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SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq - The invasion of Fallujah is
a direct test of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's
yardstick for measuring American success against
terrorism: The question is whether U.S. and Iraqi
forces can capture or kill more insurgents in the
rebel city than are being recruited and deployed
elsewhere in Iraq.
Events across Iraq since the start of the Fallujah
incursion suggest that the answer may be
discouraging. At least some of the rebels based
there appear to have slipped away to fight
elsewhere, and the insurgent leadership has proved
especially elusive.
Iraqi military and intelligence officials say many
of the foreign and Iraqi fighters fleeing Fallujah
are regrouping in Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul,
where foreign terrorist groups and Iraqi
nationalists have built a deep network over the last
year. In this view, instead of soundly defeating the
insurgents operating from Fallujah, the frontal
invasion launched there on Monday might simply have
scattered militant cells across the country.
In a sign of the insurgency's reach, a mortar attack
struck the U.S. base in Mosul on Wednesday, killing
two soldiers. Signaling its concern, the Iraqi
government imposed a curfew in Mosul, just as it has
done earlier this week in Fallujah and Baghdad.
In the three days since the assault began in
Fallujah, hundreds of Iraqis have been killed in
attacks elsewhere in the country, including
massacres at police stations in Baqubah, Haditha and
Haqlaniya. On Wednesday, gunmen attacked two police
stations in Mosul.
However, leaders of the Iraqi government and the
U.S. military said they had exhausted political
solutions, leaving no other choice ahead of the
national elections in January than to end the reign
of insurgents in Fallujah, who had turned the city
into a logistical hub and symbolic lodestar for the
resistance. Fallujah also occupies an important
strategic position on a major east-west highway from
Jordan to Baghdad, and the insurgents were able to
cut off cargo as well as passenger traffic in recent
months.
The power and breadth of insurgent and terrorist
cells across the country illustrate the complexity
of any effort to conclusively end armed resistance
in Iraq.
Military commanders on the ground in Fallujah
expressed surprise at the light resistance there.
But insurgents had expected the assault for months,
and some U.S. officers think that many fighters
regrouped outside the city rather than face certain
death against superior American firepower.
The battle evoked Rumsfeld's leaked memo to his
senior staff in October 2003 asking how the United
States should judge whether it was winning the
global war against terrorism. He wrote: ''Are we
capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more
terrorists every day than the madrassas and the
radical clerics are recruiting, training, and
deploying against us?"
As the U.S. assault on Fallujah entered its third
day, officers on the ground marveled at how quickly
and with how few casualties they had been able to
push into the city and wondered aloud whether that
meant that insurgents had slipped away and would
have to be pursued elsewhere.
"They can get out if they want, I'm sure they can,
with all the rat holes and the way they can move in
and out between walls," said Capt. Paul Fowler,
commander of a First Infantry Division company of
tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles that is normally
based in Baqubah, another insurgent hotbed.
As his company's armor pushed south into Fallujah,
he said some insurgents were probably slipping back
behind its lines and out of the city.
"They can work their way south to north without us
ever seeing them and cross the road and head out,"
he said.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist leader
who has pledged allegiance to Al-Qaida, has issued
statements in the last months from Samarra and Mosul
and has claimed attacks in half a dozen cities,
including Baghdad.
Other terror groups, such as Ansar al-Sunni, have
their headquarters in Mosul rather than Fallujah,
despite their tight operational relationship with
Iraqi insurgents and Zarqawi's group, according to
Kurdish officials who have interrogated many
arrested members of Ansar.
"It seems the terrorists want to turn Mosul into
another base like Fallujah," said Omar Fattah, the
prime minister of the Kurdish area controlled by the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan." According to our
information, many well-known figures have moved from
Fallujah to Mosul."
The interim Iraqi government is seeking to balance
the need to re-establish control in a city that
insurgents have ruled since April against the risks
of alienating Iraq's Sunni population.
Sunni Muslims make up about one-third of the Iraqi
population but held most of the power under Saddam
Hussein's regime, including the lion's share of
military and security posts. The Sunni areas north
and west of Baghdad have led the resistance against
both the U.S. military and the Iraqi government.
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a Shiite, desperately
wants to keep Sunnis on board and met privately with
Mohsen Abdulhamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic
Party, on Tuesday to ask him to reconsider his
decision to pull out of the government.
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