Skilled snipers hunt Marines
Soldiers 'go crazy trying to find' rebels who withstand barrage
By DEXTER FILKINS
THE NEW YORK TIMES
FALLUJAH, Iraq -- U.S. Marines called in two airstrikes on the pair of dingy three-story buildings squatting along Highway 10 yesterday, dropping 500-pound bombs each time. They fired 35 or so 155 millimeter artillery shells, 10 shots from the muzzles of Abrams tanks and perhaps 30,000 rounds from their automatic rifles. The building was a smoking ruin.
But the sniper kept shooting.
He -- or they, because no one can count the flitting shadows in this place -- kept 150 Marines pinned down for the better part of a day. It was a lesson on the nature of the enemy in this hellish warren of rubble-strewn streets. Not all the insurgents are holy warriors looking for martyrdom. At least a few are highly trained killers who do their job with cold precision and know how to survive.
"The idea is, he just sits up there and eats a sandwich," said Lt. Andy Eckart, "and we go crazy trying to find him."
The contest is a deadly one, and two Marines in Company B, 1st Battalion, 8th Regiment of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, have been killed by snipers in the past two days as the unit advanced just half a mile southward to Highway 10 from a mosque they had taken Tuesday.
Despite the world-shaking blasts of weaponry as the Americans try to root out the snipers, this is also a contest of wills in which the tension rises to a level that seems unbearable, and then rises again. Marine snipers sit, as motionless as blue herons, for 30 minutes and stare with crazed intensity into the oversized scopes on their guns. If so much as a penumbra brushes across a windowsill, they open up.
With the troops' senses turned up to their highest pitch, mundane events become extraordinary. During one bombing, a blue-and-yellow parakeet flew up to a roof of a captured building and fluttered about in tight circles before perching on a slumping power line, to the amazement of the Marines assembled there.
On another occasion, the snipers tensed when they heard movement in the direction of a smoldering building. A cat sauntered out, unconcerned with anything but making its rounds in the neighborhood.
"Can I shoot it, sir?" a sniper asked an officer.
"Absolutely not," came the reply.
This day started at about 8 a.m., when the Marines left the building where they had been sleeping and headed south toward Highway 10, which runs from east to west and roughly bisects the town. At the corner of Highway 10 and Thurthar, the street they were moving along, was a headquarters building for the Iraqi National Guard that had been taken over by insurgents.
Almost immediately, they came under fire from a sniper in the minaret of a mosque just south of them. Someone in a three-story residential building farther down the street also opened up. The Marines made 50-yard dashes and dived for cover, but one of them was cut down, killed on the spot. It was unclear what direction the fatal bullet had come from.
"I don't know who it was," Lt. Steven Berch, leader of the fallen Marine's platoon, said of the attacker, "but he was very well-trained."
"Fortunately, it was quick," he added.
After two hours of bombardment, the sniper at that mosque ceased firing. But just around the corner at the famous blue-domed Khulafah Al-Rashid mosque, another sniper was pinning down Marines, and airstrikes were called in on it, too. The issue of striking at mosques is so sensitive in the Arab world that the U.S. military later issued a statement saying that the strike on the Khulafah mosque was unavoidable and that precision munitions merely knocked down a minaret.
By noon, the Marines had worked their way down to the national guard building, still taking fire from the sniper, or snipers, on the other side of Main Street. Inside there was a painted sign in Arabic that said: "Long live the mujahedeen." Soon the Marines had spray-painted another sign over it: "Long live the muj killers."
But for the next five hours, they could not kill whoever was running from window to window and firing at them from the other side of Main Street, despite the expenditure of enormous amounts of ammunition.
"We're not able to see the muzzle flashes," said Capt. Read Omohundro, the company commander. "As a result," he said, "we end up expending a lot of ammunition trying to get the snipers."
At one point, they thought that they had a bead on someone running back and forth between the two buildings. Then Capt. Christopher Spears exclaimed: "He's on a bike!"
And somehow, through a volley of gunfire, whoever it was got away.
