Patrick Cockburn, in an article titled “The Baghdad Bombings – The Pattern of Attacks is Changing” mentions near the end that “On Saturday gunmen attacked civilian security in two four-wheel-drive vehicles and killed four–two Americans and two Poles–on the airport road. The US also no longer controls the road from Baghdad to Fallujah, the city that Marines besieged in April but did not capture. The city is still under the control of the resistance.”
Undoubtedly Washington Post reporter Daniel Williams would be willing to vouch for the veracity of that statement. Read about his harrowing trip to Fallujah, which ends with an attack on the highway from Fallujah to Baghdad in which armed Iraqis fired on their vehicle from an orange and white taxi:
On Friday, an armored sport-utility vehicle carrying this Washington Post reporter and his driver was attacked close to Fallujah on the main highway to Baghdad. Four men in an orange-and-white taxi pumped dozens of bullets from AK-47 assault rifles into the vehicle for more than two minutes, each round causing a loud thump on the vehicle’s metal plating and reinforced windows. They shot from behind, from in front and from the sides, where their determined frowns and mustached faces were clearly visible, as they and we weaved down the highway at 90 mph. The fusillade stopped when the SUV, its back tires missing and its rear windows shattered, spun out of control. The gunmen sped down the road, evidently thinking their mission was accomplished. Neither the driver nor the reporter was injured.
But, never fear! It’s only a matter of time before the New Iraqi Puppets restore order to Iraq and disband all the militias.
Another interesting revelation from Williams:
Under an agreement made last month with U.S. Marine commanders, a new force called the Fallujah Brigade, led by former officers from Saddam Hussein’s demobilized army, was to safeguard the city. The unruly gunmen — many of them insurgents who battled the Marines through most of April — were supposed to give way to Iraqi police and civil defense units.
Instead, the brigade stays outside of town in tents, the police cower in their patrol cars and the civil defense force nominally occupies checkpoints on the city’s fringes but exerts no influence over the masked insurgents who operate only a few yards away.