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Qaeda-Aligned Militants Press Fight Over Key Iraqi Cities
A Respite, Then Mayhem, as Qaeda-Aligned Militants Fight for Key Iraqi Cities
(about 4 hours later)
BAGHDAD — Radical Sunni militants aligned with Al Qaeda fought for control of Falluja and Ramadi on Friday, escalating a battle over the two cities that have increasingly become centers of Sunni extremism since American forces withdrew from the country at the end of 2011.
BAGHDAD — Days of fighting between black-clad Qaeda militants and Iraq’s security forces took a short-lived respite on Friday as a veneer of calm returned to Falluja, where traffic police and street cleaners resumed work and mosque loudspeakers exhorted stores to reopen so hungry residents could buy food.
Over the past several days, the Iraqi government has rushed troop reinforcements to the areas in the western province of Anbar, where the militants, dressed in black and waving the flag of Al Qaeda, have commandeered mosque loudspeakers to call for supporters to join their struggle. On Thursday, they set fire to police stations, freed prisoners from jail and occupied mosques.
But just as quickly, the calm evaporated when the militants appeared at the close of Friday Prayer – which had been moved by local imams to a public park, away from the combat zones – and seized the stage, waving the Qaeda flag and daring the Iraqi authorities to evict them.
The fighting picked up again on Friday after what appeared to be a morning lull.
“We declare Falluja as an Islamic state, and we call on you to be on our side!” one fighter shouted to the crowd, according to witness accounts.
In Falluja, traffic police officers returned to work and municipal workers cleaned the streets and fixed electricity lines. Messages broadcast from mosque loudspeakers asked merchants to reopen their shops because residents had begun running out of food after days of fighting.
Referring to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government and its Shiite ally, Iran, the fighter shouted, “We are here to defend you from the army of Maliki and the Iranian Safavids,” a reference to the Persian Empire that ruled present-day Iran and Iraq hundreds of years ago.
Later in the day, the calm was shattered. Local imams had decided to hold Friday prayers in a public park, rather than in areas closer to the fighting, and as services were concluding large numbers of masked militants affiliated with Al Qaeda appeared and took the stage. Waving a black flag, one fighter shouted to the crowd: “We declare Falluja as an Islamic state and we call on you to be on our side.”
“We welcome the return of all workers, even the local police, but they have to be under our state and our rule,” he shouted.
“We are here to defend you from the army of Maliki and the Iranian Safavids,” the fighter continued. “We welcome the return of all workers, even the local police, but they have to be under our state and our rule.”
From that moment, mayhem resumed in Falluja and other areas of Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, including in its largest city, Ramadi, in an escalating fight.
Also on Friday, gunmen blew up several government buildings in Falluja, including the police headquarters, the local council and the office of the mayor, according to a security official.
It has pitted Qaeda-affiliated Sunni extremists, who now control large amounts of territory in the desert province, against the security forces of the Shiite-dominated central government, backed by local tribesmen who are not strong supporters of the government but, in this struggle, have decided to side with the army and police against Al Qaeda.
As fighting spread, the militants recaptured that had been liberated by security forces and their tribal allies. Fighting was also said to have picked up again in Ramadi, and one official said four soldiers had been killed.
The fight has become a severe test of Prime Minister Maliki’s ability to keep the country together and prevent a full-scale eruption of civil war.
There were no immediate reports of other confirmed casualties on Friday. On Thursday, it was not possible, amid the unfolding chaos, to determine a precise number of casualties, but officials in hospitals in Anbar Province reported at least 35 people killed and more than 70 wounded. Security officials said the toll over several days of fighting was 108 dead, including 31 civilians and 35 militants. The rest of the dead were Iraqi security force members.
The combat scenes that have played out in Anbar, which had been the heart of the Sunni insurgency during the American occupation and where more than 1,300 American soldiers were killed, have provided the sharpest evidence yet of a country descending into a maelstrom of violence, just two years after the departure of the last United States soldiers.
Falluja and Ramadi are the two largest and most important cities in Anbar. The province holds grave historical significance for the United States, which asserted when its forces withdrew from the country that Iraq was on track to become a stable democracy.
For the Qaeda militants in Iraq, who are fighting under the same name as the most extremist Sunni rebels in neighboring Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the gains they have made in Anbar represent a significant step toward realizing the long-held goal of transforming Iraq and Syria into one battlefield for the same cause: establishing a Sunni Islamist state.
