20 November 2004	Saturday	07 Shawwal 1425

WASHINGTON: A top US Marine commander asserted Thursday that the invasion of Fallujah had "broken the back" of the Iraqi insurgency, countering assessments by other defence officials and his own intelligence team, who see a more resilient and potent rebel force.

Lt-Gen John Sattler said he believed denying the insurgents their main base of operations in Fallujah would have far-reaching effects, by taking away command centres, hideouts and weapons-making facilities and forcing the anti-US rebels to turn to unfamiliar locations and untested recruits.

"This has disrupted them. ... I personally believe, across the country. This is going to make it very hard for them to operate," Sattler told reporters in a videoconference from near Fallujah.

US forces also say they have found valuable information about the insurgency's members and tactics in Fallujah, such as ledgers of fighters from around the globe, Sattler said. In addition, American forces believe that on Thursday they found one of the safe houses used by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted terrorist in Iraq.

Soldiers discovered items in the house that led them to believe al-Zarqawi had been there, including letters probably written by al-Zarqawi to two of his lieutenants, said Maj David Johnson, a military historian attached to the Army's 1st Infantry Division. Still, other senior defence officials and outside experts said that they believed Sattler had overstated the effect on the insurgency of the attack on Fallujah.

Insurgent violence has continued across Iraq in recent days, including in Mosul, where US forces had to be diverted to try to restore order. One key, said a senior defence official in Washington, was that al-Zarqawi apparently fled Fallujah well ahead of the American attack, meaning that a key strategic and symbolic leader of the resistance remains free to continue the anti-American campaign.

"The serpent's head is still attached; we've chopped a lot of the tail off, and bruised the insides, but the head is still attached, and that means Zarqawi," said one senior defence official in Washington. "Until we can sever the head, we're a ways from declaring any kind of victory."

In addition, intelligence officers from Sattler's 1st Marine Expeditionary Force had warned a few days before the invasion that insurgents would return to Fallujah and rebuild, even in the face of a serious defeat there, if Marines pulled out too soon, defence sources said.

Marines plan to turn over security in Fallujah to Iraqi forces as quickly as they are ready, but this intelligence assessment suggested an insurgency capable of reconstituting itself there and continuing to wreak violence ahead of January's elections.

However, the defence sources also said they believed the intelligence report showed only a "worst-case scenario" and didn't entirely reflect the thinking of higher-level commanders, who are clear that Marines must stay as long as possible to keep Fallujah from slipping back into rebel control.

Still, even Sattler offered somewhat contradictory views of the situation in Fallujah. At one point in his briefing, Sattler told reporters, "The town is not quite secure at this point." Later, he said he misspoke and should have said the city was secure in terms of military operations but that more work had to be done to allow civilians to re-enter.

US troops are in a "search-and-clear phase that will make it safe - relatively safe is the best word," he said. At the same time, he told of fighting with a pocket of insurgents in southern Fallujah on Thursday that killed one Marine and one Iraqi security force member. In all, the military says 51 US troops have been killed in the city and about 425 wounded, with about 1,200 insurgents killed and 1,025 detained.

Sattler indicated that little of the promised effort to rebuild Fallujah and return it to Iraqi government control has begun yet, given the continued pockets of violence there. Some outside experts say the true test of whether the insurgency in Fallujah has been defeated will be returning the city to its residents and holding elections there and throughout Iraq, unmarred by violence.

"You don't know if you've broken the back of the insurgency until you have elections, until there's in fact a certain degree of stability in Fallujah," said retired Army Maj-Gen William Nash, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. -Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) Newsday.