 The mosque had been taken, but the fire kept coming. "We've got chunks of territory, but these guys [insurgents] are all over the place," Marine Lt. Brandon Turner said Thursday as he stood amid shattered glass and concrete under the green dome of the Khulafah Rashid mosque, his fellow Marines resting on a plush red carpet. "They just keep coming at us."
There is no real pattern to the fighting in Fallouja — a fierce, chaotic battle that continued to rage Thursday, house to house, street to street. But if there is any accepted truth so far, it is this: The insurgents are not going away easily. And that truth has a corollary: The Marines are doing all they can to draw the guerrillas out and kill them. "The enemy is right where we want him. He's coming to us," said Lt. Col. Gareth Brandl, commander of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, which has experienced perhaps the toughest fight of all the units penetrating the city. "And we're killing him." Many of the 3,000 to 5,000 insurgents estimated to have been in Fallouja before the invasion are believed to have fled this Sunni Muslim city west of Baghdad. But those who have remained are tenacious, even though Marines say they have killed hundreds of them.
| If the Marines have bumped off 600+, as was claimed yesterday, and captured I dunno how many, that's a pretty significant chunk of 3,000, and still a pretty good chunk of 5000 — say, between 12 and 20 percent attrition. |
Guerrilla snipers crouch in buildings and amid the rubble. Small squads of insurgents rush Marine positions. Dozens of rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, have struck tanks and other military vehicles. A pickup with six men carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers was spotted near one mosque. Several snipers on rooftops halted the advance of a platoon of Marines heading out on foot Wednesday to attack insurgents in a mosque where they had been firing on U.S. troops. "They seem to be communicating with each other," said 1st Sgt. Jose Andrade of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, as he crouched on a main street, taking cover. "It makes it harder to get at them."
| Where's the tactical intel? |
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