The assault against Falluja began here Sunday night as American Special Forces and Iraqi troops burst into Falluja General Hospital and seized it within an hour. At 10 p.m., Iraqi troops clambered off seven-ton trucks, sprinting with American Special Forces soldiers around the side of the main building of the hospital, considered a refuge for insurgents and a center of propaganda against allied forces, entering the complex to bewildered looks from patients and employees. Ear-splitting bangs rang out as troops used a gunlike tool called a doorbuster, which uses the force from firing a blank .22-caliber cartridge to thrust forward a chisel to break heavy door locks. Iraqi troops eagerly kicked the doors in, some not waiting for the locks to break. Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs. In less than an hour, the compound was secure. Most of the Iraqis had their cuffs snipped off and were sitting up along hallways in the hospital's main building. Doctors were back to attending to the most seriously ill, watched by Iraqi and American troops. There were broken doors and windows, but little in the way of more severe damage. And there was only one injury: an Iraqi soldier who accidentally discharged his Kalashnikov rifle, injuring his lower leg.Two companies from the Iraqi 36th Commando Battalion and American Special Forces teams that have been training the Iraqi battalion for the better part of a year joined in the attack on the hospital. The operation was the latest for the 36th Battalion, with men drawn from across the country, including some from Sunni heartland cities like Ramadi and Tikrit where the insurgency is fierce. Iraqis in the unit are eager to demonstrate that they can be a credible fighting force against the insurgents. But unlike some of their past operations - most notably at a mosque courtyard in Samarra last month where they killed 4 insurgents and apprehended 24 others - the Iraqi special forces met little resistance this time.
A few hundred yards away, an important strategic as well as symbolic battle was playing out: American troops, fighting to secure the western end of the two bridges across the Euphrates River, received intense fire from fortified insurgent positions on the east side of the river. One of the bridges was the scene of the grisly episode on March 31, when Iraqis hung the charred and dismembered bodies of at least two of four American security contractors who had been killed from the bridge's spans. Both the bridges and the hospital are situated on a peninsula formed by the Euphrates as it flows past downtown Falluja, on the east side of the river - a logical area, American commanders say, for insurgents to fall back if driven from central Falluja.