Twelve thousand troops from the 1st US Marine Division, 1st US Infantry Division and 1st US Cavalry Division, backed by fewer than 2,000 Iraqi national guardsmen, covered the length and breadth of the city under a complex plan that involved deception as well as mass firepower.
The Americans had learnt their lesson from the previous aborted attempt to seize control of Fallujah from the rebel insurgents and foreign terrorists in April. Then there were too few American troops and too many civilian casualties.
Six times as many troops were deployed for the second attempt, and hundreds of armoured vehicles were engaged in either encircling the city to confuse the enemy or sent down the narrow streets to launch blistering tank shell and artillery fire at any building or hideout from where masked and uniformed rebels were spotted firing their weapons. Although the rebel fighters, numbering some 3,000, had had since April to develop their defences and to prepare to take on the Americans, they were finally confronted with a plan that outwitted them.
US Marine Major-General Richard Natonski, who devised the ground attack, yesterday revealed one of the key ingredients of Operation Phantom Fury: several days before the start of the real attack, a large “invasion” force, with up to 200 armoured vehicles, carried out several “feint” attacks to the south of Fallujah, charging right up to the edge of the city in what is known as dynamic manoeuvres.
General Natonski said that these feint invasions confused the insurgents, who assumed that the attack was going to come initially from the south and built up their forces in that part of the city.
In fact, the main thrust of the invading force was made up of six battalions of US Army and Marine troops, punching through defensive lines across six points in the north of Fallujah. The feints to the south also forced insurgents to open fire from their secret bunkers, which immediately exposed them to bombing from the air and artillery fire.
Under General Natonski’s plan, which he said was followed to the letter (unusual in warfare where carefully laid plans are often disrupted by enemy counter-moves), another “pretend” attack was carried out on November 6, this time in the north. The real start date for the attack was at sunset a week ago.
General Natonski claimed that by last Monday evening Fallujah’s defending rebels were staying under cover because they were not sure whether the attack was about to begin or whether they were being tricked into coming out into the open again. “That’s kind of what we wanted, we desensitised the enemy to the formations they saw on the night we attacked,” he said.
Another key tactic was to choke off all exits from the city. Insurgents used mortars and machinegun fire to try to breach the outer ring to escape, but failed. However, the top leaders of the insurgents, including the terrorist chiefs linked to al-Qaeda — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Sheik Abdullah al-Janabi and Omar al-Hadid — appear to have vanished before fighting started.
In six days of total warfare in the streets of Fallujah, the Americans believe that they killed 1,200 insurgents, many of them foreigners from Iran, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.
By sunset on Saturday American tanks and armoured fighting vehicles had achieved their objective, penetrating the last rebel stronghold in the south and facing the final pockets of resistance from insurgents.
