Posted on 08/27/2004 7:03:30 PM PDT by Pikamax
It's peace but the dead are everywhere
Luke Harding in Najaf Saturday August 28, 2004 The Guardian
In an alleyway next to Najaf's Imam Ali shrine, Commander Sayed Haider rested yesterday. For more than three weeks he and his fellow fighters from the Mahdi army had battled against the vast firepower of the US military. Now was a time to reflect.
"We believe that we are right. This is our country. This is our city. We will not accept that people come and occupy our land," he said.
Nearby, fighters were lugging the corpse of a dead comrade out from the shattered ruins of a hotel; others were brewing tea.
Thousands of pilgrims, meanwhile, had begun flowing past the sandbags and metal barricades which until recently had blocked the path of American tanks.
"We didn't give in for one reason," Mr Haider explained, as his platoon posed for photos, still holding their rocket-propelled grenade launchers. "Our beliefs," he said.
In the end, the battle for Najaf that had plunged Iraq's interim government into crisis ended, to everyone's surprise and relief, peacefully yesterday.
On Thursday evening Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most important Shia leader, and Mr Haider's boss Moqtada al-Sadr, had agreed a deal under which Mr Sadr's Shia militia would vacate the Imam Ali shrine and go home. To some surprise, they did.
Initially not everyone was on message: as the pilgrims filed through into a narrow alleyway of bullet-ridden camera shops and colonnades, a sniper started firing. But by mid-morning, the mood had turned jolly.
"I've been here for five months. I've only seen my wife once a month during that time. I'm going back to Baghdad as soon as I've finished my breakfast," Abu al-Musawi said, waving a victory kebab. "It's peace," he added. Inside the shrine, dozens of Sadr supporters were dancing in a circle, waving placards of their leader; outside in the street a man was pushing a cart, carrying a mortar ineptly hidden under a blanket.
Asked whether he had now handed in his Kalashnikov to the Iraqi authorities, Abu Gaffar, a 25-year-old Mahdi army fighter, looked baffled. "It's my personal weapon. I can't give it to the police or the army. I'll keep it in a safe place," he promised.
Until yesterday, the market square leading to the shrine and the alleys around it had been the centre of vicious fighting between US marines and the Mahdi. Yesterday, across what was the frontline, the full scale of the devastation became clear. Tank rounds littered the road; the al-Dawha hotel had been blown apart; several of the tombs in Najaf's old cemetery had been pulverised. The souk was a tangle of metal debris; on the floor, unnoticed, lay a ripped poster of David Beckham.
Over in the old city it was the same story. In among the piles of rubbish lay a dead dog; from the seemingly empty houses came the smell of rotting flesh.
But what had it all meant?
Yesterday Abu Hussein Muhammad, a Najaf local, said he did not support Mr Sadr and was sceptical that peace would now descend on Iraq.
"We support Bush and the coalition forces. They allowed us to get rid of this monster," he said.
Mr Hussein said that the Mahdi army had slit the throat of one of his neighbours, a police officer. "These people are savages," he said.
There was stark evidence for his claim: in a building that served as Mr Sadr's Sharia court, just behind the shrine, police stumbled upon some of his army's apparent victims.
The Guardian counted 20 corpses - stinking, blackened and disfigured, on the floor beneath a judicial clock. It appeared they had been tortured. Given the state of the bodies, nobody could be sure. But other survivors were unequivocal in their praise for Mr Sadr. "Moqtada is the son of Iraq," Abu Ahmed, 28, said on his way to the shrine, his two-year-old son Ahmed perched on his shoulders clutching a multicoloured plastic Kalashnikov.
What kind of future did he envisage for Ahmed? "He'll join the Mahdi army," Mr Ahmed said. "I'll teach him to fight Americans."
By late morning the human shields who had spent days sleeping inside the Imam Ali shrine had left. The cleaners had arrived and were rolling up the carpets. A few golden tiles had fallen off one of the minarets, but otherwise the building appeared remarkably undamaged.
In an air-conditioned audience room, Mr Sadr's spokesman Sheikh Ahmed Shaibani explained the five-point peace plan signed by Mr Sadr and Mr Sistani.
Under the agreement the Mahdi army would leave Najaf and Kufa; the Iraqi police would take over security in both towns; and the Iraqi government would compensate those whose property was destroyed in the fighting.
The Americans would also pull out of both cities - something that yesterday had not happened.
Asked what the uprising had achieved, Mr Shaibani said it had proved that the al-Marjia'ya - the committee of Shia scholars headed by Mr Sistani - was the ultimate authority in Iraq.
He added: "The Mahdi army will never be disarmed. We have proved it is a religious army."
Tantalisingly, Mr Shaibani hinted that Mr Sadr might take up a post in Iraq's next government - provided next year's elections were "honest" and the Americans did not try to manipulate them.
The political parties would also create a "suitable environment" for a proper census to be carried out to facilitate elections and the "return of full sovereignty" to Iraq, he announced.
By late afternoon Iraqi troops were patrolling the old city for the first time; American soldiers were loafing some distance away on a traffic roundabout. Three tanks were sitting in a dusty car park.
Earlier, before going home, the Mahdi army fighters had been recounting their tales of martyrdom.
