The Spiders of Allah by James Hider

Author:James Hider
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407041148
Publisher: Transworld

CITY OF BROKEN MOSQUES

How the Spiders of Allah Defeated the US Marine Corps

Lieutenant Colonel Brennan Byrne, commander of the First Battalion, Fifth Regiment of the US Marine Corps, stepped out of his briefing room and gazed happily up at the sky. ‘God, that sound gives me a stiffy,’ he laughed. ‘Don’t quote me on that!’ he added, spotting three journalists standing outside, pens poised over notebooks and waiting for an update. We laughed too. After all, he was a friendly, helpful officer with a sense of humour. About a mile away, however, people were being vaporized by a wall of bullets.

The otherworldly howl and burp of the Spectre gunship continued to reverberate across Fallujah, the mournful cry of a shambling monster satiating itself on human life. By a trick of acoustics, the eerie waarrrp sound of a hundred bullets per second leaving the aircraft’s chain gun was audible only after the bass buuurrrrr of their impact on disintegrating Iraqis. The fact that the AC130 was such a large, unwieldy aircraft – an airborne platform rigged with Gatling guns and cannon – made it seem all the more sinister. Like a mythical dragon fishing over some human pond, it scarcely bothered to exert itself, yet was still able to unleash carnage with practised indifference. But as I stood outside the colonel’s headquarters hut on Iraq’s newest front line, I knew there was nothing we could do about the killing around us.

For the past seven days in April 2004, the marines in Fallujah had seen some of the harshest urban warfare since they had sweated it out for control of Hue City during the Tet offensive, back in January 1968. In the streets, dogs picked at the bloated corpses of Iraqis who had died in the fighting. Hundreds of people had been killed, though due to the ill-defined nature of the battle, no one was ever quite sure who they were, who had killed them or how many they numbered. The figure we did know, on the other hand, was that around 60,000 people – a third of the city – had already fled as the marines fought their way in, block by block. More Fallujans left every day, if they could bypass the fifteen-mile-long, six-foot-high earth wall that the US forces had bulldozed round Fallujah like a tourniquet to prevent the rebellion leaking out.

Byrne, a tall, lean man in his forties with a grey short-back-and-sides but a youthful, animated face, had at his command hundreds of men from the 1/5 Marines, a battalion with a long history of success, peppered with the odd near-disaster. It had fought the Germans at Aisne in 1917, driven the Japanese out of Guadalcanal and Okinawa in the Second World War, battled against vastly superior numbers of Chinese at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea and slogged it out in the jungles of Que Son to attack the Ho Chi Minh trail, where it took heavy losses. Now it had flown in from Japan to take on the toughest task in America’s latest military venture: the pacification of Fallujah.

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