InstaLawyer has a fascinating letter from a Marine who served in Fallujah revealing some of the enemy’s tactics and how the US was able to counter them:
Although American forces had not been into the city since April, we had been collecting intelligence on the city for months through unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s), human intelligence, and Special Forces. So we knew exactly where they stored their weapons and where they held meetings, and so on all of these attacks from the air were precise and very effective in reducing the enemies ability to fight us before the battle even started. With each attack, secondary explosions of weapons/ammo blowing up were heard. The Coalition also threw the enemy a curveball by destroying all the vehicles that had been parked in the same location for more than 3 days—the enemy planned to use these as car bombs when we attacked. Again, almost every single vehicle the air assets attacked had huge secondary explosions.
It never ceases to amaze me how singularly resourceful and adept our forces are. Fallujah was supposed to be the next Stalingrad or Grozny, but it turned out to be a decisive victory for the coalition with casualties at an exceptionally low level for an urban operation. The US military has clearly learned the lessons of Mogadishu, and our urban operations training is the best in the world. The enemy’s attempts to turn Fallujah into a bloodbath failed, and now the enemy finds itself scattered across Iraq with the coalition continuing to put the squeeze on them wherever they go. The violence remains, but without Fallujah as a base of operations, the enemy’s operational tempo cannot be maintained.
Our troops did a brilliant job in Fallujah, and their actions will help rid Iraq of the terrorists who are responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.
