"HEAVIER THAN A MOUNTAIN":

Blast in Falluja Kills 10 Marines; 11 Are Wounded (JOHN F. BURNS, 12/03/05, NY Times)

The peninsula where the bombing occurred Thursday lies at the western end of the steel trestle bridge where insurgents hung charred bodies taken from an attack in the center of Falluja in March 2004 that killed four American security guards, an incident that prompted a first, aborted American military attempt to recapture the city from insurgents who had made it their principal bastion in Iraq.

The second offensive, eight months later, was the most relentless American attack against the insurgents. It ended with American forces in control of the largely devastated city, but with many of its 300,000 residents having fled.

American commanders said their forces had killed 1,200 insurgents in that offensive, while taking more than 500 American casualties. But insurgent groups said later that many of their fighters had left the city for Ramadi, Mosul and other insurgent strongholds before the American assault.

Under a pledge to rebuild the city and compensate those who lost their homes, the Americans have spent about $100 million. But insurgents who never left under the American bombardment, or who infiltrated back through the tight cordon that American and Iraqi troops have thrown around the city, have kept up a steady stream of attacks, including suicide bombings, roadside explosions and assassinations of Iraqi government officials and others who have drawn the insurgents' wrath.

Earlier this week, a leading cleric in Falluja, Hamza Abbas al-Issawi, 70, considered the city's grand imam, who had urged Sunni Arabs to defy the insurgents and vote in the Dec. 15 elections for a full four-year national government, was shot and killed. He had received insurgent death threats in recent months.

Tensions appeared to be rising ahead of the election, when American and Iraqi officials are hoping for a repeat of the October constitutional referendum, when 170,000 votes were cast in Falluja, the strongest turnout of any Sunni Arab area in Iraq. Iraqi election officials calculated that 80 percent of the votes were against the constitution, but celebrated the fact that the city had chosen to take part in the political process.

In Falluja's mosques, angry residents have vowed in recent days to avenge the clerics' killings by hunting down Islamic extremists loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, America's most-wanted man in Iraq. The anger spread on Friday to fiery condemnations at the main weekly prayers at two of Baghdad's most militant Sunni Arab mosques.

At the Mother of All Battles Mosque in the west of the city, the preacher, Sheik Ali Abu Hassan, called the killers "murderers" and said believers should respond by voting in large numbers. At the Abu Hanifa Mosque in the eastern Adhamiya district, a stronghold of support for Iraq's ousted ruler, Saddam Hussein, the preacher, Sheik Ahmad al-Samarrai, said, "The election is both legitimate and necessary, and your duty to vote is heavier than a mountain."

MORE:
U.S. Goals for Iraqi Forces Meet Success and Challenges in Najaf (EDWARD WONG, 12/03/05, NY Times)

"I don't think I'd go so far as to recommend that we totally pull out," said Lt. Col. James Oliver, the commander of the First Battalion, 198th Armor of the 155th Brigade, a National Guard unit from Mississippi that is the main American force here. Nothing less than an American battalion, up to 1,000 troops, should remain in the area through 2006 and perhaps longer, he said.

Yet, for the most part, American officers here praise the work of the Iraqi security forces, saying they have trained well and kept the number of major attacks on American and Iraqi troops to an average of one per month.

The American commanders say their soldiers have largely halted combat missions and now play a training and backup role for the Iraqi forces - a model, perhaps, for the 160,000 American troops in other parts of the country.

In early September, the 500 soldiers of Colonel Oliver's battalion moved from a forward base on the outskirts of this city to a larger headquarters in the desert about a 40-minute drive away. A 900-person battalion of the Iraqi Army moved into the old American compound.

It was one of the 28 American forward bases in Iraq that had been shut down by mid-November, with 15 of those having been transferred to Iraqi forces, said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a spokesman for the American command. He said the military expects to close four more of the remaining 82 forward bases within three months.

Colonel Oliver's unit, backed by 700 soldiers from a logistics battalion, acts as a guarantor of last resort for the Iraqi forces, remaining on call in case of overwhelming trouble. Emergency requests from the Iraqis come in about once a month, officers say. American advisers also work with Iraqi officers at a security command center inside Najaf, and, since last spring, one company each has been assigned to train and advise the Iraqi police and army.

"They were receptive; they actually wanted to take control of their own area," said Sgt. First Class Paul Bedford, part of a reconnaissance platoon that patrols the roads outside Najaf. "Assessment would be more the word than training at this point."

Many people in this city of a half million, home to some of the world's most revered ayatollahs, support the handover of security duties to the Iraqis.

"They're spread well throughout the city," said Qasim Said, 43, a schoolteacher in a grocery store with his 7-year-old son. "I don't think any decent Iraqi is happy to see foreign forces, whatever their nationality, in his street. Thank God that the presence of the Americans has gone down in Najaf. The city is rejoicing."

The governor of Najaf, Assad Abu Ghalal al-Taiee, echoed that sentiment at a pre-election debate in a hotel here on Thursday, saying that "there's freedom in Najaf, but there's lack of freedom in Baghdad."