Rohan Pearce
Wondering what's been happening in Iraq? Here's US President George Bush's account: "Coalition forces have encountered serious violence in some areas of Iraq. Our military commanders report that this violence is being instigated by three groups: Some remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime, along with Islamic militants have attacked coalition forces in the city of Fallujah. Terrorists from other countries have infiltrated Iraq to incite and organise attacks. In the south of Iraq, coalition forces face riots and attacks that are being incited by a radical cleric named [Moqtada] al Sadr."
Bush presented this account at a heavily stage-managed White House press conference on April 13. The only people who could accept it are those who accept Bush's equally ludicrous claim that the US occupation forces in Iraq "serve the cause of liberty".
In reality, what happened in Iraq in early April was an offensive by the Iraqi resistance movement. Militias led by Sadr staged an armed rebellion against the occupation forces in southern, Shiite-inhabited cities and in the Shiite slums of Baghdad.
In the predominantly Sunni-inhabited city of Fallujah, 45km west of Baghdad, resistance fighters waged a fierce defence of the city which they had liberated from the occupation forces' control in February. They succeeded in defeating repeated attacks on the city of 250,000 inhabitants by the US marines.
Resistance fighters, joined by members of the US-trained Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC) and Iraqi police officers, stepped up attacks on the occupation forces in other cities and on the roads between them. The Pentagon reported on April 12 that attacks on the occupation forces had escalated from an average of 26 a day in March to 70 every day in April.
The combined offensive by Sunni resistance fighters and Shiite militias has inspired mass demonstrations of solidarity in Baghdad and shattered Washington's claims that the occupiers have made progress in "pacifying" the Iraqi population.
A key trigger for the Shiite insurrection in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities was the March 28 banning by the US-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of Sadr's Al Hawza weekly newspaper.
The CPA shutdown the paper, which had a weekly readership of up 10,000 people, for allegedly breaching CPA Order 14 (issued in June 2003). This prohibits Iraqis from "broadcasting or publishing original, re-broadcast, re-printed or syndicated material that ... incites violence against coalition forces or CPA personnel".
It has been widely reported that US ambassador Paul Bremer, who heads the CPA, ordered the paper's closure after it carried an article comparing his undemocratic regime to that of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.
Battle of Fallujah
The CPA's attempt to suppress Sadr's political activities coincided with an attempt by the US military to re-occupy Fallujah. Often described by Western reporters as a "hotbed of resistance", few of them give any account of the origins of the armed resistance in Fallujah and its surrounding areas.
On April 27, 2003, US troops fired on unarmed protesters in Fallujah, killing at least 13 of them. Three of those shot dead were under the age of 11. The protesters were demanding that US troops end their occupation of Fallujah's schools, so classes could resume.
Two days later, two more protesters were killed, and 14 injured, when US troops fired at another anti-occupation street demonstration. According to witnesses, both Iraqis and foreign journalists, none of the protesters were armed.
The most recent US military assault on Fallujah was ostensibly a response to the March 31 killing of four US "private security contractors" (a Pentagon euphemism for US mercenaries) and the mutilation of their bodies.
The killings triggered a wave of denunciations by the White House and commentators in the Western corporate media of the "savagery" of the killings — from the very same people who applauded the US cluster bombing of Iraqi hospitals during the invasion and the 13 years of US-enforced economic sanctions, which were responsible for the deaths of at least 500,000 Iraqi children.
In reality, the assault on Fallujah by the US marines was planned well before the four mercenaries were killed. On March 24, the US Army's 505th parachute infantry regiment, which had been driven out of Fallujah in February, was replaced by troops from the US 1st Marine Expeditionary Division, whose commanders vowed to reoccupy Fallujah.
Using the mercenaries' deaths as cover, the marines laid siege to the city. In the ensuing battles, the marines used attack helicopters, tanks, armoured vehicles and extensive artillery shelling in an attempt to defeat the Iraqi defenders, who are armed only with Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
The sheer brutality of the US assault on Fallujah galvanised outrage across Iraq, leading two members of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) — the puppet advisory body set up by the CPA — to threaten resignation unless the marines ended their attack.
