US says Fallujah's capture broke back of insurgency

timesonline.co.uk ^ | November 19, 2004 | Richard Beeston

[crushelits]

US FORCES making house-to-house searches in the bombed-out remains of Fallujah may have found the headquarters of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist mastermind.

Soldiers picked their way carefully through a heavily defended building with thick concrete walls and a large sign in Arabic which read “al-Qaeda Organisation” and “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger”. Al-Zarqawi’s group is called “al-Qaeda in Iraq”.

In their search of the badly damaged building, American soldiers made some gruesome discoveries, including those of several bodies and a ski mask. Documents, computers and photographs were taken away to be analysed by military intelligence officers. The documents included flight paths for aircraft and instructions on how to shoot them down. Two letters were also recovered, one from al-Zarqawi giving instructions to two of his deputies. Another one was addressed to him asking for money.

In a separate building in Fallujah’s industrial zone, soldiers found a lorry surrounded by bags of sodium nitrate explosives. The vehicle had an American registration sticker reading “Texas Department of Transportation” and was clearly being prepared as a suicide bomb.

The find, and the arrest of about 1,000 suspected insurgents, could help American forces and their Iraqi allies to piece together more accurately who is controlling the insurgency and how to defeat them.

Yesterday Lieutenant-General John Sattler, the commander of Operation Fajr (Dawn), the offensive to recapture Fallujah, said that, based on captured “records and ledgers” recovered from the fighting, the assault had “broken the back of the insurgency”.

“This has disrupted them, I believe, across the country,” he said. “This is going to make it very hard for them to operate.”

He said that captured intelligence could prove decisive.

“I am hoping that we’ll continue to breathe down their neck, quick-turn this tactical intelligence, find them in areas that they’re not familiar with, where they will, in fact, be easier to capture or bring to justice,” he added.

Nevertheless, the US military has faced setbacks. It lost 51 men in the battle and admitted that al-Zarqawi and many other fighters had fled the city before the Americans attacked.

“A lot of the foreign fighters left Fallujah in the early days,” said Lieutenant-General Lance Smith, deputy commander of the US military’s Central Command. “A lot of them moved out of there. Some suicidal types stayed behind, but others moved out. Some went back home, others went to Ramadi, Mosul and most likely Baghdad to fight another day,” he said.

Of the 1,000 men detained by the Americans in Fallujah, less than 2per cent were foreigners. But he added that there could be as many as 1,000 foreign mujahidin currently in Iraq. While most of the foreigners are volunteers from Arab countries, French officials said yesterday that as many as a dozen French Muslims had also gone to fight in Iraq, where four have been killed in action.

The most recent fatality was identified by Le Figaro newspaper as Tareq W, a man in his twenties from Paris who was killed on September 17 after several months fighting alongside other militants.

Elsewhere in Iraq fighting continued, with the heaviest clashes in Mosul, the thirdlargest city in the country, where ten mortar rounds exploded near the offices of the provincial administration, injuring four of the governor’s bodyguards. Four more people were killed by bombs in Baghdad and Kirkuk.

While vowing to put down the insurgency in time for elections in two months, the Iraqi authorities also warned Muslim preachers against making inflammatory sermons.

“The Government is determined to pursue those who incite acts of violence. A number of mosques’ clerics who have publicly called for taking the path of violence have been arrested and will be legally tried,” Thair al-Naqeeb, the Prime Minister’s spokesman, said. “Some mosque clerics incite people to kill the police and the National Guard . . . They’re considered to be participating in terrorism.”

[Imaverygooddriver]

“There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger”

Then why do you act like you are God?

[fooman]

Where is fox news? They should be gushing over this news. We need a ticker tape pareade after elections.

Afghan went out with wimper too.

[stefanbc]

Then why do you act like you are God?
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Their god allah = satan so their actions are normal

[hometoroost]

"Tareq W, a man in his twenties from Paris who was killed on September 17

Too bad they didn't nail his sorry hide six days earlier. It would have been poetic justice. My only regret is that he cannot go back to France to make trouble for the cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

I bet he didn't look as French as John Kerry and I bet he didn't serve in Vietnam either.

[weenie]

Some mosque clerics incite people to kill . . . They’re considered to be participating in terrorism.

That's a great rule for world wide application.