Marine predicts Fallujah success by August

Published Thursday, June 21, 2007

BAGHDAD (AP) - A U.S. Marine commander in Anbar province predicted that al-Qaida fighters will be expelled from Fallujah by August as the military moves to cut insurgent supply and reinforcement lines into Baghdad and surrounding areas.

Brig. Gen. John Allen, the deputy commander for American forces west of Baghdad, said al-Qaida in Iraq has largely been pushed out of population centers in much of the Anbar province.

He cited the success in turning Sunni tribes against the organization and an influx of U.S. troops to chase al-Qaida out of Iraqi and regions around the capital.

"The vast majority of them have been pushed out of the population centers," Allen said yesterday in an interview with The Associated Press. "The surge has given us the troops we needed to really clear those areas, so we cleared them, and we stayed."

He said U.S. and Iraqi troops were trying to repeat recent success in calming Ramadi, the provincial capital, using the same neighborhood-by-neighborhood tactics in Fallujah - a Sunni insurgent bastion that was first cleared by a massive American assault in 2004.

"We’re going to finish off those neighborhoods by August," he told AP. "The people are really responding well, establishing very quickly neighborhood watch organizations and a police precinct headquarters now in every neighborhood," he said.

A new cooperation between U.S. forces and Sunni tribal leaders in recent months has allowed them to clear al-Qaida-led extremist elements from some of the most violent areas in the vast desert province that stretches west from Baghdad to the borders with Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

Allen said the arrival of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit in the area as part of a U.S. troop buildup ordered by President George W. Bush has enabled the American forces to turn their attention to places previously considered no-go zones.

"We’re going to start churning up the ground north on the grounds of Tharthar, ... a spot where we haven’t had forces before," he said in an interview at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.