or several weeks in late 2004, U.S. Marines pushed their way through Fallujah, fighting street-by-street, house-by-house, room-by-room. In that desert city, on the banks of a polluted Euphrates River, they experienced some of the heaviest urban combat the Corps had seen since the Battle of Hue City, Vietnam, in 1968.
The second battle to retake Fallujah, code-named Operation Phantom Fury, and eventually secured the longstanding Sunni stronghold, 35 miles west of Baghdad. The fighting, which for many young Marines was their first real combat, left deep psychological scars. Only a decade later were those scars beginning to heal. But when the city fell again to al-Qaeda and affiliated militants, including ISIS, in 2014, those who had helped to liberate Fallujah were thunderstruck. Their sacrifices, it seemed, had finally come to nothing.
In his preface to Fallujah Redux: The Anbar Awakening and the Struggle with al-Qaeda, a new book published by the U.S. Naval Institute Press, John Allen blames the city’s loss on self-seeking Iraqi politicians. Allen, who was Deputy Commanding General of Multi-National Forces West and II Marine Expeditionary Forces (Forward) during Operation Iraqi Freedom, writes: “political compromise and the struggle of politics [should have] replaced the struggle of arms.” That, Allen believes, “was the greatest gift our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines could give the Iraqi people.”
Political compromise, however, waned as American forces withdrew from Iraq. “The fact that Iraqi politicians have squandered that gift does not diminish what we did in Al-Anbar,” adds Allen, who now serves as President Obama’s special envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition, which is helping to prepare Iraqi forces to take back the city.
Fallujah Redux tells the story of what Americans did (and failed to do) in Fallujah several years after the two major battles to secure the city in 2004. It begins in 2007, chronicling “the far less glamorous but fundamentally more important campaign that eventually won Fallujah and set the conditions for its transfer to Iraqi control.”
Written by Operation Iraqi Freedom veterans Daniel R. Green and William F. Mullen III, the book details how American forces were able to turn local Iraqi tribes against al-Qaeda’s insurgency, enabling the Iraqi government to hold the city against a lingering insurgency and allowing U.S. forces to leave.
Green, a Defense Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, played a pivotal role. Sent to Fallujah for the second time in 2007, he became the tribal and leadership engagement officer for a Naval Special Warfare unit. Brigadier General Mullen, a twenty-seven-year Marine infantry officer, served as a battalion commander in charge of the city for most of 2007. Together, they led efforts to build partnerships with local Iraqis intended to rout out insurgents by bolstering the city’s traditional tribal authority structures.
When Green and Mullen returned to Fallujah in 2007, they discovered a security situation that had deteriorated sharply from their previous time in the city from 2005 to 2006. In the face of mounting casualties, calls in Congress to pull American forces out of Iraq, and daily media reports suggesting the war was lost, they set about to deal with both nationalist and extremist Islamist insurgents.
In recounting their mission, Green and Mullen alternate between conceptual musings on the nature of counterinsurgency warfare and a griping narrative description of their day-to-day activities. Their mission – which is what sets this book apart from others on Fallujah – is not merely one of survival; it is to reverse the violence and return the city to a semblance of peace. In this respect, their job is much more complex than previous offensives to take the city. Yet despite this complexity, gauging its success (or failure) is far less ambiguous. “The most frustrating aspect of counterinsurgency warfare,” they write, “is that if one is not clearly winning, one is losing.”
The main challenge the authors face in Fallujah is to figure out which tribal sheiks, if any, genuinely represent the people. This is no easy task, for the city’s residents “were not particularly tribal.” Many sheiks are former Baathists looking to regain power. Others are actually al-Qaeda members or their supporters seeking contracts to finance a continued insurgency. Surveying the city’s human terrain, Green and Mullen write: “It was clear that the insurgency of Iraq was much more multifaceted than was the Taliban in Afghanistan.”
Once they are able to recruit suitable Iraqi partners, Coalition forces work alongside them to secure and stabilize the city, and to start the process of reestablishing a viable local government. To accomplish this, U.S. Marines and Special Operations Forces train and arm local tribesmen to become Provincial Security Forces (PSF) or Indigenous Counterinsurgency Forces (ICF).
“The general plan was to provide these tribesmen with enough firepower to protect their home areas,” Green and Mullen write, “but not enough to go on the offensive against other tribes.” The plan soon bears fruit, acting “like an employment sponge on unemployed military-age males and provided them with positions of respect in their communities,” which “contributed significantly to a reduction in al-Qaeda recruits due to people simply having a job.”
Since Iraqis are strongly loyal to their own tribe, Green and Mullen realize it is crucial to identify a paramount sheik, and to encourage him to work with U.S. forces to bring their plan into effect. To do this, they undertake to enhance his wasta – a term used by Iraqis to describe the respect a person commands – by repeatedly facilitating public demonstrations of his influence. These demonstrations include help with civil affairs projects such as clinics, community centers, and other public infrastructure.
