Feature Page: U.S. offensive in Iraq provokes rising hostility

by Gerry Foley

U.S. military commanders and the U.S. client government in Iraq are hailing the assault on Samarra that began in the first days of October as the model for their offensive to regain control of areas of the country that have been taken over by insurgents, in particular three middle-sized cities in the so-called Sunni Triangle that have been in the hands of insurgents for some months.

The days of death and destruction in Samarra have been followed by increased bombing of rebel strongholds, with a heavy toll of civilians and housing, as well as an extension of similar search and destroy operations to other areas.

The U.S. military bases its claims of victory in Samarra on three points: (1) that they managed to kill more than a 100 insurgents without themselves suffering significant losses; (2) that they succeeded in occupying the city militarily after a few days fighting; (3) that the armed forces of the U.S.-installed Iraqi government fought well.

They leave out of the equation, however, the response of the population to their ruthless assault on the city. On that basic factor depends the answer to the question of whether the occupation forces really won anything.

According to accounts of eye-witnesses published in the international press, in the face of the massive U.S. land and air assault on the city, the insurgents simply dispersed. If the popular support for them persists or grows, they can easily reemerge in the areas the U.S. military has occupied.

As for the third point in the U.S. claims, even the big Western papers have noted that the occupation officials have consistently exaggerated the role of their Iraqi auxiliaries in their operations. In any case, ultimately the reliability of the Iraqi forces built up by the occupation depends on attitude of the civilian population to which they are linked.

The assault on Samarra was clearly massive, but according to the accounts of the local people and hospital officials, the majority of the victims were innocent civilians. In its Oct. 3 issue, the British Independent reported: “Yesterday the U.S. military claimed the casualties in Samarra were all insurgents, but doctors in the city reported women, children and the elderly among the dead.

“‘Dead bodies and injured people are lying everywhere in the city. The Americans fired at us when we tried to evacuate them,’ said an ambulance driver. ‘Later on they told us that we can evacuate only injured women and children, but we cannot pick up injured men.’

“Standing over a young boy with his stomach wrapped in bandages and his arm in a cast, Sami Hashem, a neighbour, said at the hospital in nearby Tikrit: ‘His pregnant mother was killed in front of him.’ On another bed lay a young girl who had lost her left foot. Some residents complained that they could not take their wounded to the hospital, as U.S. troops were arresting any Iraqi male over the age of 15.

“Thousands of people have fled from the city, 60 miles north of Baghdad, where U.S.-led forces cut off power and water, and American snipers on rooftops were said to be firing at anything that moved. According to doctors at Samarra general hospital, of the first 47 bodies brought in, 11 were women, five children, and seven elderly men.”

Occupation and puppet officials have been crowing that their forces liberated the city from “thugs” who were “terrorizing” it. But the terror of the U.S-held assault was obviously on a scale that would dwarf any abuses the insurgents might have committed. It remains to be seen what the specific response of the Iraqi population will be—that is, whether or not they will be intimidated. But the assault certainly cannot have made them any fonder of the occupation and its stooges.

The rulers of Iraq cannot have been comforted either by the popular reaction to one of the worst atrocities by Islamist terrorists, a series of suicide car bombings in Baghdad on Sept. 28, just before the start of the Samarra assault. Thirty-five children were killed in an attack aimed at U.S. troops.

A Los Angeles Times dispatch of Oct. 3 made it clear that the local population and the parents of the children put the primary blame for the slaughter on the U.S. and not the Islamists: “Resentment against the Americans remains high. Many of the children were killed because they were gathering around U.S. soldiers, who were passing out candy after a ceremony to mark the reopening of the sewage facility….

“‘The Americans were giving the children candy just for propaganda, so people would say they are good,’ said Ali Hussein, 38, who refused to let his children go near the soldiers. He said he suspected that the U.S. soldiers purposely surrounded themselves with children because it made them less susceptible to insurgent attacks.

”‘They are making the children into human shields,’ Hussein charged.”

Destruction by aerial bombing

The U.S. and puppet authorities will have to measure the political effects of the assault on Samarra before they go on to their promised campaign to occupy Ramadi and Falluja, which are larger cities. In Falluja, moreover, the insurgents have set up their own government, the Council of the Mujahadeen.

In fact, the assault on Samarra came immediately after the local insurgents had proclaimed that they were accepting the political authority of the Council in Falluja. The emergence of an alternative government based on the insurgency over a wide area would raise the opposition to the occupation and its stooges to a new level.

Falluja has been a vital political symbol for the resistance. The U.S. military was obliged to abandon its siege of the city in April because the resistance of the insurgents there was inspiring a mass upsurge of opposition to the occupation in Baghdad and other parts of the country. It pulled out of the city in a compromise deal, leaving control of it to a “peacekeeping force” that the U.S. agreed to pay for.

However, the U.S.-backed force very quickly dissolved in the sea of support for the insurgents, opening up the way for the establishment of a government based on the insurgency. The city is now the ultimate target of the campaign of the U.S. and its local supporters to drive the insurgency underground before the scheduled January elections.

In recent weeks, the U.S. forces have treated the city in a way similar to the methods of the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip. They have made it a shooting gallery, claiming that they have been making precisely calculated bombings of “militants.”

If the United States does launch an all-out assault on Falluja, it is almost certainly going to suffer notable casualties, and it may again face the wide upsurge of popular indignation in Iraq that it did in its first attempt to take the city.

