With fighting slowing down in Falluja, the insurgents who slipped out of town are now kicking up the action across Iraq. Did anyone really think that 12,000 troops could seal off a city of 300,000 people? Our media has been pumping us yet again with Pentagon spin that only a fool would believe. Funny how reality can run counter to a media hype campaign.
Guerrillas in Baquba, Mosul, Kirkuk and Suwaira stormed police stations, set oil wells ablaze and struck at American military convoys with suicide car bombs, routing Iraqi security forces in several coordinated assaults and severely damaging parts of the country's petroleum-based economic lifeline.
The wave of attacks across the Sunni Muslim heartland suggested that guerrillas were ready to carry on the war despite the loss of their safe haven in Falluja. The most intense fighting took place in the morning in Baquba, northeast of the capital. Insurgents there ambushed American troops near a downtown police station and laid siege to another station in a southern suburb.
