Iraqi troops prepare for Fallujah offensive

BY MATTHEW MCALLESTER | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

November 7, 2004

NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq - The Bradley Fighting Vehicle roared and turned on its tracks. The Iraqi troops kept close, but not too close. No one got run over.

Lesson learned.

"They've never worked with Bradleys," said Marine Capt. James Farrelly, 42, one of the Americans charged with training Iraqis who are to take part in a possible attack on the insurgent-held city of Fallujah in the coming days. He and his colleagues are teaching the Iraqi army troops how to avoid becoming Bradley roadkill, how to remain within view of the driver and the gunner and, at the same time, use the Bradleys as cover.

"It's the same training the Marines would do," said Farrelly, of Roanoke, Va.

This isn't going to be just an American fight. It's a fight for an Iraqi city so the country can be stable for elections in January, and Iraqi soldiers will be in on the fighting. This is partly a political calculation, putting an Iraqi face on what is essentially a U.S. offensive, and partly a long-term military one: U.S. and Iraqi leaders want the Iraqi forces to become capable of providing stability for their country.

There's nothing like major combat to speed up the learning process.

At a camp here a few miles outside Fallujah, a battalion of Iraqi troops is training with a unit of the U.S. Army. They turn on their heels when their platoon commanders give an order, but they march a little out of step. They wear fine-looking desert combat boots and flak jackets, but their weaponry is limited to Kalashnikov rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

Other units are getting ready for the days ahead in other locations around the city. There's no question who will take the lead when and if the world's largest military force receives the order to advance, but when that battle begins, men such as Abu Mustafa will be alongside the Bradleys and the Americans.

"We have a stronger motive than the Americans in fighting this war," said the Iraqi sergeant, 34, sitting in a truck next to the gravel-covered training area yesterday. The insurgents "are holding back the progress of our country. The electricity is being cut, they kill journalists, they kill even the Red Cross. ... They will never win. I expect they will be gone within 45 days from the start of the operation. Some will be killed, some will run away. But I hope there will be no escape for them because we will surround the enemy."

The weakness of the newborn Iraqi security forces - the army, the national guard, the police - has been one of the greatest challenges for a post-invasion Iraq. Paul Bremer, the former U.S. governor of Iraq, disbanded the Iraqi army and decided to rebuild it and the other security forces from scratch.

It has not been an easy process. Bremer's own Coalition Provisional Authority hastily recruited thousands of criminals into the ranks of the Iraqi police force, U.S. and Iraqi officials say. The army has been slow to train. Recruits for all services have been routinely killed in suicide bombings, roadside bombs and assassinations. Recently, insurgents captured nearly 50 recruits for the army and executed them.

Successes have come, though. In recent months, Iraqi soldiers fought alongside U.S. troops in major battles to wrest control of the cities of Najaf and Samarra, and the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, from rebel forces.

Those engagements gave the green Iraqi recruits more actual combat experience than many of the highly trained U.S. troops in Iraq - and they learned on the job.

"The way we used to go into a building changed from the theoretical to the practical," said Abu Raghad, 35, another Iraqi army sergeant, who, like the others, preferred to use an Arabic nickname rather than his full name. He doesn't tell his neighbors what he does for a living.

"We were able to decrease the duration of entering a building and this reduced casualties," he said.

Abu Mustafa agreed. "In training, we knew upfront that this was training so we weren't giving it our best," he said. "In real life, with real buildings, you speed up."

Lt. Col. Jim Rainey, who is commanding the U.S. unit these Iraqi soldiers would be working with in a forthcoming battle, said the quality of the Iraqi troops "runs the gamut." There are excellent soldiers, he said; there are unimpressive ones, and there are, he assumes, even some members of the resistance implanted within the Iraqi ranks.

"There are some things they're better at than us," said Rainey, 39, who spends as much time as he can reading about Iraqi, Arab and Islamic culture and history. He recently finished T.E. Lawrence's chronicle of British military involvement in the region, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom."

Rainey said that unlike his own troops, the Iraqi troops can identify non-Iraqis and can more easily tell Shia from Sunni from Kurd. But most importantly, he said, Iraqi soldiers are inevitably more welcomed in people's homes than U.S. troops.

"When they go into someone's house, the people not only don't mind; they like it," he said. Iraqi, not American, troops also would likely be used to occupy mosques in a city known locally as "the City of Mosques." Fallujah is a religiously conservative place and, in the past, residents have complained of U.S. troops' insensitivity to their religious beliefs and culture.

U.S. officers here seem aware that the Iraqi troops' presence might appear primarily cosmetic, but they insist that is a false impression. Some of the U.S. advisers will accompany the Iraqis into battle, so it's in their interest to make sure the Iraqis are ready.

"They have a no-kidding mission," Farrelly said.

The troops he was training yesterday were passionate about their involvement in the battle, if it comes.

"It's going to be a great blow to the terrorists and it's going to be a turning point in the return of security," said Abu Raghad, who served in Saddam Hussein's army as a driver to a brigadier general in the engineering corps.

One day before the fall of the regime, Abu Raghad said, he was joking with his boss. "One day you will be on the run," he told the brigadier general, who fortunately had a sense of humor, "and I will come to arrest you."

Abu Raghad may be about to storm the best-defended bastion of former regime diehards. His old boss, he said, is still on the run.