Top U.S. military officers have been holding up Najaf as the example of the strategy they are now following toward the insurgent areas. That is, they threaten the local chiefs that they will wreck their areas with aerial and artillery bombing unless they convince the rebels to pull out and hand over control to Iraqi government forces and the U.S. Army.

It is a strategy of political blackmail, relying on the capacity of the U.S. forces for destruction from a safe distance. But for the occupation, this is a very risky gamble, and even if they get compliance, it is hardly going to remove the support for the rebels. It would probably only oblige them to assume a lower profile.

Police cooperate with insurgents

A Canadian journalist who was held for a time by the guerrillas in Tal Afar, another favorite target of U.S. bombing, told the Pacifica Radio program “Democracy Now” two things that are ominous for the U.S. plans. In an interview on Sept. 22, Scott Taylor pointed out that the U.S. forces were too few to control the area and that the insurgents moved around with impunity. As a military expert, he thought that the U.S. would need three times as many troops to exert effective control.

Secondly, he said, the local police were fully cooperating with the insurgents. Taylor was held by a Turkmeni section of the Islamist group, Ansar al-Islam, which the U.S. claims is linked to Al Qaeda. But he said he saw evidence of collaboration between groups belonging to different currents.

The Bush administration’s promises that it will soon extricate the U.S. from the quagmire in Iraq are based on the claim that it will be able to turn over the task of controlling the country to the Iraqi security forces it is training. In fact, reports in most of the serious press have been skeptical about the prospects of Washington’s Iraqi auxiliaries.

A Sept. 24 article in the Christian Science Monitor noted some of the false claims of U.S. military officials:“Seeking to shore up the image of Iraqi forces, U.S. military officials have publicly praised Iraqis for acts that U.S. soldiers say were actually performed by GIs, such as the killing of 13 insurgents near Baqubah in July.”

The article quoted a U.S. training sergeant in Mosul working with Iraqi National Guardsmen: “‘With constant contact and death threats, they quit at unbelievable rates,’ says Nunn, adding that several hundred soldiers have left his battalion over the past few weeks. More than 700 Iraqi security forces have been killed this year. ... ‘The psychological campaign put on by the insurgents is working, and there are levels of distrust between the people and the Iraqi security forces.’”

An Iraqi National Guardsman quoted in the article acknowledged that his unit faced the antagonism of the local people because of their association with the U.S. forces, although he claimed that relations had improved: “‘In the first weeks, the people threw rocks at us,’ says Sgt. Omar Abdullah Abbas. ‘They hate the American occupier, so for that reason they hated us.’”

Resistance lacks unifying organization

“To many experts, the conflict in Iraq has entered a new phase that resembles a classic guerrilla war with U.S. forces now involved in counterinsurgency,” staff writer Brad Knickenbacker wrote in the Sept. 20 Christian Science Monitor. “And despite the lack of ideological cohesion among insurgent groups, history suggests that it could take as long as a decade to defeat them.”

The article quoted a guerrilla warfare expert to the effect that the insurgents’ biggest weakness was the lack of a unified leadership and political program. That is clear. The U.S. rulers’ best strategy for maintaining control of Iraq depends largely on their hope of being able to divide the rebels.

There are no lack of cleavages between Kurd and Arab, Sunni and Shia, and within the Shiite community in particular. The fact that religious ideology has been the predominant unifying force of the rebel groups itself threatens to foster conflict.

In his book “Competing Fundamentalisms,” Tariq Ali cites a Pakistani leader who asked the different Muslim groups who they considered Muslims and who they considered apostates (subject to the death penalty under Islamic law.) He found that they all wanted to kill each other’s followers on the basis of old theological disputes.

Moreover, these obscure hatreds offer a perfect field for provocations by so-called countergangs, special-operations forces designed to split the ranks of the rebels and assassinate their leaders without concern for any legal cover.

The Sept. 22 Christian Science Monitor published an article on the threat of “civil war” in Iraq, introduced as follows: “The killing of two Sunni clerics earlier this week could be part of a slide toward sectarian civil war, analysts say.” But if you read further into the article, you find that spokespersons of the organization to which the two clerics belonged believed that the murders could have been carried out by agents of the occupation or its local stooges.

"We cannot as yet accuse specific people for these crimes, but we can suspect specific aims," says Muthana al-Dhari, spokesman for the Association of Muslim Clerics. "Those responsible are attacking our well-known opposition to the American occupation of our country. And they are attacking our success in strengthening that opposition with other sects."One of the murdered men was involved in trying to achieve cooperation among the different religious groups.

A divisive role is played by some Islamist groups, apparently involving volunteers from other Islamic countries, who operate in a politically blind way, killing indiscriminately and ruthlessly. Their actions, like the kidnapping of two Italian aid workers and the beheadings of civilian hostages, have been generally condemned by religious authorities throughout the Muslim world and by the leaders of the Iraqi resistance who are able to make their opinions known.

Because of their technical expertise, their financial resources, and their willingness to die, these foreign Islamists have been able to carry out spectacular suicide attacks. But they are mostly the product of a moral crisis of middle-class layers in some Arab countries and not an expression of the Iraqi resistance as such.

Thus, the resistance certainly has political problems. But it is the U.S. rulers who have the biggest political problem of all. They have no credible or reliable political allies in Iraq. They operate in a sea of hostility and suspicion, both open and dissimulated. And in this situation, their prospects for achieving any of their objectives in Iraq are becoming more and more remote.