So what does the US military really think about journalists? Below are excerpts from a report that addresses wider issues about the first Battle of Fallujah but contains some interesting points about “information operations,” in Orwellian milspeak.
The document is chiefly the work of Jane Austen fan Dr Sean Edwards, on whom more below. But first, his report as it relates to the media:
(U) Arab satellite news channels were crucial to building political pressure to halt military operations.
For example, CPA documented 34 stories on Al Jazeera that misreported or distorted battlefield events between 6 and 13 April. Between 14 and 20 April, Al Jazeera used the “excessive force” theme 11 times and allowed various anti-Coalition factions to claim that U.S. forces were using cluster bombs against urban areas and kidnapping and torturing Iraqi children.
Six negative reports by al-Arabiyah focused almost exclusively on the excessive force theme. Overall, the qualitative content of negative reports increasingly was shrill in tone, and both TV stations appeared willing to take even the most baseless claims as fact.
(U) During the first week of April, insurgents invited a reporter from Al Jazeera, Ahmed Mansour, and his film crew into Fallujah where they filmed scenes of dead babies from the hospital, presumably killed by Coalition air strikes. Comparisons were made to the Palestinian Intifada. Children were shown bespattered with blood; mothers were shown screaming and mourning day after day. Follow this link to see an example of the emotional images highlighted by Al Jazeera.
(U) The absence of Western media in Fallujah allowed the insurgents greater control of information coming out of Fallujah. Because Western reporters were at risk of capture and beheading, they stayed out and were forced to pool video shot by Arab cameramen and played on Al Jazeera. This led to further reinforcement of anti– Coalition propaganda. For example, false allegations of up to 600 dead and 1000 wounded civilians could not be countered by Western reporters because they did not have access to the battlefield.
(U) Western reporters were also not embedded in Marine units fighting in Fallujah. In the absence of countervailing visual evidence presented by military authorities, Al Jazeera shaped the world’s understanding of Fallujah.
Edwards doesn’t tell you that Mansour quitting Fallujah was one of the US conditions of the ceasefire. Yes, control of the informational realm is certainly important.
In 2006, Mansour and his cameraman, Laith Mushtaq gave this interview on their reporting from Fallujah. Here is Mushtaq, in his rather broken English, describing the deaths of the family of a man called Hamiz:
The family of Hamiz were gathered in the house of Hamiz, his sister and their family and their daughters. There was about four families in one place, children and ladies and women. Usually men leave to leave the — some privacy for the children and the ladies. The planes bombed this house, as they did for the whole neighbourhood, and they brought the corpses and bodies to the hospital.I went to the hospital. I could not see anything but like a sea of corpses of children and women, and mostly children, because peasants and farmers have usually a lot of children. So, these were scenes that are unbelievable, unimaginable.
I was taking photographs and forcing myself to photograph, while I was at the same time crying, because I used to move the camera from one picture of a child to the father Hamiz, who was still the only one left alone from that family.
He was speaking with his children, and they had an infant, and the children was named Ahmed. He used to speak to him, so he used to use a nickname Hamudi as a nickname for Ahmed. So he used to talk to this child who was sleeping, and in his hand was a toy of a shape of a car. Half his head was gone.
So he used to speak to him, “Come back, my beloved. Come to my lap. I am your father,” and talking to the other daughter. I could not really find any one human being in one piece or intact. They were cut up. It’s bombing of airplanes. You can imagine what could happen. It was a very saddening scene.
To get an idea of what the Arab media was reporting, you can turn to BBC Monitoring:
10–16 APRIL 2004 Pan-Arab TVs: Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, both very popular in Iraq, carried lengthy video reports from correspondents in Fallujah and other flashpoints, in addition to interviews with Iraqi politicians and regional experts.In fact, neither channel found room for much other than Iraq-related stories in news programmes throughout the week. On 9 April Al-Jazeera featured a day-long special programme entitled Baghdad: a year under occupation which included archival footage, a Friday prayer sermon, interviews and newscasts.
It and Al-Arabiya also gave extensive coverage to US President Bush’s speech on Iraq on 13 April and the hostage crisis, including footage of the foreign kidnap victims, their relatives and masked abductors.
Al-Jazeera was sent a video tape, which it did not broadcast, of the killing of an Italian security guard abducted on 12th. Both Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya were accused of incitement in their coverage of the Fallujah clashes by Iraqi National Security Secretary Muwaffaq al-Rubay’i, echoing complaints by US officials.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on 15th that the stations’ reporting that American troops had killed hundreds of civilians in the city was “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.”
