[Marxism] The morning after the big roll-over, fighting in Falluja continues

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

www.nytimes.com
U.S. and Iraqis Continue Battle Against Rebels in Mosul
By EDWARD WONG
and JAMES GLANZ

Published: November 16, 2004


BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 16 - American and Iraqi forces continued operations
today against fighters in the northern city of Mosul, one of several
cities in Iraq where guerrillas staged a counteroffensive as American
troops struggled to flush the remaining insurgents from the
rubble-strewn streets of Falluja.

The American military said in a statement today that the forces were
striking against "isolated pockets of insurgent fighters" in the city.
Bridges have been sealed off to civilian traffic and a 4 p.m. to 6 a.m.
curfew has been imposed, the statement said.

Over the past few days, guerrillas in Baquba, Mosul, Kirkuk and Suwaira
stormed police stations, set oil wells ablaze and struck at American
military convoys with suicide car bombs, routing Iraqi security forces
in several coordinated assaults and severely damaging parts of the
country's petroleum-based economic lifeline.

Those attacks took place as a weeklong offensive continued in Falluja,
where a five-hour gun battle broke out in the southernmost reaches of
the city on Monday morning. Tanks and other armored vehicles had fought
their way through the area and had seemingly quashed all remaining
resistance to the weeklong offensive, although some rebels had stayed
hidden in the bombed-out landscape of the district and came out fighting
around dawn, killing at least two marines.

"They're clearly fighting until the last man," said Lt. Col. Gareth
Brandl, commander of the First Battalion, Eighth Regiment, First Marine
Expeditionary Force.
[snip]


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