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Next up after Fallujah: Ramadi.
Three months after American forces recaptured the insurgent stronghold of Falluja in the biggest operation of the war, the Marine division that led the assault said Sunday that it had started a new offensive against insurgents in Ramadi, Falluja’s twin city, on the Euphrates about 75 miles west of Baghdad.
...The offensive appeared to be a new phase in the military strategy adopted last summer, when the American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., took over with a plan to reclaim a string of cities that had fallen to insurgent control.
Even the NY Times now has something approving to say about the previous operation in Fallujah:
Between August and November, the strategy drove Shiite rebels out of the holy city of Najaf, forced a standdown by the same group in Baghdad’s Sadr City district, and ended Sunni insurgents’ stranglehold on Falluja, a major staging post for attacks.
Iraq’s interim government requested the operation:
Ramadi, with a population of 400,000, is larger than Falluja and strategically as important. The stretch of the Euphrates involved in the offensive is a crucial communications corridor.
It has the main road and railway line connecting central Iraq to Syria, long accused by American commanders of acting as a sanctuary and staging post for insurgents and those financing them.
A major oil pipeline runs along the river’s west bank. And to the east lies one of the country’s most important power transmission lines, connecting a hydroelectric dam at Haditha to Baghdad.
The Marines said they had imposed a 10-hour night curfew around Ramadi and established “access control points” on roads into the city to screen vehicles “for terrorists and criminals, as well as weapons and materials” for making bombs. The command statement quoted Maj. Gen. Richard F. Natonski, commander of the First Marine Division, as saying the offensive had been requested by Iraq’s interim government.
The terrorists currently are working on disrupting energy supplies in Baghdad:
Insurgent attacks to disrupt Baghdad’s supplies of crude oil, gasoline, heating oil, water and electricity have reached a degree of coordination and sophistication not seen before, Iraqi and American officials say.
The new pattern, they say, shows that the insurgents have a deep understanding of the complex network of pipelines, power cables and reservoirs feeding Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.
It looks like the terrorists are being helped by former officials of the Hussein regime:
The overall pattern of the sabotage and its technical savvy suggests the guidance of the very officials who tended to the nation’s infrastructure during Saddam Hussein’s long reign, current Iraqi officials say.
The only reasonable conclusion, said Aiham Alsammarae, the Iraqi electricity minister, is that the sabotage operation is being led by former members of the ministries themselves, possibly aided by sympathetic holdovers.
The terrorists would like to see Iraq turn back into a place of tyranny and oppression, with themselves as the new tyrants.
