Don’t want to “inflame the Arab street” by damaging mosques, right? Well then, they shouldn’t be stockpiling arms in them:

[Maj. Gen. Richard Natonski, commander of the 1st Marine Division] said troops had found an arms cache in “almost every single mosque in Fallujah.”

Yet we’re still being careful. Deadly, but careful:

American troops scored one of their biggest successes in the battle for Fallujah when an estimated 70 foreign fighters were killed in a massive precision artillery strike on a building in a mosque complex.

Word is that among the dead is “a key lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”. This guy seems to have a lot of lieutenants. It’ll be nice when we hear we actually put al-Zarqawi out of commission. But I digress.

The constraints of firing into another AOR, where US marines might be operating, and the danger of damaging the mosque, which would have provoked outrage in the Arab world, meant attacking the building had to be authorised at a very senior level.

Screw the mosque, screw the Arab street, get the bad guys. They violated the sanctity of thier mosques when they started using them as weapons caches.

A Humvee from Phantom troop fitted with a Long Range Acquisition System (LRAS) was moved to within two kilometres of the mosque, well inside its maximum range of 15km, to get a second opinion on what was happening. “The strike was so sensitive that it took more than an hour to approve it,” said Maj John Reynolds, operations officer for 2-2. “Normally it happens in minutes.”

Lt Prakash was asked to provide a grid co-ordinate, accurate to within a metre, to minimise the chance of hitting the mosque, about 50 metres from the building.

Evidently the fighters gathered to try and figure out a way out of town. They didn’t get the chance.

Mobile phone intercepts and reports from Iraqi informants suggested there were 70 gunmen in the building and indicated that the very senior Zarqawi lieutenant had perished.

But even better news:

“We are hearing reports saying that the enemy is withdrawing to a central place for a final stand,” said Maj Reynolds. “It’s like a Gettysburg. We have surrounded the whole area.”

Hopefully not quite like Gettysburg. I don’t recall anyone being surrounded at Gettysburg and there were over 3,000 killed on each side not to mention that casualties were in the tens of thousands. Maybe it will be more like the Battle of Great Bridge. </nit-picking>

For more on Fallujah, see Airborne Combat Engineer’s post on our use of white phosphorous rounds and visit the Command Post Your Comprehensive Briefing (v2.4).