RIBAT, Iraq — The casualties mounted Monday in remote Iraqi desert villages near the Syrian border after U.S. troops launched their largest offensive since last year's invasion of Fallouja.
Insurgents have killed at least three Marines and wounded 20 American troops trying to cross the Euphrates River in western Iraq since the offensive began Sunday. Marine commanders estimate they have slain more than 100 guerrillas.
From a hilltop overlooking Ribat, a Times reporter traveling with members of the 2nd Marine Division could see insurgents driving to houses on the northern edge of the town, filling trucks with AK-47s and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers and ferrying them to the south side of the village where the battle was taking place.
Children stood near one of the houses. A woman casually hung clothes on a line. Marines held their fire.
On Monday, more than 1,000 Marines, sailors and soldiers from Regimental Combat Team 2 crossed to the north side of the Euphrates River. The U.S. troops were preparing for a large-scale assault today in the region's scattered villages.
Marines hope the assault will flush out insurgent fighters who the Marines believe have made the Ramana region -- a conglomeration of well-irrigated riverside towns -- a haven and training ground for foreign guerrillas. The 2nd Marine Division is responsible for security in Al Anbar province, a desert region the size of South Carolina that runs from Jordan in the south to Syria in the north.
"The insurgents we're fighting today are not the guys getting $50 to put [a roadside bomb] on the side of the road," regiment commander Col. Stephen Davis said. "These are the professional fighters who have come from all over the Middle East. These are people who have received training and are very well-armed."
The Marines say that capturing or killing insurgents in these villages is key to pacifying Iraq. Recruits from western Iraq and much of the nation's Sunni Muslim heartland fuel the insurgency.
Foreign fighters pour across the border here to volunteer as suicide bombers, the guerrillas' most potent weapons, which in the last month have claimed scores of Iraqi lives. Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant who leads an Al Qaeda group in Iraq, is said to travel this region with impunity, granted the protection of powerful Sunni clans resisting U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies.