Shiite rebellion
Mass protests in Baghdad against the US assault on Fallujah and the failure of the marines to reoccupy the city led the US command to seek a ceasefire, which went into effect on April 11. Doctors at hospitals in Fallujah said at least 600 Iraqis had been killed, most of them women, children and old men.
Responding to the close of Al Hawza, the US assault on Fallujah and Iraqi opposition to the planned June 30 cosmetic handover of authority to a US-appointed Iraqi government, Sadr's militias (the Madhi Army) launched a stunningly successful series of insurrections, taking full or partial control over the cities of Hawija, Kut, Ramadi, Kirkuk and areas of Baghdad as well as the Shiite holy city of Najaf.
On April 6, Sadr issued a call for "the American people to stand beside their brethren, the Iraqi people, who are suffering an injustice by your rulers and the occupying army. Otherwise, Iraq will be another Vietnam for America and the occupiers."
CPA attempts to use the US-trained paramilitary ICDC to put down the Shiite insurrection proved spectacularly unsuccessful. During an April 5 assault on Sadr's militia in the Shiite slums of Baghdad, the ICDC troops turned on US soldiers, who were forced to battle both the ICDC paramilitaries and the Mahdi Army militia fighters.
Even more disastrously for the US occupiers, the April 10 Washington Post reported that the 2nd Battalion of the new, US-trained Iraqi Army had refused to join the US assault on Fallujah.
On April 12, Associated Press reported that "US-trained Iraqi policemen have defected to the insurgent forces of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr".
'Large-scale problem'
Patrick Lang, a former member of the US Defence Intelligence Agency, explained the situation to the April 8 Christian Science Monitor: "We have a war going on in Fallujah with armor and helicopters and house-to-house fighting. We have the Shiite Sadr battling us from what looks like a growing number of locations, and you have the rest of the [Shiite] population watching with interest to see how this goes. This is a large-scale problem going on."
The April 11 New York Times reported that sources at the Pentagon had expressed worry that "without a successful political process leading to a new government with popular support, the current military operations to restore order throughout restive Sunni and Shiite cities may have to be repeated in months to come".
While the US has the firepower to crush the insurgency by levelling Iraq's cities, such a move would be a public relations disaster, particularly when Washington is still claiming that the resistance movement only has the support of a tiny minority of Iraqis. As the US assault on Fallujah has demonstrated, even more limited assaults on liberated Iraqi cities only fuels growing support for, and recruitment to, the armed resistance movement.
On the other hand, the failure of the US-led occupiers to crush the armed resistance also encourages more Iraqis to support and join it —— seeing the armed resistance as an effective means of opposing the widely hated occupation.
US military commanders in Washington are now blaming the failure of Bremer and the CPA to broaden the political base of the IGC, while US commanders in Iraq are baying for Sadr's blood.
"We can beat these guys, and we're proving our resolve", one US military officer told the April 11 NYT. "But unless the political side keeps up, we'll have to do it again after July 1 and maybe in September and again next year and again and again."
The brutality of the US military's assault on Fallujah and the Madhi Army's uprising have led a new layer of Iraqis, predominantly unemployed workers, shopkeepers and former soldiers, to take up arms against the occupiers.
Moneer Munthir, a 35-year-old labourer in Baghdad, told the April 11 NYT that the "Americans are attacking Shiite and Sunni at the same time. They have crossed a line. I had to get a gun."
The NYT reported: "There is no way to estimate the size of the mushrooming insurgent force, but demonstrations in several cities by armed and angry people indicate that it probably runs in the tens of thousands. Many people said they did not consider themselves full-time freedom fighters or mujahedeen; they have jobs in vegetable shops, offices, garages and schools. But when the time comes, they say, they line up behind their leaders — with guns."
Another Iraqi pointed out to NYT Baghdad correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman that the resistance forces had a wide base of potential fighters to draw on, thanks to compulsory military service under Hussein's regime.
With the large number of refugees from Fallujah (some estimate up to a quarter of the city's residents have left under pressure from the brutal US assault), Washington faces another problem. These refugees will transmit to many more Iraqis eyewitness accounts of the marines' brutal attacks and reports of the heroic acts of young Iraqi fighters who stood up to and beat back the US imperialist war machine's assault on Fallujah.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, April 21, 2004.
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