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FALLUJAH, Iraq - U.S. Marines have postponed plans to mount an attack against insurgents holed up here and instead will attempt to regain control of this violence-wracked city without a full-scale offensive, military commanders said Sunday.
But the U.S. occupation authority said Shiite rebels in the holy city of Najaf were stockpiling weapons in mosques, shrines and schools, creating a "potentially explosive situation."
A spokesman for the occupation authority said it had learned from Najaf residents that insurgents following Muqtada al-Sadr, the fervently anti-American cleric, were gathering arms, apparently to defend themselves against 2,500 U.S. soldiers who have encircled the city. The spokesman said the occupation authority was urging people in Najaf to retake control from Sadr and his militia, the Mahdi Army.
Concerned about the repercussions an attack on Fallujah could generate across Iraq and the Arab world, senior U.S. military and civilian officials have decided to try to confront a band of hard-core Sunni Muslim insurgents, who have effectively taken over the city, by having Marines conduct patrols, starting as early as Tuesday, alongside Iraqi security forces.
The new strategy, reached in consultation with the White House over the weekend, is an effort by U.S. officials to avoid a military incursion that could be fraught with urban combat, civilian casualties and a wave of retribution strikes outside Fallujah.
"A military solution is not going to be the solution here unless everything else fails," said Maj. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, which is responsible for securing Fallujah and other parts of western Iraq. U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Baghdad, said efforts to deal with the insurgency in Fallujah had shifted to "a political track."
U.S. military commanders and civilian leaders have also opted to take a similar approach with militiamen loyal to Sadr. Although U.S. soldiers have mobilized outside the holy city of Najaf, where Sadr and many of his militiamen have congregated, Kimmitt said there were "no time lines" for the soldiers to enter the city.
U.S. officials continue to rely on Iraqi interlocutors to persuade Sadr to demobilize his illegal militia, whose members have repeatedly attacked U.S. forces and foreign troops stationed in central Iraq. "We would like to obtain a final agreement in Najaf," Kimmitt said.
Together, the latest approaches to dealing with Fallujah and Najaf represent a new effort by the U.S. military and civilian leadership in Iraq to address two volatile problems without force and avoid the sort of violent confrontations that occurred this month, when Marines fought running battles in Fallujah and Sadr's militiamen skirmished with soldiers in Baghdad and across central Iraq.
"This is the way we want to do it," Mattis said. "We didn't come here to fight."
If Marines patrolling the city are fired upon, Mattis said they would shoot back and reassess the joint patrols or whether more aggressive military action was warranted.
"If we do not gain control of Fallujah using joint patrols, then we've got to look at other options," he said.
Marine commanders at Fallujah had expected to receive orders over the weekend to attack insurgents in the city, who Marines believe are a combination of foreign fighters, indigenous Islamic extremists and Saddam Hussein loyalists. Marine officers estimate there are several hundred insurgents in Fallujah, about 35 miles west of Baghdad.
After a mob in the city killed and mutilated four U.S. security contractors, Marines encircled Fallujah, a city of 200,000 along the Euphrates River, and engaged in intense firefights with insurgents. After three days, U.S. commanders declared a cease-fire in an attempt to negotiate a solution.
Although a group of civic leaders had agreed to a peace deal with U.S. military commanders and civilian officials on April 19, the local leaders have failed to fulfill a key element of the agreement: getting the insurgents to surrender heavy weapons.
Attacks flared elsewhere Sunday, threatening to further erode what little confidence many Iraqis have in the U.S. occupiers. In Baghdad, witnesses said U.S. soldiers fired on a crowd of Iraqi bystanders, mostly youths, after a roadside bomb damaged a Humvee, killing one soldier and wounding three. Kimmitt said that the soldiers were responding to rooftop snipers, and that the military was investigating.
A member of the Coast Guard died of wounds received when a boat that he and six colleagues were trying to intercept in the southern port of Basra exploded Saturday night, the Navy said Sunday. Two Navy sailors died in that explosion, and the rest were taken to a hospital in Kuwait. The boat was one of three skiffs rigged with bombs that exploded in what appeared to be a coordinated suicide attack on the port.
In the northern city of Mosul, insurgents used mortars, rockets and other munitions early Sunday to attack two police stations, a mosque, a hospital and a hotel, the military said. Four Iraqi civilians were killed, and 13 civilians and two policemen were wounded.
- Information from the Washington Post and New York Times was used in this report.