The province also represents the place where the United States witnessed its greatest losses, and perhaps its most significant success, during the eight-year war.
As fighting resumed on Friday, militants blew up several government buildings in Falluja, including the police headquarters, the local council and office of the mayor, according to a security official. Militants also retook areas that had been liberated by security forces and their tribal allies. In one reclaimed area of Falluja, a militant said over a mosque loudspeaker, “We are God’s rule on Earth, no one can defeat God’s will!”
Nearly one-third of the American soldiers killed in the war died trying to pacify Anbar, and Americans fought two battles for control of Falluja, in some of the bloodiest combat that American troops had faced since Vietnam.
Sheikh Majed al-Jerasi, a tribal leader whose men are fighting with the government, said that in his area of Falluja on Friday, tribesmen and police commanders regrouped after the fighting resumed, and then stormed the main street of the city, retaking a municipal building, where by nightfall his men were holed up.
The violence in Ramadi and Falluja had implications beyond Anbar’s borders, as the Sunni militants fought beneath the same banner as the most hard-line jihadists they have inspired in Syria — the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
At night, Mohamed al-Isawi, the head of the Falluja police, said in a telephone interview that he was gathering men in an area north of Falluja, as a staging ground for what he hoped would be a decisive battle to retake full control of the city.
That fighting, and a deadly bombing in the Beirut area on Thursday, provided the latest evidence that the Syrian civil war was helping breed bloodshed and sectarian violence around the region, further destabilizing Lebanon and Iraq while fueling a resurgence of radical Islamist fighters.
“We succeeded today with the tribesmen in getting back the main street of Falluja after a big fight,” he said, “and now we are keen to fight the terrorists and liberate our city from any traces of the criminals.”
The latest fighting began after Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, ordered security forces to dismantle protest encampments in Falluja and Ramadi.
But on Friday night, many signs suggested the militants still had the advantage, as they blew up power stations in Ramadi and Falluja and ordered residents not to run their generators, plunging the cities into almost total darkness.
The order came after fighting erupted following the government’s arrest of a prominent Sunni lawmaker who had been a supporter of the protests, which had been going on for more than a year and had become an outlet for disenchanted Sunnis angered over their treatment by Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government. The arrest attempt set off a firefight that left several bodyguards and the brother of the lawmaker dead, and led to clashes between the government and armed tribesmen.
“We are scared, my kids keep crying from the sounds of shelling,” said Azher Qasim, a Falluja resident reached by phone Friday evening. “I have a sick son, and I need to buy medication for him, and no stores are open. We have no food, or heat, and our only light is candles.”
Officials later seemed to have calmed the situation, and in a deal between local tribal leaders and the central government, Mr. Maliki agreed to withdraw army troops from Anbar on Tuesday.
He added, “We might die any time from a rocket, or a gunmen storming our house.”
But as soon as any trace of government authority vanished, large numbers of Qaeda-aligned fighters attacked the cities, and by Wednesday the prime minister reversed his decision. He sent troops to try to secure the support of local tribal leaders, offering them guns and money to join forces with the regular army.
An Iraqi special forces soldier reached by telephone on Friday said he was holed up with his men at a college campus in Ramadi, sending targeting information for airstrikes to superiors. The soldier, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, described fierce fighting on Friday, and said his patrol had been targeted by suicide bombers.
In a telephone interview on Thursday, one tribal fighter loyal to the government, Abu Omar, described heavy clashes across Falluja, and said the government had started shelling militant hide-outs.
“We have orders to kill any gunmen in the street,” he said. “When we catch one, we kill him immediately. There is no arrest.”
“We told all the families to leave their houses,” he said over the phone, with the sound of gunfire in the background. “Many of the families fled from the city, and others are still unable to because of the heavy clashes. We have reports that the hospital in Falluja is full of dead and wounded people.”
The soldier said he had been facing some of the most intense fighting of his life.
Many of the tribesmen fighting alongside government security forces have been doing so reluctantly, making the calculation that, in this case, the government is the lesser evil than Al Qaeda.
“We have been here for six days, fighting everywhere and storming cities and police stations all over Anbar,” he said. “When we first entered Ramadi, it was like hell opened a door. They were shooting at us from everywhere. For me, I have one idea in my mind – that I have to fight with no mercy, or I will die.”
