{"id":442,"date":"2004-12-17T21:55:57","date_gmt":"2004-12-18T03:55:57","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=442"},"modified":"2004-12-17T21:56:35","modified_gmt":"2004-12-18T03:56:35","slug":"marines-face-more-cunning-foe-in-fallujah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/?p=442","title":{"rendered":"Marines Face More Cunning Foe in Fallujah"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Associated Press is trying to put the worst spin possible<\/a> on the aftermath of the Fallujah operation, perhaps the most stunningly successful urban operation in military history.<\/p>\n

American troops face sporadic but cunning resistance from insurgents as they sweep the city of Fallujah more than a month after U.S. and Iraqi forces invaded the militants’ stronghold, U.S. officials said Friday.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So the terrorist remnants are more cunning? Hell yeah and a great big “Duh!” to the AP. The dumb and crazy are now serving as corpses.<\/p>\n

They characterized the insurgents who remain as less suicidal than those who fought the initial battle, using a newly discovered tunnel system or knocking holes in walls to move unseen and avoid American troops.<\/p>\n

“Pretty much the ones who have wanted to be martyrs outright have been killed and the ones who remain are the smart ones, or the ones who have been able to avoid our clearing forces, so we continue to clear, to back clear, and to clear again,” said Lt. Col. Daniel Wilson, deputy for current operations for the 1st Marine Division.<\/p>\n

“We know that they’re slithering around in the tunnels from one place to another,” Wilson said.<\/p>\n

The U.S. military claims that 1,200 insurgents were killed in the weeklong invasion to destroy what were believed to be the insurgents’ main bases in Iraq. At least 50 Marines and eight Iraqi soldiers also died. No civilian casualty figures have been released.<\/p>\n

Weeks later, the city is in ruins. The bodies of dogs lie in the streets, piles of rubble line the roads and what little infrastructure there was before the onslaught has been shattered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More cunning but numerically shredded. I can live with that.<\/p>\n

The Marine officials said the insurgents are far weaker now, pointing to a 60 percent drop in the number of attacks in western Iraq from the week before the Nov. 8 invasion to last week. They said a cordon is keeping insurgents from coming back in large numbers and that the destruction of the guerrillas’ Fallujah bases would help counter the new threats ahead of Iraq’s Jan. 30 elections.<\/p>\n

“It hinders their ability to interfere with the election process and it hinders their ability to discredit the government because they’re not able to set up these bases like they had in Fallujah,” Marine Maj. Jim West, an intelligence planning officer, said at a briefing with two other Marine officials. “They don’t have a safe haven where they can conduct the horrific torture that they did.”<\/p>\n

Fallujah was believed to be the focal point for kidnappings and beheadings orchestrated by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s terror group al-Qaida in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi is believed to have slipped out ahead of the U.S. ground assault.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dang those Marine officials for pointing out facts showing not only the success of the operation, but also overall improvement it has rendered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Associated Press is trying to put the worst spin possible on the aftermath of the Fallujah operation, perhaps the most stunningly successful urban operation in military history. American troops face sporadic but cunning resistance from insurgents as they sweep the city of Fallujah more than a month after U.S. and Iraqi forces invaded the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}