IRAQ: The tactics used were not thought to be those of al-Qaeda, writes Jack Fairweather in Fallujah.
US officials were yesterday calling Saturday's attack on a police station in Fallujah the most sophisticated yet carried out by forces hostile to the US-led occupation.
Twenty-three Iraqi police officers were killed when up to 70 gunmen overwhelmed Fallujah's main police station with machine guns, hand grenades and RPGs. A second team pinned down Iraqi security forces at a nearby compound to stop them coming to the rescue as dozens of prisoners were released.
"This was something put together by people with knowledge of small unit tactics," said one senior official. "It was a complex, well co-ordinated attack. This would not be the same tactics that al-Qaeda would employ. These are military tactics." At the police headquarters walls riddled with bullet holes bore testimony to the ferocity of the assault.
Witnesses described seeing a group of men calmly unloading equipment and weaponry from the boot of cars parked nearby.
The two guards at the station's fortified entrance were quickly overpowered, the assailants using concrete barricades outside for protection as they shot at the compound.
"There was so much firing we thought the Americans were attacking us," said Sgt Mohammed Ahmed, injured in the arm as he returned fire. Sgt Ahmed described how he was mistaken for dead as gunmen entered the compound and began clearing rooms with small arms fire and hand grenades.
Some of rooms in the station were still smattered with blood from the close-combat fighting. "These people were professional and violent. I pray I never see them again," he said. The motives for the attack are unclear.
Fallujah has long been at the heart of the resistance to the US occupation, although in recent months a strategic pull-out of US soldiers from the city centres has lessened the number of attacks.
Fallujans, however, remain deeply opposed to the US presence in Iraq, and Iraqi security officials whom they accuse of being collaborators. There were reports that shopkeepers near the station had been tipped off about Saturday's attack but did not pass the information to the police.
"We're trying to convince the people in Fallujah we're here to protect them and they must work with us," said police chief Brig Aboud Farhan. The investigation into the attack, he said, was focusing on prisoners released during Saturday's raid. The week before 15 Iraqis from southern Iraq had been arrested, raising concerns that militant Shia groups or criminal gangs might have been involved in the attack.
"We think Iraqis carried out this attack, not foreign fighters," said Brig Farhan. "Although I shouldn't call them Iraqis. These people are animals." The bloodshed in Fallujah ended a particularly violent week in which over 100 people were killed in suicide bombings at a police station in Iskandariyah and an army recruiting centre in Baghdad.
Those attacks - blamed by the US on al-Qaeda operatives - have shaken support among Iraqis working with the US-led coalition and suggested they will face a stiff challenge to contain the violence when US forces leave.