Fallujah’s subsheiks quickly come around, enticed by the prospect of lucrative contracts and employment for their men. Even those previously aligned with al-Qaeda begin to work with Coalition forces, providing assistance in pinpointing insurgent targets, locating arms caches, and conveying information of tactical value. The effort culminates in Operation Alljah, in which combined Coalition and Iraqi forces sweep the city, one neighborhood at a time, to drive out or destroy the remaining insurgents.
“A key goal of having newly reconciled tribal members participate in military operations against al-Qaeda,” write Green and Mullen, “was that it created a blood feud between the reconciling member and his old al-Qaeda acquaintances.”
The authors point out that their own forces have to show a different kind of moral fortitude if they are to win against an “enemy that would do anything and everything to further its cause, no matter how despicable”:
We were not them and had to remain above revenge. We were Americans and represented the best nation on earth. These last themes were particularly important because many young Americans want things to be fair – if the enemy can do something, we ought to be able to do it also. Unfortunately, Americans rarely ever fight on an even basis. Limits are crucial in winning a counterinsurgency fight. Not adhering to limits would likely be more satisfying in terms of revenge, but it would also guarantee that we would lose the conflict.
This, Green and Mullen believe, is the key to waging a successful counterinsurgency war. It can also reduce post-traumatic stress, they argue, since combatants who fight within moral limits go home with less weight on their conscience.
Indeed, throughout the book, Green and Mullen show us that defeating an idea requires more than just force of arms. Confronting the insurgency with a “holistic approach” enables them to bring the tribes over to the Coalition side. That, they write, “had a more decisive effect on the city than a thousand direct-action raids on targets in the middle of the night.”
The approach also allows them to see ordinary Iraqis for who they are: a people able “to endure great hardships and persevere,” and who generally want peace and stability after decades of physically and mentally debilitating conflict.
Green and Mullen had hoped that this book would “provide a sense of closure for all those who served in the Fallujah area or lost a friend or a loved one there.” Since mid-2007, reporting on Fallujah has all but disappeared from the mainstream media, and many wonder what has become of that city and whether American sacrifices had any meaning.
The emergence of a new insurgency in 2014 may have dashed those hopes, but it has by no means lessened the importance of this book. Rather than being simply an engrossing postscript to a bygone war, Fallujah Redux should become required reading for those involved in fresh efforts to train and assist Iraqi security forces as they work counter the pernicious influence of ISIS.
a global affairs media network
Fallujah Redux
May 20, 2015
F
or several weeks in late 2004, U.S. Marines pushed their way through Fallujah, fighting street-by-street, house-by-house, room-by-room. In that desert city, on the banks of a polluted Euphrates River, they experienced some of the heaviest urban combat the Corps had seen since the Battle of Hue City, Vietnam, in 1968.
The second battle to retake Fallujah, code-named Operation Phantom Fury, and eventually secured the longstanding Sunni stronghold, 35 miles west of Baghdad. The fighting, which for many young Marines was their first real combat, left deep psychological scars. Only a decade later were those scars beginning to heal. But when the city fell again to al-Qaeda and affiliated militants, including ISIS, in 2014, those who had helped to liberate Fallujah were thunderstruck. Their sacrifices, it seemed, had finally come to nothing.
In his preface to Fallujah Redux: The Anbar Awakening and the Struggle with al-Qaeda, a new book published by the U.S. Naval Institute Press, John Allen blames the city’s loss on self-seeking Iraqi politicians. Allen, who was Deputy Commanding General of Multi-National Forces West and II Marine Expeditionary Forces (Forward) during Operation Iraqi Freedom, writes: “political compromise and the struggle of politics [should have] replaced the struggle of arms.” That, Allen believes, “was the greatest gift our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines could give the Iraqi people.”
Political compromise, however, waned as American forces withdrew from Iraq. “The fact that Iraqi politicians have squandered that gift does not diminish what we did in Al-Anbar,” adds Allen, who now serves as President Obama’s special envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition, which is helping to prepare Iraqi forces to take back the city.
Fallujah Redux tells the story of what Americans did (and failed to do) in Fallujah several years after the two major battles to secure the city in 2004. It begins in 2007, chronicling “the far less glamorous but fundamentally more important campaign that eventually won Fallujah and set the conditions for its transfer to Iraqi control.”
Written by Operation Iraqi Freedom veterans Daniel R. Green and William F. Mullen III, the book details how American forces were able to turn local Iraqi tribes against al-Qaeda’s insurgency, enabling the Iraqi government to hold the city against a lingering insurgency and allowing U.S. forces to leave.
Green, a Defense Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, played a pivotal role. Sent to Fallujah for the second time in 2007, he became the tribal and leadership engagement officer for a Naval Special Warfare unit. Brigadier General Mullen, a twenty-seven-year Marine infantry officer, served as a battalion commander in charge of the city for most of 2007. Together, they led efforts to build partnerships with local Iraqis intended to rout out insurgents by bolstering the city’s traditional tribal authority structures.
