A Soldiers Blog

From the New York Times :

In Mosul, 225 miles north of the capital, sporadic fighting erupted Saturday, but clashes were smaller than on Thursday, when groups of insurgents overran at least a half-dozen police stations, said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, a spokesman for Task Force Olympia, assigned to control the northern region. Hundreds of policemen fled the guerrillas that day, and the Iraqi government fired the cityâ??s police chief on Friday.

Mosul has sizable numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Christians, and ethnic tensions have run high since the Americans invaded Iraq. It is clear that the Sunni Arabs are leading the insurgency here, while the Kurds and Christians are more sympathetic to the American forces.

A car bomb exploded next to a Kurdish patrol in the afternoon, killing at least six militiamen, witnesses said. The cityâ??s health bureau said that at least 25 people were killed and 62 wounded in violence on Thursday and Friday, though it was unknown how many of them were civilians and how many were guerrillas.

It is clear that the American-led forces were taken by surprise by the magnitude of the uprising. The Stryker Brigade, a light-armored mechanized unit based in Mosul, had to recall a battalion from the fighting in Falluja. The Iraqi government ordered four battalions of national guardsmen, all Kurds, to the city.

Up to 500 insurgents, far more than American and Iraqi intelligence had predicted, carried out the first big wave of attacks on police stations on Thursday by working in groups of 15 to 50, Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, commander of the Stryker Brigade, said in a telephone interview late Friday.

The general said he believed that the insurgency was being organized by former members of Saddam Husseinâ??s security forces.

The Iraqi Interior Ministry appointed a new police chief in Mosul on Saturday, and police officers were returning to the stations, some of which had been set afire, Colonel Hastings said. But the police were being confined to security duties at six sites, he added, because American soldiers might not be able to tell the real police from insurgents who could be roaming the city in stolen police uniforms or body armor.

In Al Wehda, a neighborhood of Mosul, insurgents slit the throats of two Iraqi National Guardsmen in the street, witnesses said.

â??When I was driving back to my house, I saw a huge gathering of people, so I stopped the car and went to see what was the matter,â?? said Muhammad Hazim, a resident. â??I saw a number of insurgents holding two Iraqi National Guard soldiers and reading a statement calling them traitors and collaborators with the enemy, and then they slaughtered them by slitting their throats and yelling, â??God is great!â?? â??

General Ham, the commander in Mosul, said the performance of the Iraqi policemen on Thursday had been â??very disappointing.â?? While raiding six or seven of the cityâ??s 33 police stations, the insurgents made off with up to 40 police vehicles, hundreds of weapons, handheld radios, computers, telephones, police uniforms and body armor.

From the Times-Reporter :

The American military said that a U.S. soldier in Baghdad was killed by â??indirect fire,â?? probably referring to a mortar or rocket attack.

From the Chicago Tribune :

Jump out. Kick in door. Spray machine-gun fire. Run to rooftop. Kill enemy. Jump back into armored vehicle. Move to new location.

Repeat.

So goes the battle for Fallujah as experienced Friday by the exhausted and bewildered soldiers of the 3rd Brigade of the Armyâ??s 1st Infantry Division. Flanked by Marines, the bleary-eyed troops led the southern push to corner die-hard Sunni Muslim insurgents who were the last obstacles to full American control of the city.

From the AFP via The Australian :

The body of a woman in her 60s, with her legs and arms cut off and throat slit was found today in the city of Fallujah but it was unclear whether she was a foreigner or an Iraqi, marines said.

The discovery was made as the marines moved through the south of Fallujah, hunting out the remaining die-hard rebels after a week of fierce fighting to regain control of the city.

An AFP photographer embedded with the marines said the woman had grey hair, was wearing a blue dress and her face was completely disfigured.

The marines said she appeared to have been on the street for about two days.

Sweeps of rubble-strewn neighbourhoods in Fallujah have already uncovered a grisly underworld of hostage slaughterhouses, prisons and torture chambers as well as the corpses of Iraqis who had been executed, marines say.

From the AFP via The Australian :

Three Marines were killed yesterday by an explosion as they entered a booby-trapped building in central Fallujah, while another 13 were wounded in a firefight nearby, a marine officer told AFP today.

Of the 13, ten were seriously injured in the gun battle just south of the main road that cuts through the centre of the Sunni Muslim bastion, the officer said.

The latest deaths bring to at least 25 the number of US troops who have been killed in the fight for Fallujah, which was launched on Monday. Five Iraqi soldiers have also died along with more than 1000 rebels.

From Reuters via the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) :

Resistance has dwindled in the last rebel redoubt in Fallujah, US officers said, but explosions still shook the smoke-wreathed city as an Iraqi Red Crescent convoy waited nearby to distribute relief.

â??Two days ago they were coming out and fighting us. Last night they were running. It looks like we are about to break their will,â?? Captain Robert Bodisch, a US tank company commander, told Reuters. â??I donâ??t think it will be long now.â??

Fighting was focused mainly on the Shuhada district, viewed by US forces as a stronghold for foreign fighters led by Jordanian Al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

But a Reuters reporter with the Red Crescent convoy at Fallujahâ??s main hospital by the Euphrates river on the western edge of the city said explosions had been sending up plumes of smoke in central and southern areas since 6:00am (local time).