Over 60 Days, Troops Suppressed an Uprising

"We weren't going to let them dance on it for the news," said Capt. Ty Wilson, 31, of Fairfax, Va., who commands "Apache" Company. "Even all the guys they lost that day, that still would have given them victory. Once they saw we weren't going to leave it, though, they really stepped up the attack."

After the troops took mortar fire for days from behind the cemetery wall, a tank was sent to knock down a 200-foot section, exposing the fighters inside. Qasim Alwan, a Najaf resident who watched the fight, remembered the animosity it inspired.

"Most people were out of their houses because they feared the war, and what was happening in the cemetery," said Alwan, 36. "What happened disrespected what the cemetery means to us."

But the mortar attacks stopped.

Mukhaiyam Mosque, Karbala: May 11-21

By May 11, Sadr's militants had withdrawn into a square-mile area around Karbala's shrines. For the first time, Bishop's soldiers contended with an exclusion zone of their own.

That evening Bishop sent hundreds of soldiers into buildings around the Mukhaiyam mosque. Sgt. Shane Hill, a 24-year-old from Chicago, entered a boys school a block west of the mosque. He found tank rounds and four men who identified themselves as Iraqi police officers bound and gagged, badly beaten and smelling of urine.

As Hill worked to clear the school, mortar shells fell in the courtyard, fired by teams of insurgents who faded into the old city. Bisho, observing from a few blocks away, would not let his men pursue them into the exclusion zone. Asked how he made the decision, Bishop said, "By being here a year."

The battle moved to the shrines. Over 10 days, Bishop's soldiers played cat-and-mouse with insurgents who took cover among the city's alleyways, covered archways and low rooftops. Residents were caught in the fighting. The soldiers estimate that 20 civilians were killed in Karbala during the fighting, a figure that could not be independently verified.

Squeezed into a few downtown blocks, Sadr militants began using children to shuttle ammunition, soldiers said. Youngsters carrying large plastic bags darted from corner to corner, and the soldiers would not shoot them. "We all grew up knowing you don't hurt women and children," Taylor said. "And they used that to their advantage."

Sadr militants accused U.S. forces of killing hundreds of civilians, a claim denied by U.S. commanders. Hussein Hadi, the assistant director of Najaf's general hospital, said 81 civilians were killed and 353 others wounded during the weeks of fighting. Many of Sadr's militiamen wore black uniforms, making it relatively easy to distinguish between civilian and insurgent. But that changed as the battle wore on.

On May 21, Bishop's men destroyed two arms stockpiles and two Sadr headquarter buildings. The remaining militants, whose numbers swelled to more than 400 over the course of the fighting, vanished overnight.

Kufa: May 24-June 4

By the last week in May, Najaf's war of attrition had entered its endgame. From two sides, battalion-size tank units converged on the town of Kufa, a few miles east of Najaf, where Sadr delivered Friday sermons.

In darkness, tank platoons began pushing into Kufa across a bridge over the Euphrates. Fighters holed up in a former palace and a technical college watched over the west side of the river. Each night, soldiers shot tank rounds into the buildings.

On the night of May 24, Lt. Col. Bob Burns, commander of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment's 3rd Squadron, sent three tanks under Capt. Geoff Wright on a scouting mission across the bridge. As the convoy turned north toward the Kufa mosque complex, the heart of Sadr's militia, six rocket-propelled grenades hit the lead tank.

"Every alley had four- to five-man teams, firing," said Wright, 31, of Emmaus, Pa. "The sheer amount of it was awe-inspiring."