Falluja recovers from battle
From Wolf Blitzer
CNN
FALLUJA, Iraq (CNN) -- The helicopter flight from Baghdad to Falluja is only about 40 minutes, over vast stretches of dryland. But the two cities today are very different.
The Iraqi capital remains a hotbed for deadly insurgent attacks against Americans, their coalition partners, and their Iraqi supporters in the police and security services. The insurgency in Falluja has been broken.
Only a few months ago, the city was the scene of a horrible battle that took hundreds of lives.
U.S. Marine Lt. Gen. John Sattler led Operation Vigilant Resolve against the insurgents.
" ... somewhere around 2,000. I'll just put that out as a benchmark," said Sattler when asked how many insurgents were killed.
That battle was intense. Sattler said that the insurgents who survived the attack fled the area.
The badly damaged city is making a comeback. Nearly a third of the city's 300,000 residents have returned.
Sattler insists that Falluja is one of the safest places in Iraq. But he and other U.S. commanders say the Iraqi insurgency is far from over.
The Saddam loyalists, the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi terrorists, the foreign fighters and the common criminals continue their attacks, especially their increasingly sophisticated use of improvised explosive devices.
At a U.S. base near Baghdad, the U.S. military is confronting this threat with a huge armored vehicle, called a Buffalo, that can detect the bombs and detonate them.
But there's no shortage of deadly threats. Top planners hope that a new Iraqi government and a new Iraqi military will increasingly take charge of events in their country and give the United States and its coalition partners a chance to scale back and eventually leave.
