In the first days of November, U.S. forces stepped up air strikes on militia positions in Fallujah, and in nearby Ramadi. According to the Associated Press, air and artillery bombardment was the heaviest in two months.

Meanwhile, hundreds of British troops arrived at their new base outside Baghdad October 28, freeing up U.S. units for the offensive in the two cities. Most of London’s 8,500 troops are stationed in the relatively quiet areas around Basra.

More than 3,000 U.S. Marines have now encircled Fallujah. Another 2,000 are in Ramadi.

On October 31, Allawi said the Iraqi military and U.S. forces have recently captured 167 militiamen from North Africa and Middle Eastern countries other than Iraq around Fallujah and elsewhere in the country, according to the Knight Ridder news agency. The interim regime used publicity around the seizures of these men to bolster its argument that “foreigners” are to a large degree responsible for many bombings and kidnappings and to push for securing Iraq’s border with Syria.

Allawi also claimed that a “few thousand” followers of Izzat Ibrahim, deputy president of Iraq under the Saddam Hussein regime, were captured in recent days.

The Sunni Triangle in central Iraq, where Fallujah and Ramadi are located, was the strongest base of the Hussein government. U.S. military officials charge that businessmen loyal to Hussein are funding the militias and that former members of Hussein’s military are helping to organize them. They also charge that Tiwhad and Jihad, a group led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is responsible for many of the attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops.

Allawi issued a “last chance” offer to intermediaries attempting to strike a deal to avoid a large-scale offensive on Fallujah, according to an October 29 al-Jazeera TV report.

A negotiator for Fallujah’s Sunni Muslim council said the group would agree to restart talks with the government provided that Baghdad halted the weeks-long air strikes by U.S. warplanes on the city. Al-Jazerra said the group also would demand that thousands of civilian residents who have fled Fallujah be allowed to return and be compensated for damages, that U.S. troops remove a checkpoint from the eastern entrance to the city, and that they would push for the formation of an Iraqi National Guard force that would include local residents to keep peace between U.S. troops and militias.

Neither Allawi nor the U.S. military are likely to accept these proposals. A similar Fallujah Brigade headed by former Iraqi army officers was dissolved in September after it refused to engage the militias. That brigade was established as part of a compromise after U.S. Marines laid siege of Fallujah in April following the killing of four military “contractors,” whose burned remains were suspended from a bridge over the Euphrates river.

Allawi has refused to address any of the demands made by the negotiators, insisting that they first turn over al-Zarqawi and other leaders of Tiwhad and Jihad. The group has taken responsibility for a number of beheadings of hostages and bombings of military and civilian targets, including an attack on a sewage plant that killed dozens of Iraqi children. The U.S. administration has offered a $25 million reward for information leading to al-Zarqawi’s capture or death. Muslim clerics in Fallujah say al-Zarqawi is not in the city.

The impending offensive against Fallujah and Ramadi is expected to be the toughest in the campaign by the interim government and its U.S. sponsor to bring some 30 cities, said to be strongholds of anti-government militias, under control of the Allawi regime before national elections scheduled for January.

“We’re gearing up to do an operation and when we’re told to go we’ll go,” said Brig. Gen. Dennis Hejlik, deputy commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force camped near Fallujah. “When we do go, we’ll whack them,” said Hejlik, according to the Associated Press.

Militias in the city have begun fortifying their positions, said the AP, blocking roads with barriers and cars. A leading Sunni cleric in Baghdad, Sheik Mahdi al-Sumaidaei, warned that should the Allawi government order an assault on Fallujah Sunni clerics in the capital will issue a fatwa, or religious decree ordering Muslims to launch protests in the streets and a civil disobedience campaign. Others have threatened to boycott the upcoming elections.

Actions by militias in Ramadi have increased since the U.S. encirclement of Fallujah began in mid-October. A front-page article in the October 21 New York Times described the provincial government in the city as being on the verge of collapse. “Just about everybody has resigned or is on the verge of resigning,” the article quotes Second Lt. Ryan Schranel as saying. Schranel’s platoon does 24-hour guard duty at the government’s provincial offices.

The provincial governor, Muhammad Awad, the article states, doubles as Ramadi’s mayor after the previous governor resigned following the kidnapping of his three sons and the killing of the deputy governor. No one has stepped forward to lead the city hall.

Still dozens of government employees come to work at the provincial offices each day. “This is not Fallujah,” said Lt. Col. Randall P. Newman, a battalion commander. “We want to keep this place from becoming a Fallujah.”

Speaking from his office in Ramadi, Maj. Gen. Natonski dismissed the view that city authorities faced an imminent collapse, according to the London Telegraph. “Ramadi is not going to fall,” he said. “We don’t have to worry about that.”

As preparations are being made for the assault, the British medical journal Lancet released on its web site findings of a research team headed by a Johns Hopkins professor that estimates at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a “direct or indirect consequence” of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The figure includes not only “violent deaths” but those from diseases spread because of the conditions of military occupation. The report says that the large majority of deaths from combat are concentrated in the so-called Sunni Triangle, with two-thirds of them having taken place in Fallujah. The printed edition of the journal will appear after the U.S. presidential elections.

The survey, whose results are based on a poll, not a census, is drawn from a sampling of interviews with 988 households from 33 randomly selected locations throughout Iraq. The participants in the survey were questioned about births and deaths in their households for the 14 months prior to the invasion and the 17 months following.

Various news reports already said the Lancet figure is questionable, since it is just an estimate and translates to an average of 166 deaths a day since the invasion.

The Bush administration has declined to give estimates of civilian deaths in Iraq since the beginning of the war. When asked about Iraqi deaths in the 1991 U.S.-led war against Iraq, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell—then head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff—replied, “It’s really not a number I’m terribly interested in.”  
 
 
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