Fallujah: In press reports on Iraq a number of themes emerged. Fallujah was widely seen as a model or symbol of “resistance” and “sacrifice” (London-based Al-Arab al-Alamiyah, Saudi Al-Jazirah, Oman’s Al-Watan) and an indication of Iraqis “overwhelming desire for liberation from occupation” (Saudi Al-Jazirah, Palestinian Al-Quds).
For London-based Al-Hayat, the street fighting in the city dispelled the “misconception that resistance is the work of foreigners and remnants of the former régime.” Events in Fallujah also revealed US “weakness” (Jordan’s Al-Dustur, Syria’s Al-Ba’th), with the cease-fire agreement a “confession of defeat” (Pakistan’s Islam).
One dissenting voice was Kuwait’s Al-Ra’y Al-Am, which described Fallujah as the centre of Islamic extremism in Iraq and saw no reason why Kuwaiti Muslims should have sympathy with its residents.
Another common observation was that US “claims to have liberated Iraq” were given the lie by pictures of the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Fallujah and the support for Al-Sadr (Saudi Al-Watan, Lebanon’s Al-Anwar and Al-Mustaqbal). Indonesia’s Suara Pembaruan interpreted the rise of al-Sadr as evidence of a further increase in dissatisfaction with power-sharing, therefore making the US mission to introduce democracy even more difficult.
24–30 APRIL 2004 Al-Jazeera TV maintained a sharply critical tone toward the US in its Iraq war coverage, portraying US military actions in Al-Fallujah as unprovoked violations of the truce. It highlighted the impact of US military operations on Iraqi civilians, implying Coalition forces used excessive force and glorified the “resistance” against Coalition forces.
Al-Jazeera — which says it is the favourite channel of Iraqi viewers — failed to distinguish between insurgents, foreign fighters and unarmed civilians. The channel rarely reported insurgents as instigating attacks against Coalition forces, instead portraying US military actions as unprovoked violations of the truce.
Despite this, it did provide time to the US viewpoint, covering US press conferences and speeches and inviting US officials to comment on events and participate in talk shows e.g. on 25 April it aired repeatedly an “exclusive” two-minute recorded interview with US civil administrator Paul Bremer.
The 24-hour news channel also offered entertainment that did not portray the US in an unfavourable light…Al Jazeera managing director Waddah Khanfar recently announced the channel introduce a tourism programme in an effort to “add a softer dimension” to the channel (Qatari daily The Peninsula)
On 27 April US Secretary of State Colin Powell accused the channel of damaging relations between Doha and Washington, picking up criticism by senior US officials who charge Al-Jazeera and Dubai-based Al-Arabiya TV with bias and stoking anti-US sentiment.
The pan-Arab press on 28th slammed these US attempts “to suppress the Arab satellite channels” (London’s Al-Quds al-Arabi). Al-Jazeera itself on the 30th reported several international groups opposing US pressure on Qatar to influence the channel’s editorial content.
In the wider Middle Eastern press there was a torrent of attacks on all aspects of US strategy and tactics in Iraq. Many papers pointed to a heightened state of crisis in the direction of the “unjustified” US-led occupation brought on by the spectacle of “daily killings” (Jordan’s Al-Dustur, echoed by Oman’s Al-Watan and Oman, Iran’s Arabic Al-Vefagh, Egypt’s Al-Ahram, and Al-Jumhuriyah, UAE’s Al-Ittihad and Akhbar al-Arab). Some editorials chose to home in on casualties being suffered by innocent civilians in the fighting (Jordan’s Al-Dustur, Egypt’s Al-Jumhuriyah, UAE’s Al-Bayan,) while others feared the entire political development in Iraq had ground to a halt (Lebanon’s Al-Mustaqbal, Jordan’s Al-Ra’y).
Would “information operations” have made much of a difference to that groundswell of opinion? Edwards thinks so (my italics):
(U) The relative failure of the first Battle of Fallujah compared to the more successful second Battle of Fallujah (November 2004) offers useful political– military lessons for how to defeat asymmetric adversaries in complex environments.
- (U) The enemy will seek to utilize the human, informational, and physical complexity of urban areas to avoid direct military confrontation and exploit American political and informational vulnerabilities.