Sheikh Hamed Rasheed Muhana echoed what many Sunnis in Iraq feel when he complained that the government had alienated Sunnis with harsh security crackdowns and mass arrests of Sunni men, militants and ordinary civilians alike. He said the government had worsened matters by “creating more depressed people willing to join Al Qaeda because of the sectarian behavior and ongoing arrests.”
The Iraqi government has reportedly used airstrikes, from Russian helicopters the government recently bought.
Also on Thursday, in a move that seemed calculated to appease Sunni resentment, the government arrested a Shiite militia leader in Baghdad who is believed to be the leader of the Iraqi affiliate of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group.
Since the withdrawal of American soldiers at the end of 2011, the United States, in an effort to influence the Iraqi government, has maintained a multibillion-dollar program to sell weapons to the Iraqis. But the slow pace and bureaucracy involved – not to mention that many of the weapons, such as F-16 fighter jets, have little practical use against Qaeda cells – has frustrated the Iraqis, who have increasingly looked elsewhere, especially Russia.
Thursday was the fourth consecutive day of battles in Anbar. Late in the afternoon, security officials said the government had regained some territory in Ramadi but that fighting was still fierce in Falluja, where militants controlled a much larger portion of the city than they did in Ramadi.
More recently, as the Sunni insurgency has gained strength, the United States has said it was rushing missiles and surveillance drones to Iraq.
It was not immediately clear how much terrain had been taken into control by the militants on Friday.
By Friday evening, reports emerged from contested areas in Anbar of government shelling and civilian casualties. An official at a hospital in Falluja said the hospital had received the bodies of three civilians killed in the shelling and had tended to 30 others who were wounded, including at least four children. Late Friday, security officials in Anbar said that 86 people had been killed in the day's fighting, and that 150 others were wounded. It was not immediately clear how many of those were civilians.
With Iraqi casualty rates at their highest in five years, the United States has rushed to provide the Iraqi government with new missiles and surveillance drones to combat the resurgence of Al Qaeda.
Heavy fighting also afflicted the western edge of Ramadi, according to a police official, and in one battle alone, the official said, 17 militants were killed and seven trucks belonging to the insurgents destroyed.
American officials have been in touch with the Maliki government and its Sunni critics, trying to encourage them to join forces against Al Qaeda.
Yasir
Ghazi reported from Baghdad, and Tim Arango from Istanbul. An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Anbar Province.
“We’ve encouraged the government to work with the population to fight these terrorists,” said Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman.
The chaos in Anbar has underscored the steady deterioration of Iraq’s security since the withdrawal of American forces. The battles have heightened fears that Iraq is descending into the type of sectarian civil war that it once faced during the American-led occupation.
The center of that unrest was in the desert region of Anbar, a cradle of Sunni discontent where swaggering tribesmen defied authority even under Saddam Hussein. An American pact with those Anbar tribesmen in 2007 — to pay them to switch sides and fight alongside the United States against Al Qaeda — became known as the Awakening and is considered partly responsible for turning the tide of the war.
Abu Risha, a leading tribal sheikh in Ramadi, was perhaps the Americans’ most stalwart partner, and even today he is likely to show visitors the plaques he received from American officers, and old pictures of him with American soldiers, even as he speaks of what he calls betrayal by the United States for leaving without finishing the job.
In a statement released this week, he exhorted his men to again fight Al Qaeda, and hinted at business left unfinished by the Americans.
“We were all surprised that the terrorists left the desert and entered your cities to return a second time, to commit their crimes, to cut off the heads, blow up houses, kill scholars and disrupt life,” he said. “They came back, and I am delighted for their public appearance after the security forces failed to find them. Let this time be the decisive confrontation with Al Qaeda.”
In another indication that the war in Syria is reverberating back here, Iraqis who fled the country by the thousands after the American invasion and then began to return as the fighting eased are becoming refugees again.
Analysts have long worried that the war in Syria would engulf Iraq, as hard-line Sunni rebels in Syria have said they see the two countries as one battlefield in the fight for Sunni dominance. For some time, the Syrian war has dragged in Iraqis along sectarian lines, with Iraqi Shiites rushing to Syria to support the government of President Bashar al-Assad, and Iraq’s Qaeda affiliate fostering the most extremist Sunni fighting units across the border.
Yasir Ghazi reported from Baghdad, and Tim Arango from Istanbul. An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Falluja, Iraq, and Michael R. Gordon from Jerusalem.