When Green and Mullen returned to Fallujah in 2007, they discovered a security situation that had deteriorated sharply from their previous time in the city from 2005 to 2006. In the face of mounting casualties, calls in Congress to pull American forces out of Iraq, and daily media reports suggesting the war was lost, they set about to deal with both nationalist and extremist Islamist insurgents.
In recounting their mission, Green and Mullen alternate between conceptual musings on the nature of counterinsurgency warfare and a griping narrative description of their day-to-day activities. Their mission – which is what sets this book apart from others on Fallujah – is not merely one of survival; it is to reverse the violence and return the city to a semblance of peace. In this respect, their job is much more complex than previous offensives to take the city. Yet despite this complexity, gauging its success (or failure) is far less ambiguous. “The most frustrating aspect of counterinsurgency warfare,” they write, “is that if one is not clearly winning, one is losing.”
The main challenge the authors face in Fallujah is to figure out which tribal sheiks, if any, genuinely represent the people. This is no easy task, for the city’s residents “were not particularly tribal.” Many sheiks are former Baathists looking to regain power. Others are actually al-Qaeda members or their supporters seeking contracts to finance a continued insurgency. Surveying the city’s human terrain, Green and Mullen write: “It was clear that the insurgency of Iraq was much more multifaceted than was the Taliban in Afghanistan.”
Once they are able to recruit suitable Iraqi partners, Coalition forces work alongside them to secure and stabilize the city, and to start the process of reestablishing a viable local government. To accomplish this, U.S. Marines and Special Operations Forces train and arm local tribesmen to become Provincial Security Forces (PSF) or Indigenous Counterinsurgency Forces (ICF).
“The general plan was to provide these tribesmen with enough firepower to protect their home areas,” Green and Mullen write, “but not enough to go on the offensive against other tribes.” The plan soon bears fruit, acting “like an employment sponge on unemployed military-age males and provided them with positions of respect in their communities,” which “contributed significantly to a reduction in al-Qaeda recruits due to people simply having a job.”
Since Iraqis are strongly loyal to their own tribe, Green and Mullen realize it is crucial to identify a paramount sheik, and to encourage him to work with U.S. forces to bring their plan into effect. To do this, they undertake to enhance his wasta – a term used by Iraqis to describe the respect a person commands – by repeatedly facilitating public demonstrations of his influence. These demonstrations include help with civil affairs projects such as clinics, community centers, and other public infrastructure.
Fallujah’s subsheiks quickly come around, enticed by the prospect of lucrative contracts and employment for their men. Even those previously aligned with al-Qaeda begin to work with Coalition forces, providing assistance in pinpointing insurgent targets, locating arms caches, and conveying information of tactical value. The effort culminates in Operation Alljah, in which combined Coalition and Iraqi forces sweep the city, one neighborhood at a time, to drive out or destroy the remaining insurgents.
“A key goal of having newly reconciled tribal members participate in military operations against al-Qaeda,” write Green and Mullen, “was that it created a blood feud between the reconciling member and his old al-Qaeda acquaintances.”
The authors point out that their own forces have to show a different kind of moral fortitude if they are to win against an “enemy that would do anything and everything to further its cause, no matter how despicable”:
We were not them and had to remain above revenge. We were Americans and represented the best nation on earth. These last themes were particularly important because many young Americans want things to be fair – if the enemy can do something, we ought to be able to do it also. Unfortunately, Americans rarely ever fight on an even basis. Limits are crucial in winning a counterinsurgency fight. Not adhering to limits would likely be more satisfying in terms of revenge, but it would also guarantee that we would lose the conflict.
This, Green and Mullen believe, is the key to waging a successful counterinsurgency war. It can also reduce post-traumatic stress, they argue, since combatants who fight within moral limits go home with less weight on their conscience.
Indeed, throughout the book, Green and Mullen show us that defeating an idea requires more than just force of arms. Confronting the insurgency with a “holistic approach” enables them to bring the tribes over to the Coalition side. That, they write, “had a more decisive effect on the city than a thousand direct-action raids on targets in the middle of the night.”
The approach also allows them to see ordinary Iraqis for who they are: a people able “to endure great hardships and persevere,” and who generally want peace and stability after decades of physically and mentally debilitating conflict.
Green and Mullen had hoped that this book would “provide a sense of closure for all those who served in the Fallujah area or lost a friend or a loved one there.” Since mid-2007, reporting on Fallujah has all but disappeared from the mainstream media, and many wonder what has become of that city and whether American sacrifices had any meaning.
The emergence of a new insurgency in 2014 may have dashed those hopes, but it has by no means lessened the importance of this book. Rather than being simply an engrossing postscript to a bygone war, Fallujah Redux should become required reading for those involved in fresh efforts to train and assist Iraqi security forces as they work counter the pernicious influence of ISIS.
