In Fallujah's wake, marines go west

After five hours of shivering quietly in the desert outside Hit, where sulphur seeps from the ground and almost nothing grows, Bravo Company marines got the word - "good to go" - and began to creep into the sleeping city.

They were primed for strong resistance. But the marines of the First Battalion of the 23rd Regiment entered Hit (pronounced Heat) almost unopposed and filtered toward the neighborhood around the Mubarak mosque at 2 a.m., kicking down doors of homes in search of weapons and setting up a command post to coordinate operations to clear out the city's fighters.

Three weeks after Iraq's elections, US forces are still leading the fight in Anbar, the most dangerous of the country's 18 provinces. Marines have launched operations in at least three other provincial cities in operation "River Blitz."

Targeting hardscrabble cities like Hit, Ramadi, and Baghdadi, they are looking for foreign insurgent fighters and known insurgent hotbeds. But resistance has been light, far different from the November assault on Fallujah where dug-in mujahideen fought pitched battles with marines and died in the hundreds.

While that has been welcome news to the grunts of Bravo, a group of reservists primarily from Texas and Louisiana who have fought their way up and down the Euphrates since August, it appears to represent a shift in insurgent tactics.

Rather than standing and fighting, insurgents are melting away when troops move in. And they are focusing more intently on the emerging Iraqi government and its security forces. The hope, it seems, is that US forces won't stay long enough to develop the intelligence to root out insurgents systematically.

"There are some hard-core fighters in Hit but we can hold it easily for as long as we are here," says Maj. Mike Miller, the company commander and a policeman from San Antonio, Tex. "But we can't make any promises beyond when we leave. So I can understand that locals are reluctant to get involved."

"I guarantee you they'll be back in here when we leave," says Sgt. Shawn Hudman, who lives in Austin, Texas. "Maybe at least as we go on, there'll be fewer and fewer places for them to go."

The US effort, which flows from the November assault on Fallujah, is designed to restore some government control over the town of Anbar. Until now, Anbar has provided safe ground for insurgents, with the roads and trails along the Euphrates River serving as "rat-lines" for men and weapons to move around the country.

Many of these towns, like Hit, have centuries-old traditions of banditry and smuggling. They are also among the most severe practitioners of Sunni Islam in the country, thanks to the river which has provided a corridor for strict Saudi Arabian ideas to move into the country.

"We think the assault on Fallujah pushed a lot of fighters and leaders out of there, squeezed them west along the Euphrates," says Lieut. Col. Steven Dinauer of Verona, Wisc. "This city is not another Fallujah, but we know there are mujahideen in there, so we're going to keep them back on their heels and disrupt their lines of communication."

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