The Marines who swept into the Euphrates River town of Ubaydi confronted an enemy they had not expected to find - and one that attacked in surprising ways.
As they pushed from house to house in early fighting, trying to flush out the insurgents who had attacked their column with mortar fire, they ran into sandbagged emplacements behind garden walls. They found a house where insurgents were crouching in the basement, firing upwards through slits hacked at ankle height in the ground-floor walls, aiming at spots that the Marines' body armor did not cover.
The shock was that the enemy was not supposed to be in this town at all. Instead, American intelligence indicated that the insurgency had massed on the other side of the river. Marine commanders expressed surprise Monday not only at the insurgents' presence but also the extent of their preparations, as if they expected the Marines to come.
"That is the great question," said Col. Stephen Davis, commander of Marine Regimental Combat Team 2, responsible for this rugged corner of Anbar province near the Syrian border. American officials describe the region, known as the Jazirah Desert, as a haven for foreign fighters who shuttle across the porous Syrian border, using the broken terrain for cover.
Three Marine companies and supporting armored vehicles crossed to the north side of the Euphrates early Monday, using rafts and a hastily constructed pontoon bridge. From there they were expected to roll west toward the border, raiding isolated villages where insurgents are believed to cache weapons and fighters. The offensive, planned for weeks, is expected to stretch on for several days.
"We're north of the river (and) we're moving everywhere we want to go," Davis said late Monday. "Resistance is predictably low, but I do not expect it to stay that way."
In recent weeks, intelligence suggested that insurgents were using the area to build car bombs that later would be used in attacks in Baghdad and other cities. More than 300 Iraqis have been killed in insurgent attacks in the past two weeks, following the formation of a Shiite-dominated government. A senior military official in Washington told The Associated Press that the Marines were targeting followers of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has been linked to many of the most violent attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces.
The offensive that began Sunday is described as one of the largest involving U.S. troops since the assault on Fallujah last fall. It involves more than 1,000 Marines and Army personnel, backed by helicopters and jet fighters.
With the Marines pressing the assault, new details emerged about the pitched battles that took place Sunday in Ubaydi, a town perched on the tip of a bend in the Euphrates, 9 miles east of the Syrian border. As Army engineers worked to shore up soggy banks and build the bridge, waiting Marines came under mortar fire from a town they had assumed was free of the enemy.
After calling in air strikes from prowling fighter jets and helicopter gunships, the Marines entered the town in armored personnel carriers and light armored vehicles. At times the fighting was door to door as Marines sifted through areas where resistance was stiffest. According to commanders, Marines entered walled-off front yards in a row of white townhouses in the town's southwest corner to find a scene reminiscent of the fighting in Fallujah: sandbagged firing positions next to the front doors. They suspected the area had been used for mortar attacks.
Maj. Steve Lawson of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines said his troops had found a house on the north side of town that apparently had been rigged to ambush invading soldiers. Slits cut low in the walls allowed insurgents to fire up at the Marines as they entered. After retreating, Marines in Lawson's company called in artillery and heavy machine guns to rake the house. As sporadic fighting continued Monday morning, they brought in tanks and leveled it, Davis said.
Though military commanders in Baghdad announced that 100 insurgent fighters were killed in the early fighting, along with three Marines, Davis' figures were lower. He said "a couple of dozen" insurgents had been killed in Ubaydi, about 10 at another river crossing near Al Qaim, and several who were killed by air strikes north of the river.
Other commanders said they had recovered few bodies but had seen blood trails that suggested insurgents were dragging away wounded or dead fighters. The number of insurgents in the region is "in the hundreds," Davis said. "How many hundreds is tough to tell." But more surprising, he said, was the insurgents' preparation and tactical prowess, a development that he said reinforced intelligence that many of the insurgents have been trained outside Iraq.
Davis described sophisticated attacks in which the detonation of a roadside bomb would be quickly followed by accurate mortar or rocket fire, then machine-gun fire as Marines raced to the area. "They clearly have trained people," he said. "It looks rehearsed."
Marines who had captured an existing bridge over the Euphrates north of Al Qaim came under attack early Monday by several insurgents, Davis said. An air assault killed about 10 of them, who were wearing flak jackets - which American officials generally take as a sign that the fighters were not local Iraqis.
As the fighting raged Sunday in Ubaydi and other towns along the Euphrates, a platoon of Marines perched on cliffs near the Syrian border, hoping to call in air strikes on any fighters who tried to slip across, commanders said. The commanders reported that the Marines saw truckloads of men speeding toward remote houses in the region, leaping off the trucks and racing inside. They came out carrying armloads of rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles, loaded them onto their trucks and headed back east, toward the fighting. |