Once inside the city, the enemy unleashed everything they had. They plowed through a minefield and slammed through barricades at the edge of the city. Staff Sergeant Anibal Reyes followed Smith with a roller attached to the front of his tank. Sergeant Matthew Smith led RCT-1’s attack through the breach with a tank-mounted plow. It ended badly for those that thought they could defeat American tanks and Bradleys. Four battalions of Marine infantry swarmed into the city behind the armored juggernaut. They mowed down fanatic fighters in the streets and blew through barricades as enemy RPGs bounced off their thick skins, leaving little more than black scorch marks. The 70-ton armored vehicles were unstoppable. Task Force Blue Diamond, the 1 st Marine Division, led with their tanks. Most of the four-thousand jihadists were there to fight and die. They had built barricades, set IEDs and dug in deep. The enemy had been preparing for the inevitable assault for months. To the east, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Newell’s 2-2 Infantry attacked south on the eastern edge of the city alongside Colonel Craig Tucker’s RCT-7 Marines. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Rainey’s 2-7 Cavalry led Colonel Mike Shupp’s Regimental Combat Team (RCT-1) into the northwestern Byzantine neighborhoods. The actual attack would come twenty-fours later, at sunset on November 8, 2004, as two Marine regiments swept into the city. Two Army mechanized task forces and four reinforced Marine infantry battalions were preparing to inundate the enemy, all along the northern edge of the city. The Wolfpack’s attack was a battalion-sized diversion. As the Wolfpack was moving to secure the Fallujah Hospital and the western approach to the Euphrates River bridges, a massive military force was assembling, north of the city. It is hard to believe that it has been five years since the beginning of the largest, and most important, battle of Operation Iraqi Freedom. An angry mob had strung up the bodies of two Blackwater contractors on the older footbridge in spring of 2004. Two bridges spanned the Euphrates River, connecting the Shark’s Fin with downtown. The Beginning of the End of al Qaeda in IraqĪt sunset on Sunday, November 7, 2004, the soldiers, sailors and Marines of Task Force Wolfpack raced north in their Light Armored Vehicles, tanks and trucks to secure the "Shark’s Fin," a large peninsula west of the insurgent stronghold in the ancient Iraqi blue-collar city of Fallujah. Interviews in Eyewitness to War span a wide spectrum of participants, from commanders and senior non-commissioned officers at platoon, company, and battalion levels, to combat and combat service support personnel on the battlefield, and to one journalist who witnessed the battle firsthand.Operation Phantom Fury – Beginning of the End of al Qaeda in Iraq By Richard S. Using the firepower and mobility of the Army's heavy armor and mechanized units to full effect, the Marine Regimental Combat Teams were successful in destroying the enemy and securing Fallujah in ten days. Under the overall command of the 1st Marine Division, four Marine infantry and two US Army battalions, Task Forces 2-2 Infantry and 2-7 Cavalry, were committed to the streets of Fallujah while the Army's 2d Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division formed a cordon to hold and isolate the insurgents in the city. The second battle for Fallujah in November 2004 was a brutal and bloody fight so characteristic of urban terrain. This study is a derivative of the CSI Operational Leadership Experience (OLE) project, a program that collects and archives first-person experiences from the Global War on Terror. Matthews (Editor) Eyewitness to War: A US Army Oral History of Operation AL FAJR, is a unique publication. Army Command and General Staff College, Combat Studies Institute Staff (Contribution by) Matt M. Eyewitness to War: the US Army in Operation Al Fajr Volume I by Kendall D.
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