The face of victory.

The 10,000+ soldier major assault upon Fallujah rose to a boil last night with multiple warplane airstrikes. One bombing has demolished a hospital.

Today, the Marines are attacking:

"Colonel Gary Brandl of the United States Marine Corps commented: "The enemy has a face. It is Satan's. He is in Fallujah, and we are going to destroy him.""

Sunni does not translate into "satan", but what do I know...viva la liberation.

We've been bombing Fallujah for months with the result of a smashed city suffering thousands of casualties - men, women, and children. Its so horrible that Fallujah was excluded in the recent 100,000 civilian death estimate because there was such a high concentration of deaths, it would have skewed their estimate way too high:

"By the luck of the draw, the Iraqi city of Falluja was included in their sample. The researchers found an enormous number of deaths in that besieged city, much higher than in any over cluster they sampled. Researchers call such an observation an outlier and have developed a number of techniques for dealing with them. These researchers used the most conservative approach: namely, they presented many of their data excluding Falluja." (link)

One soldier killed and six wounded in Fallujah.

20 Marines wounded in Ramadi in a car bomb attack. At least 34 Iraqi slain and dozens wounded in Sammara attacks.

More at Today in Iraq , Antiwar.com, and GI Special.