Fallujah veteran says militiamen should have ‘warrior ethos’
A Marine combat vet who went house-to-house against insurgents in Fallujah in 2004 said driving the Islamic State from Mosul will depend on the grit and the training of Iraqi commandos who now face the same dirty, deadly task.
“I don’t know where these Iraqis’ heads are at,” former Marine Sgt. Chris Lessard told the Herald yesterday. “Are they scared beyond belief? Are they determined? Are they bloodthirsty?”
Because in the chaos of closequarters urban fighting, Lessard said, you have to be.
“There’s this adrenaline rush that comes with combat, the psyche of the individual. I was in the infantry for 8 years in the Marines, which is a radical culture. It welcomes the warrior ethos,” said Lessard, a machinegunner who punched into the city in November 2004 in the second battle of Fallujah, which finally drove insurgents out of their stronghold there.
Islamic State fighters have held Mosul for two years and have dug-in defenses, with an elaborate system of tunnels and trenches, peppered with booby traps and manned by suicide bombers in Iraq’s sprawling second-largest city. The setting is widely expected to be a repeat of the bloody urban warfare U.S. and coalition fighters waged in Fallujah.
Lessard said urban combat had been a focus for the Marines even before Fallujah, and his expectation is U.S. advisers working with Iraqi special forces have only refined their tactics based on that experience.
“We were doing it right in 2004. I can only imagine 12 years later we are even better at it, but this time it’s not us — it’s the Iraqis,” he said.
He said the slow, steady process of going house-to-house, clearing apartments, sometimes turned into repeat work as insurgents would slip back to retake positions after U.S. forces marked them as clear.
“One time, we walked in the house and we saw the tea kettle boiling,” Lessard said, noting an insurgent had fled seconds before they returned to the house. “There were some really close calls.”
Lessard said while the insurgents in Fallujah ironically benefited from their lack of planning that led to random, unpredictable attacks, the Islamic State’s centralized operations could be its downfall.
“ISIS seems like they are a little bit more advanced than those insurgents, and that might be their demise,” Lessard said. “They are trying to be more conventional and that takes away the advantage.”