- (U) Shaping operations that clear civilians from the battlefield offers many positive second-order effects. In Fallujah in April 2004, I MEF only had a few days to shape the environment before engaging in decisive combat operations. The remaining
noncombatants provided cover for insurgents, restrained CJTF-7’s employment of combat power, and provided emotional fodder for Arab media to exploit.
- (U) Information operations are increasingly important in a 21st Century world where cable television runs 24 hours a day and the Internet offers propaganda opportunities for insurgent and terrorist groups.
- (U) The media presence on the battlefield was controlled by the enemy; consequently, they shaped much of the information the world viewed during the fight. In VIGILANT RESOLVE there were few reporters embedded in Marine infantry units; in Operation AL FAJR there were 91 embeds representing 60 media outlets. False allegations of noncombatant casualties were made by Arab media in both campaigns, but in the second case embedded Western reporters offered a rebuttal.
It is quite likely that there were civilian casualties in their hundreds. Not unsurprising when you launch a major offensive against a city of tens of thousands. You cannot bomb a city and call the victims emotional fodder. Edwards fails to take into consideration the problems of warfare in a supportive but noncombatant civilian environment.
Incidentally, in December 2007, a Serbian general was jailed for 33 years by the ICTY for leading the siege of Sarajevo. You can read the full judgment here [pdf], (section 914 onwards is particularly interesting).
The key question about civilian deaths in Fallujah, beyond the legal and ethical ones, was — does the audience care? In the West, the answer was not much. In the Middle East, and especially in Iraq — it was rather a lot.
The Edwards report comes courtesy of one of my favourite resources, Wikileaks [pdf]. But who wrote this stuff? Not a Jane Austen fan surely? Well, actually, it would be this guy:
Dr. Sean Edwards, Intelligence Analyst, National Ground Intelligence Center
Former Army Ranger. Conducted a study on Operations in Complex Terrain, to include the Battle of Fallujah — having a significant effect on Army thinking on doctrine and tactics.
So is Dr Edwards right about the impact of Western reporters? Perhaps in the case of Western outlets. Take this piece from the foreign editor of the Washington Times on 11 April, 2004 about their correspondent, Willis Witter:
Mr. Witter simply covered himself from head to foot in a hooded Arab robe and slouched down in the front seat of a car alongside his Iraqi driver-translator for the 30-mile drive from Baghdad to Fallujah.Once in the city, they navigated through coalition roadblocks and made their way to the command post from which Marine Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne was directing the battle and joined up with a handful of Western reporters already embedded with the unit…
Reports had begun appearing on the wire agencies earlier on Wednesday saying coalition forces had bombed a mosque in Fallujah as residents gathered for afternoon prayers and that as many as 40 worshippers had been killed in the strike.
The reports, based largely on telephone interviews with hospital officials in Fallujah, had the obvious potential to infuriate ordinary Iraqis and further inflame the situation both in the city and across the country. But by being in Fallujah, Mr. Witter was able to get an alternative account of what had happened from Col. Byrne.
According to the colonel, the Americans had been coming under heavy fire from the mosque and the compound in which it sat, beginning when a rocket-propelled grenade struck a Marine vehicle and wounded five men.
Strikes with a Hellfire missile and then with a 500-pound laser-guided bomb were called in only when the fighting persisted for hours, and even then the bomb had been dropped in such a way that the mosque itself suffered little damage, Mr. Witter reported.
When Marines entered the mosque a half-hour after the bomb ended the fighting, they found the building empty and its floor littered with shell casings. How many people were killed or injured in the mosque could not be determined, but it seems reasonable to assume that few of them were innocent worshippers.
Mr. Witter’s ability to get balanced information about the incident into the public arena may have, in some small way, helped to prevent a bad situation from getting worse.
Chalk one up to info ops! Embedding people so they can cover pressers nearer the front line does not really make the reporting grade, besides it would hardly have won over Arab media outlets.
Unlike Witter, Ned Parker of Agence France Presse was actually embedded with the Marines in Fallujah. On 9 April 2004, the Times ran a joint dispatch from Parker, he got a different take from Lt Col Byrne. :
An exact death toll was impossible to ascertain, but the director of Fallujah’s hospital claimed that 280 Iraqis had been killed and 400 wounded since the offensive to capture those responsible for the deaths of four American contractors began on Monday.
