The 70-ton armored vehicles were unstoppable. Task Force Blue Diamond, the 1 st Marine Division, led with their tanks. Most of the four-thousand jihadists were there to fight and die. They had built barricades, set IEDs and dug in deep. The enemy had been preparing for the inevitable assault for months. To the east, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Newell’s 2-2 Infantry attacked south on the eastern edge of the city alongside Colonel Craig Tucker’s RCT-7 Marines. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Rainey’s 2-7 Cavalry led Colonel Mike Shupp’s Regimental Combat Team (RCT-1) into the northwestern Byzantine neighborhoods. The actual attack would come twenty-fours later, at sunset on November 8, 2004, as two Marine regiments swept into the city. Two Army mechanized task forces and four reinforced Marine infantry battalions were preparing to inundate the enemy, all along the northern edge of the city. The Wolfpack’s attack was a battalion-sized diversion. As the Wolfpack was moving to secure the Fallujah Hospital and the western approach to the Euphrates River bridges, a massive military force was assembling, north of the city. It is hard to believe that it has been five years since the beginning of the largest, and most important, battle of Operation Iraqi Freedom. An angry mob had strung up the bodies of two Blackwater contractors on the older footbridge in spring of 2004. Two bridges spanned the Euphrates River, connecting the Shark’s Fin with downtown. The Beginning of the End of al Qaeda in IraqĪt sunset on Sunday, November 7, 2004, the soldiers, sailors and Marines of Task Force Wolfpack raced north in their Light Armored Vehicles, tanks and trucks to secure the "Shark’s Fin," a large peninsula west of the insurgent stronghold in the ancient Iraqi blue-collar city of Fallujah. Operation Phantom Fury – Beginning of the End of al Qaeda in Iraq By Richard S.
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