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uniforms, had launched an assault on the main police station. Shouting “God is great” and “There is no God but Allah,” they also attacked the compound housing the National Guard battalion. When the fighting did not let up after half an hour, Col Smith and LtCol Drinkwine decided to send in an armored column, although they hadn’t been asked to help.
    Before the tanks left the compound, Lieutenant Colonel Suleiman al Marawi drove in, at the head of a half-dozen pickups. A short man with a thick black mustache, Suleiman was in charge of a National Guard battalion stationed on the western peninsula, on the far side of the Brooklyn Bridge. The battalion had been recruited a week earlier and was untrained—it consisted of four hundred former soldiers and unemployed youths, pulled together with the promise that the 82nd would give them three weeks of training, AK rifles, uniforms, and $200 a month. Now Suleiman, summoned by Smith and Drinkwine, had rushed into the American base with a few dozen excited, fresh-faced young men.
    Drinkwine had met Suleiman only a few times. Suleiman had gone to high school in Fallujah, then moved to another city before being accepted at the military academy. He had joined the Baath Party, served in the Republican Guard, trained fedayeen insurgents before the invasion, and refused to speak English. He had been the city elders’ third choice to lead a column into the city because he was an outsider known as a hardhead, difficult to control. Suleiman told Drinkwine that the Americans had to stay out of the fight. If they charged in with their armor, he said, they would kill the wrong people. He demanded grenades, handheld radios, and ammunition for the operation.
    Smith asked where LtCol Nowar was. Gone, Suleiman said. The police chief, Abood, was no help either. Suleiman gestured impatiently. “I need to be the protector,” he said to Smith, “not you.”
    He and his volunteers needed military equipment, not questions. Drinkwine agreed, and the paratroopers piled the pickups full of ammunition. Then Suleiman led his little convoy into the city.
    The battle was petering out, and within an hour Suleiman’s men were sifting through the wreckage of the shattered police station. The insurgents had freed seventy-five prisoners and killed twenty-three policemen. At most, eight attackers were killed or captured.
    When Suleiman called for him to come in, Drinkwine arrived on scene with a company mounted in Bradleys. After his medics extracted thirteen pieces of shrapnel from one insurgent, the dazed guerrilla rattled off the names of his leaders, some of whom had been taken to the hospital.
    Drinkwine and Suleiman then drove to the hospital, where the director, Rafi Aieisaw, refused to allow them to see the dead or wounded insurgents, despite blood trails in the main corridor. He relented after Suleiman threatened to kill him. Suleiman identified two of the dead as brothers from a small Luhaibi tribe in eastern Fallujah. One had been a lieutenant and the other a captain in the army. Both were members of a fundamentalist cell working in the city with Zarqawi.
    Drinkwine and Suleiman rushed over to the cell’s headquarters, an abandoned, battered building that also served as a mosque for a recently arrived imam sponsored by Janabi. According to Suleiman, Janabi, who was nowhere to be found, had been a businessman for most of his life and had taken up preaching as a lucrative side business. The paratroopers moved on to search four small “mosques”—shabby, half-built buildings—set up by Janabi in the same neighborhood. All contained weapons and explosives.
    The next day Drinkwine fired the police chief when he refused to wear his uniform. LtCol Nowar, having failed to fight, stepped down in disgrace. Many in the police and the city hierarchy had known the attack was coming and had left town for the day. The mayor, Ra’ad Hussein Abed, had been mysteriously absent during the attack and was