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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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January 28th,
2007 - Battle for Baghdad: City Braces itself for US Surge |
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Battle for Baghdad: City Braces
itself for US Surge Urban fighting
amid the ruins By Patrick Cockburn The Independent 28 January 2007 22:47 Lina Massufi, a 32-year-old
Iraqi laboratory assistant with two children, is a widow - her husband was
killed by US troops when he accidentally drove down a closed road in 2003. In
the past three months she has seen her house raided and her furniture smashed
12 times. "Every time they raid
my house, they break down the door," she told a UN official. When she
asked them why they did not ring the bell "they laughed at me and called
me an idiot". Her brother Fae'ek, a pharmacy student, was arrested and
held in prison for a week. "He returned with signs of torture on his
body, and was crying like a baby because of the pain." Her story shows why the odds
are against what may be President George Bush's final gamble in Iraq: the
attempt by US troops, now receiving 17,500 reinforcements, to regain control
of Baghdad. The plan is for US forces, along with Iraqi army and police, to
enter Sunni and Shia districts in the capital, cleanse them of insurgents and
militia and then stay put, preventing their return. In his State of the Union
speech last week Mr Bush told Congress: "With Iraqis in the lead, our
forces will help secure the city by chasing down the terrorists, insurgents,
and the roaming death squads." But the failings of this
strategy become more obvious the further one gets from Washington and the closer
to Baghdad. The insurgents and militiamen, both Sunni and Shia, usually have
more credibility in their districts than Iraqi government forces. As for the
heavily Shia police commandos, they are seen by Sunni in Baghdad as licensed
death squads. A foretaste of what the
"surge" of US and Iraqi soldiers will mean came last week, as they
fought their way into the tough Sunni insurgent-controlled Haifa Street
neighbourhood, only a mile from the Green Zone. Iraqi soldiers happily let US
forces take the lead, and a US long-range missile demolished a house from
which snipers were allegedly firing. The readiness of the Americans to use
such heavy weapons in densely-populated urban areas ensures that many
civilians have been, and will be, killed and wounded. The Iraqi government forces
are either highly sectarian or will not fight. The insurgents and militias
are strong because they provide the security the government does not, and
Baghdad has already broken up into several dozen hostile townships, each defended
by its own militia. There are fewer and fewer mixed districts; Shia caught in
Sunni areas are killed, and vice versa. Strangers are viewed with suspicion,
and there are signs everywhere, saying "Death to Spies". The American troops may be
seen as temporary allies by either side, but are also blamed for the lethal
anarchy. Some 61 per cent of Iraqis, a majority of both Sunni and Shia,
approve of armed attacks on US forces. The Shia, the majority in
Baghdad, are on the offensive. They have their great bastion in the shabby
overcrowded houses of Sadr City, with more than two million people, and have
taken over almost all of Baghdad east of the Tigris, aside from a few
hard-core Sunni areas such as al-Adhamiyah. They are also seizing ground in
west Baghdad, attacking south from al-Khadamiyah, site of a revered Shia
shrine. Al-Hurriya, once mixed, is now Shia; the Sunni are being pressed back
into the south-west of the city. In the heart of this Sunni
core of Baghdad, now under insurgent control, lies al-Khadra. The sort of
area where the future of the US plan will be decided, it used to be a
modestly prosperous 1970s suburb, bisected by important highways now leading
to the US military headquarters at the airport, the half-ruined city of
Fallujah and the notorious prison at Abu Ghraib. Another highway leads to
Taji, north of Baghdad, where there have been repeated insurgent attacks. Al-Khadra's 60,000 people
are waiting with dread to see what the coming US-Iraqi government offensive
means for them. There is a lot for them to be frightened of: already young
men of military age are leaving the neighbourhood for Syria or Mosul in
northern Iraq. Ismail, in his early
thirties, fled to Mosul when police commandos suddenly arrested 25 men,
including two of his cousins, on 15 January. One cousin was later released
and told how he had been beaten and tortured with electricity, accused of
being an insurgent. "When I said I was not a mujahedin [fighter], they
said that as a Sunni I was bound to support them." He was only released
when a US commander demanded to know what had happened to the prisoners, and
the commandos freed 15 at random. The fate of the others is unknown. I first visited al-Khadra in
October 2003, when a police station near a mosque with a green dome had been
attacked by a suicide bomber, killing three policemen and wounding nine. I
walked over broken rubble to talk to shaken policemen who survived. They were
barricading off the street in front of their station, and it has remained
closed to this day. But while the barricades may stop suicide bombers,
insurgents have repeatedly attacked with mortars and rocket-propelled
grenades (RPGs). Al-Khadra was predisposed to
favour armed resistance to the US. Many of its people had worked for the old
regime - under Saddam Hussein, when the district was 80 per cent Sunni and 20
per cent Shia, several senior leaders of the Baath party lived in al-Khadra.
Sunni inhabitants often came from the great tribes of western Iraq, such as
the al-Dulaimi, al-Rawi and al-Hadithi, who are at the heart of the
insurgency. US vehicles often used the
important roads leading through al-Khadra, and as often came under attack.
The most common weapon was the roadside mine (the notorious IED, or
improvised explosive device), frequently consisting of several heavy
artillery shells wired together. This was planted either in the road or among
the piles of rubbish that lie all over al-Khadra. The insurgents, realising
the usefulness of garbage for concealing mines, discouraged rubbish collectors
by simply shooting two of them dead. The men who detonated the
mines became expert at timing them to explode when US patrols were passing.
Once I went to a house on the edge of al-Khadra, facing a highway on which a
US Humvee had just been blown up. The heavy machine gunner had been killed
and his gun, its barrel twisted sideways by the blast, had been hurled 40
yards on to the roof of the house. In February 2006, when the
Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra was blown up, there was a pogrom of Sunni in
Baghdad. Many survivors moved into al-Khadra, and at the same time the Shia
were driven out. "Some were threatened; many just fled," said a
resident. "Now, if a Shia is found here, he is killed." The
insurgents who took over were preferred to Iraqi government forces, and
deemed essential in case of an attack by Shia militias like the Mehdi Army. How would the people of
al-Khadra react if US troops and Iraqi security forces launched an offensive?
Probably some of the insurgents would fight to the last, but others would
fade away, using classic guerrilla tactics. "Searches we could accept,
and maybe the presence of Americans and Iraqi army," said Ismail,
"but not mass arrests or the use of the police commandos. If this
happens, we will resist." Intense streetfighting last
week in the Sunni insurgent-held district of Haifa Street, when US forces
used heavy weapons in a densely-populated area, raised fears that the
struggle to regain control of Baghdad could resemble the battle of
Stalingrad, with residents of districts such as al-Khadra vowing to resist. External link: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2192979.ece |