At least ten Marines are thought to have been killed, including two yesterday…
“This is like Hue City in Vietnam,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Brennan Byrne, referring to the city that became a byword for lethal street fighting, the type of combat most feared by US commanders when they invaded Iraq last year…
Captain Chris Chown, a Marine battalion air officer, said that the Iraqis were fighting back with hit-and-run tactics and snipers, using small-arms fire and rockets against the Americans.
“It’s tough. These guys are determined. One by one they can’t stand up to the US military force so they are using all the scenery available to them,” Captain Chown told a reporter who is embedded with the unit.
“One guy can basically hold down a whole squad. He shoots from one window and pops in another. They are fierce and very determined but they can’t shoot straight. They are basically spraying and praying.”
But Captain Chown expressed concern that the outgunned Iraqis could end up winning the battle of public opinion if the fighting continues. “I hope one day we don’t get so jaded we just roll down the streets in armoured vehicles shooting at whatever moves,” he said. “If that happens, we need to take a step back and look at the humanity of the place or we’ve just lost our mission.
“We are at a crossroads in Fallujah. You get to a critical juncture where one small event is going to tip things for us or against us. If we’re not there already, we’re getting pretty close.”
James Hider of the Times was also in Fallujah in mid-April. Not every Marine was as considered as Captain Chown. Information operations are not necessarily won like this:
The Marines have little regard for their foes’ mettle or fighting ability.“When we capture them, they cry like babies. Then they p*** themselves,” Lieutenant Michael Liguorni said.
“We find these little drug bottles around; we think half of these guys are drugged up,” he said, as the eerie hiss and bang of rocket-propelled grenades broke the silence, followed by the rattle of rifle fire and the zing of ricochets.
Under the headline, Marines losing the battle for Fallujah, Hider pretty much summed up the situation at the end of April 2004:
After three weeks of fighting that has killed hundreds of people, forced 65,000 from their homes and threatened to shatter ties between the coalition and its political allies in Iraq, American forces appear to be no closer to their aim of flushing out foreign insurgents and the killers of four US defence contractors in Fallujah.US Marines were hours away from renewing a full-scale attack on the city this weekend when they were ordered by the coalition’s political leadership to rethink their plans, as Paul Bremer, the coalition chief administrator, rushed to the city for last-ditch peace talks. Apparently shaken by the political fallout from the fighting, Mr Bremer and President Bush flinched from another confrontation.
The battle has been muddled by cross-currents of military expediency and political imperatives, with the United Nations envoy to Iraq demanding an end to the military’s heavy-handed tactics.
Instead of a wave of American military muscle sweeping in, the city will be slowly inundated by a rising tide of joint US-Iraqi patrols to restore security — an attempt by coalition leaders to show they are trying to avoid bloodshed.
“A military solution is not going to be the solution here unless everything else fails,” Major-General James Mattis said as his men prepared to conduct the heavily armed joint patrols this week, after putting Iraqi security forces through an intensive, but brief, training camp.
That message is a far cry from the operation launched with tanks, helicopter gunships and aircraft three weeks ago, when the Marines stormed the Sunni city to hunt for guerrillas and foreign fighters. As the resistance proved as fierce as anything that coalition forces have so far encountered, the security clampdown rapidly escalated into a public relations disaster for the coalition. Sunni leaders threatened to walk out of the Iraqi Governing Council.
The coalition argued that it was adhering to the Geneva Convention, but the result was a howl of rage from Iraqis across the country. A reported death toll of at least 600 met an outcry in the Arab world.
At the same time, the ferocity of the resistance — coinciding with an uprising by Shia militiamen in other cities — made the fighters heroes in the eyes of many and caused several coalition partners to question their troop commitment.
While the Marines believe that they are more than capable of taking the town, the political price has proved to be too high. Restoring the peace has become the priority as the flashpoint city threatened to act as a catalyst for uniting Sunni and Shia hardliners into one formidable front.
Edwards’ own conclusions?
(U) In summary, several factors explain the difference in outcomes between Fallujah I and II.Longer shaping operations to evacuate civilians, control of the informational realm, more aggressive COIN operations in surrounding towns to protect Coalition MSRs, solid political backing from a more stable Iraqi government, and larger forces that contained a greater percentage of mechanized units to speed up the campaign all contributed to the relative success of Fallujah II (November 2004) versus the failure of Fallujah I.
The informational realm — for those of us in the reality-based community — is the world of events.
My advice to those Dr Edwards would reach? Don’t unleash hell and then complain about the smell of sulphur.