"In the last couple of hours before the ceasefire one of my friends died while he was firing his Kalashnikov at a helicopter," Jawad Abdul Khadi, 24, said. "Fortunately our brothers shot it down over the cemetery."
Mr Khadi claimed that during the entire battle only 61 of his "brothers" were killed - with only "one or two fighters" dying each day.
And what would happen now he was asked?
"There are still a lot of us left," he said.
Wow every defeat is a victory for these clowns, and western propaganda is proping them up...
what a joke...
A young child will grow up to "fight Americans".
This is the cancer that needs to be excised. If they don't "fight Americans" they will chose another target. They only want to fingt. It is all they are taught. It is all they understand. It is all they ever will understand as long as they keep breeding with these fathers.
Does this mean that al Sadr is going to be freed? Is the U.S. Military just going to watch as Muqtada al Sadr walks passed them? What was the battle against for anyway. We should not have negotiated with the Iraqi military, we should just have blown that mosque up to smitherines. Who is going to fight against us after that? The U.S. must put their foot down and say, anymore killing of U.S. military or it's true allys will result in assault on the city that the terrorist came from. This will cause the citizens of that city to round these terrorists up and hand them over to the U.S. military or Coalition Forces. That's the only thing that these people understand. They take kindness, compassion, and sensitivity as a sign of weakness, and will encourage them to think they are winning the battle against foreign occupation.
The Guardian is a paper that thinks the United States is the cause of all the dead Iraqi citizen's lives. This article seeks to explain how Moslem extremists who kill their own citizens on a whim, are nothing more than justified patriots taking on the 'great Satan' for occupying their nation.
It is tragic how these leftist papers run cover for some of the most diseased minds the world has ever known. Had they had these editorialists and their managing editors during the great sieges in history, there's no doubt which side they would have come down on.
Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Hao, Pol Pot, these folks would have love them. "Oh things aren't perfect now, but these folks are patriots, just trying to trim the sails of their nations for a better outcome."
In wiser times, these editors and those who herd them would have been stoned. Today fringe elements the world around buy into their drivel and raise little hoodlems to take their place.
I'm sorry for this. I'm sorry because the people of Iraq deserve better. When a busload of Iraqis are destroyed, it's because a madman did it, not a patriot looking for a better tomorrow fighting against a nation ruled by a madman. No, we removed the madman.
The Children of Iraq can attend school today. Girls as well as boys now take part. Food is abundant, or becoming so. Electricity is expanding across the nation. The economy is expanding and commerce fairly exploding. In short, the Iraqis are incredibly better off today.
Iraqis have self-determination. They are not being brutalized by a mad man, his sons and his henchmen. Today all that is left is the henchmen, and foreign born bastards that can't stand to see Iraqis skip decades of stoneage existance and abuse.
Papers like the Guardian help retard that advancement. They operate on the behalf of the terrorists for free. Some political parties and world ideologies could care less about the fate of Iraqis, while they leverage for position for their favorite cause.
My favorite cause is a good life for all of humankind, yes even Iraqis. One of my least favorite things, is private and public entities that seek to retard my favorite cause.
Would someone please pull the plug on the Guardian, a terrorist supporting enterprise? That power can be put to better purpose inside Iraq. People over there know what reality is. Unlike the pussies at the Guardian, they live it every day.
Does this mean that al Sadr is going to be freed? Is the U.S. Military just going to watch as Muqtada al Sadr walks passed them? What was the battle against for anyway. We should not have negotiated with the Iraqi military, we should just have blown that mosque up to smitherines. Who is going to fight against us after that? The U.S. must put their foot down and say, anymore killing of U.S. military or it's true allys will result in assault on the city that the terrorist came from. This will cause the citizens of that city to round these terrorists up and hand them over to the U.S. military or Coalition Forces. That's the only thing that these people understand. They take kindness, compassion, and sensitivity as a sign of weakness, and will encourage them to think they are winning the battle against foreign occupation.
I vote for the Neutron Bomb, it kills all inside and leaves the building intact. Or the sleaping gass that the Russians used.
I completely agree with you (you do mean for the Guardian, right?)
I will state it in this forum and elsewhere as many times as necessary: There is no such thing as the popular conception of the "neutron bomb", and most especially as just characterized by you.
What DOES exist (at least in theory) are known as "enhanced radiation" weapons. They are nuclear explosives so constructed as to create an increase of neutron radiation, but they do NOT alleviate the destructive power. An EHR of 10kiloTon yield, for example, might have the same radiation effects as a non-EHR of 50kTon. The physical damage of the 10kT is still present, or possibly reduced by a very small percentage, and that physical damage is still very significant.
The US has apparently decided that tactically, EHR are either not practical or useful, and wargaming suggests that they confound our battlefield problems (since those who are irradiated don't die for several days). It is widely suggested that Israel has EHRs, but whether or not they do, the physical damage a target would sustain is very, very great.
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These Beavis and Buttheads will now soon be off to another corn holy site
"The Guardian counted 20 corpses - stinking, blackened and disfigured, on the floor beneath a judicial clock. It appeared they had been tortured."
OH? Did they find 20 pairs of panties to prove it?
"It's peace but the dead are everywhere"
Not enough were dead since they walked out! The entire mosque area should have been obliterated --- that is all this swine understand.
How terribly cute.
I didn't characterize anything; I was just clarifying the target.
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