FALLUJA: Marine Colonel Lawrence Nicholson strides the stony ground here in camouflage fatigues, his dog tag secured under the laces of his left boot. He doesn't slip into his flak jacket but rather assaults the bullet-proof vest, wrestles it on, then walks off with the slightly bowlegged gait of a man just off a horse.
“This is the club. Welcome to our country club, our gated community,” the 51-year-old Toronto native says with a grin during a recent tour of this former Sunni insurgent stronghold in the western province of Al-Anbar.
Two years after the US marines attack on Falluja to drive out insurgents, Nicholson takes pride in what he and his men have done since taking over. But if Falluja were a hospital patient, it would still be in intensive care.
Two city council members and the council president have been assassinated since February. At least 30 police officers were gunned down this summer. The mayor fled in July.Reconstruction of the city, ruined in the marine assault, is in progress but far from complete. There's no bustle on the main street. Unemployment is well above 50 per cent. The once-vibrant cement factories are only now struggling back to life.
Population figures in Iraq are notoriously incorrect, but Falluja was said to have about 450,000 residents before US forces stormed the city.
As the assault gained force nearly 400,000 of that number had fled, but the Americans say there are about 300,000 living in the city.
A reporter who tried to step outdoors during a city council meeting this week as part of the tour was grabbed by the arm and pulled back inside by marines who warned of snipers right in the centre of the city.
Nicholson and his 5,000 marines of Regimental Combat Team 5 have Falluja sealed -- the incoming roads at least -- with what they call ECPs, or entry control points manned by Americans, Iraqi army soldiers and Iraqi police.
As a result, a long line of cars stretches at Falluja's eastern reaches.
The Americans said they had reduced the wait to drive into the city to about 40 minutes since being put in place several months ago. It looked a much longer wait.
Weapons are banned in Falluja, by law if not in fact, and everyone must carry a US-issued ID card proving they are residents and registered to live in the city, in order to get in. At one point, Nicholson strode in to begin directing traffic himself, then pulled a local Iraqi policeman, a Sunni Muslim, together with an Iraqi soldier, a Shia, and asked them if there were any problems between them.
The men, from the rival sects whose religious-based conflict is tearing apart central Iraq, assured the colonel all was well.
Nicholson smiled and shook his head in a “Didn't I tell you so?” gesture.
He was seriously wounded the same day he first took control of RCT 5 shortly before the marine assault in November 2004.
He missed the Falluja operation but has returned and surrounded himself with a team of junior officers to whip the place into shape.
His command is made of smart, well-groomed Marine Corps rising stars, specialists in Sunni tribal affairs, linguists and organizational experts.
They boast that Falluja has changed so much from its days as a Sunni insurgent bastion that there now are about 150 displaced Sunnis each week who flee the chaos in Baghdad for the relative safety they find here among their Sunni co-religionists.
A group of about 30 refugees from Baghdad, all men, sat under the shade of a camouflage net on the outskirts of Falluja at a makeshift US facility, surrounded by a series of earthen berms, waiting to get their city IDs.
One skinny young man with a red and white scarf wound around his head pulled a reporter aside and lifted his right trouser leg, exposing a shin with marks where Shia militiamen had bored into the bone with an electric drill, the current tool of choice for Baghdad torture specialists.
Nicholson, wiry and ruddy-faced with the look of a street brawler, keeps a tight rein on Falluja and its townspeople.
“The average person here would tell us to 'Get the hell out of my city, but not just yet',” the colonel said.
His men call him the mayor of the town. The real mayor is Jassim al-Bedawi, who took over from a predecessor who fled to Amman, Jordan, this summer under threat of death.
Bedawi, a lawyer, looks like a bit like Burt Reynolds in his younger days, the same white-toothed grin under a full mustache. He took Nicholson to task at the latest city council meeting for closing a bridge over the Euphrates river.
They call it the new bridge here. The old bridge, built in 1937, is now called the Blackwater Bridge. It's where insurgents hung the charred bodies of four Blackwater security men who were killed in the city in March 2004.Bedawi complained that the heavy security and closed new bridge were jamming traffic and blocking deliveries of necessary goods.
Nicholson stood listening but shaking his head. He said he would check but countered that there had been too many attacks on the Iraqi army at the new bridge.
Only 12 of 20 council members showed up this week, obviously not keen to journey through the town to a meeting that so closely associates them with the Americans.
The colonel calls the council "our dysfunctional family, but our family nevertheless."
"We preach Team Falluja constantly ... that we’re all in this together," the 26-year Marine veteran said. "But in the end we have to tell them it is their choice, what they want it to look like when we’re gone."—AFP