

The offensive ended, mortifyingly for the Marines, in a decision to pull back from both cities and entrust American hopes to the former Baathists. The American rationale was that military victory would come only by flattening the two cities, and that the better course lay in handing important government positions to former loyalists of the ousted government to wrest control from the Islamic militants who had emerged from the shadows to build strongholds there.

The culmination of this approach came with the recruitment of the so-called Fallujah Brigade, led by a former Army general under Saddam and composed of a motley assembly of former Iraqi soldiers and insurgents. The brigade marched into the city in early May, wearing old Iraqi military uniforms, backed with U.S.-supplied weapons and money.

But the Fallujah Brigade is in tatters now, reduced to sharing tented checkpoints on roads into the city with the militants, its headquarters in Fallujah abandoned, like the buildings assigned to the national guard.

Men assigned to the brigade, and to the two guard battalions, have mostly fled, Iraqis in Fallujah say, taking their families with them and handing their weapons to the militants.

The militants' principal power center is a mosque in Fallujah led by an Iraqi cleric, Abdullah al-Janabi, who has instituted a Taliban-like rule in the city, rounding up people suspected of theft and rape and sentencing them to publicly administered lashes, and, in some cases, beheading.

Al-Janabi appears to have been working in alliance with an Islamic militant group, Unity and Holy War, that U.S. intelligence has identified as the vehicle of Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist with links to al-Qaida whom the Americans have blamed for many of the suicide bombings in Iraqi cities including Baghdad, which is just 35 miles from Fallujah.

Marine commanders at Camp Fallujah, a sprawling base less than five miles east of the city, have been telling reporters for weeks that the city has become little more than a terrorist camp, providing a haven for Iraqi militants and for scores of non-Iraqi Arabs, many of them with ties to al-Qaida, who have homed in on Fallujah as the ideal base to conduct a holy war against the United States.

Eventually, the Marine officers have said, American hopes of creating stability in Iraq will necessitate a new attack on the city, this time one that will not be halted before it can succeed.

In the meantime, the American command says it has carried out many bombing raids since the Marine pullback from the city in May, killing scores of militants. One such raid that was reported earlier this month in a popular Baghdad newspaper, Al-Adala, said that 13 Yemenis had been killed in an air raid in Fallujah as they prepared for suicide bombing attacks in Baghdad, and that the Yemeni government was negotiating to bring the bodies home.

Even militants in Fallujah admit that many of the bombing raids have hit militant refuges, and with pinpoint accuracy.

American commanders confess, however, they have no immediate answers in Anbar and say their strategy is to curb the militants' ability to project their violence farther afield, especially to Baghdad. A recent meeting between Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, and a delegation of tribal sheiks from Fallujah who have pledged fealty to al-Janabi is said to have ended with Allawi promising not to sanction large-scale American attacks on the Anbar cities, and the sheiks conveying Janabi's pledge to halt militant attacks on the Americans.

But leaving the militants in control could pose a disabling threat to American political plans, already badly shaken by events in Najaf. Top U.S. officials say that events there, with Muqtada al-Sadr's militiamen finally driven from the Imam Ali shrine, have set the stage for a turn in American fortunes across the Shiite heartland of Iraq. But even there the prospects seem deeply clouded by the failure to effectively disarm Sadr's surviving fighters as they left the shrine with shouldered rifles and donkey carts loaded with rockets.

Sadr has signed a new pledge to join the democratic political process that will be the final measure of American success here. But he has abrogated similar undertakings before, and many of his fighters vowed to take up arms again.

Coupled with the militants' control in Anbar, this could unsettle plans for elections scheduled across Iraq by the end of January — the next crucial step toward a fully elected government by January 2006, an event American officials see as a way station on the path to a reduction or withdrawal of the 140,000 American troops committed here.

U.S. officials say a rapid buildup of the new Iraqi army, the national guard and police, coupled with gathering momentum in "turning dirt" on the thousands of reconstruction projects funded by $18 billion in American financing, should eventually improve security across Iraq. But the Americans acknowledge that a full, nationwide election in January may not be possible.

For now, they have identified 15 cities across the Arab parts of Iraq that they contend can be stabilized to make voting in January possible. For the moment, they say, Fallujah and Ramadi are not among them.