Fallujah, November 7, 2004
Operation Phantom Fury
The Beginning of the End of al Qaeda in Iraq

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At 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. Two bridges spanned the Euphrates River, connecting the Shark’s Fin with downtown. An angry mob had strung up the bodies of two Blackwater contractors on the older footbridge in spring of 2004. 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. 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. The Wolfpack’s attack was a battalion-sized diversion.

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 actual attack would come twenty-fours later, at sunset on November 8, 2004, as two Marine regiments swept into the city. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Rainey’s 2-7 Cavalry led Colonel Mike Shupp’s Regimental Combat Team (RCT-1) into the northwestern Byzantine neighborhoods. 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.

Attack on Fallujah. USMC PowerPoint debrief

The enemy had been preparing for the inevitable assault for months. They had built barricades, set IEDs and dug in deep. Most of the four-thousand jihadists were there to fight and die. Task Force Blue Diamond, the 1^st Marine Division, led with their tanks. The 70-ton armored vehicles were unstoppable. 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. Four battalions of Marine infantry swarmed into the city behind the armored juggernaut. The insurgents tried to stand and fight. It ended badly for those that thought they could defeat American tanks and Bradleys.

Sergeant Matthew Smith led RCT-1’s attack through the breach with a tank-mounted plow. Staff Sergeant Anibal Reyes followed Smith with a roller attached to the front of his tank. They plowed through a minefield and slammed through barricades at the edge of the city.

Once inside the city, the enemy unleashed everything they had. They thought they could take on the tanks and win. The tankers responded with coax machine gun fire, spewing streams of steel. The tank’s main guns were belching fireballs the size of a house, momentarily lighting the street like it was daytime and shaking the ground as their supersonic projectiles shattered buildings and killed any insurgent in their path.

Smith and Reyes were ordered to push forward to make room for the rest of Jim Rainey’s tanks. Slowly, the two tanks ground forward into the maelstrom. Smith and Reyes waited nervously at the first major intersection for the battalion’s tanks and Bradleys to fill in behind them. Swarms of insurgents tried to maneuver around in back of the tanks, only to find more tanks and Bradleys pushing into the city through the gap in the barricade. There seemed to be no end to the armored assault.

Rainey’s Bradleys followed his tanks through the breach and fanned out to the west. Any enemy fighters remaining at the barricades at the edge of the city must have been scared silly as they watched an entire mechanized battalion roll through their flimsy barricade – tank after tank, Bradley after Bradley. The Americans just kept pouring into the city. Some insurgents were foolish enough to stand and fight. Their bullets plinked harmlessly against the armor plate like rain on a tin roof.

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