Ribat, Iraq – The casualties mounted Monday in remote Iraqi desert villages near the Syrian border as U.S. troops launched their largest offensive since last year’s invasion of Fallujah.
Marine commanders estimate that they have slain more than 100 guerrillas since the offensive began Sunday. Insurgents have killed at least three Marines and wounded 20 more American troops trying to cross the Euphrates River in western Iraq.
From a hilltop overlooking Ribat, a Los Angeles Times reporter traveling with members of the 2nd Marine Division could see insurgents driving to houses in the northern edge of the town, filling trucks with AK-47s and rocket- propelled grenade launchers and ferrying them to the south side of the village where the battle was taking place.
Children stood near one of the houses. A woman casually hung clothes on a line. Marines held their fire.
On Monday, more than 1,000 Marines, sailors and soldiers from Regimental Combat Team 2 crossed into the north side of the Euphrates River. U.S. troops prepared for a large-scale assault today in the region’s scattered villages.
Marines hope the assault will flush out insurgent fighters who the Marines believe have made the Ramana region – a conglomeration of well-irrigated riverside towns – a safe haven and training ground for foreign guerrillas. The 2nd Marine Division is responsible for security in Anbar province, a desert region the size of South Carolina that runs from Jordan in the south to Syria in the north.
“The insurgents we’re fighting today are not the guys getting $50 to put (a roadside bomb) on the side of the road,” said regiment commander Col. Stephen Davis. “These are the professional fighters who have come from all over the Middle East. These are people who have received training and are very well armed.”
The Marines say that capturing or killing insurgents in these villages is key to pacifying Iraq. Recruits from western Iraq and much of the nation’s Sunni Arab heartland fuel the insurgency.
Foreign fighters pour across the border here to volunteer as suicide bombers, the guerrillas’ most potent weapons, which in the past month have claimed scores of Iraqi lives. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant who leads an al-Qaeda group in Iraq, is said to travel this region with impunity, granted the protection of powerful Sunni Arab clans resisting U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies.
The U.S. operation had been delayed a day because of insurgent attacks from at least two nearby cities.
Guerrillas appeared well prepared, with sandbag bunkers piled in front of some homes, and fighters strategically positioned on rooftops and balconies. In the predawn hours Sunday, occupants of houses along the road to Ubaydi flashed their lights one after the other, apparently to signal that the U.S. military was on the way.
In nearby Sabah, New Ubaydi and Karabilah, insurgents fired mortar rounds at Marine convoys along the river’s southern edge. Marines who pursued attackers in those towns took part in house-to-house combat against dozens of well-armed insurgents.
One Marine was walking into a house when an insurgent hiding in the basement fired through a floor grate, killing him. Another Marine, who was retrieving a wounded comrade inside a house, suffered shrapnel wounds when a rebel threw a grenade through a window.
Machine-gun fire lighted dozens of windows and doorways like strobes. Three Cobra helicopters pummeled insurgent positions for several hours, raining machine-gun fire and Hellfire missiles on houses suspected of hiding weapons caches.
A U.S. helicopter sent up a row of water columns as it fired upon boats being used by insurgents to transport weapons from one side of the river to the other. An F/A-18 Hornet screeched overhead and dropped a laser-guided bomb on a truck used by insurgents, eviscerating the vehicle and a nearby house.
As U.S. troops inflicted casualties on the guerrillas, they had to care for their own wounded. A Marine suffered a broken back and at least two others were wounded Sunday when a land mine damaged their tank.
“Sunday was tough for us,” said one Marine officer, who asked that his name not be used.
