Alert and alarmed ... patrolling the streets of Baghdad can never be considered routine. Photos: Jason South
Posted on 08/15/2003 8:07:45 PM PDT by yankeedame
Inside the resistance
August 16, 2003
Alert and alarmed ... patrolling the streets of Baghdad can never be considered routine. Photos: Jason South
The United States likes to think that all it confronts in Iraq are a few die-hard Saddamists. But Paul McGeough meets a new guerilla movement with growing popular support.
There's a knock on the door. Standing in the first-floor corridor of the Al Safeer Hotel are two men - Ahmed, a weapons dealer and group commander in the Iraqi resistance, and Haqi, one of his foot soldiers. They enter and take a seat on the sofa, edgy but full of bravado after what they claim was a successful strike against a US convoy in a rural area north of Baghdad.
They had agreed, after weeks of negotiation through a go-between, to talk about the resistance. Now they are here to recount the detail of their most recent offensive against the US occupation forces in Iraq.
Ahmed begins: "Yesterday we were told about the new movement of convoys, so we used a special car to take our RPG [rocket-propelled grenades] and guns up there. We struck at sunset, in an area surrounded by farms.
"We positioned ourselves as locals, just standing around. But as the convoy came into view we picked up the weapons which we had lying on the ground. There were 19 soldiers. I could see their faces. I fired three grenades - two at a truck and one at a Humvee. Then we escaped across the fields to a car that was waiting for us. It took just a few seconds because God makes it easy for us."
This is the third mission for Ahmed, a 32-year-old who has inherited family wealth, including a factory and a farm, and the fourth for Haqi, a 25-year-old Baghdad taxi-driver who defers to Ahmed as "my instructor".
Their claim to success is in keeping with exaggerated local accounts of the hundreds of hit-and-miss resistance attacks on the US.
I checked. At Al Meshahda, near Tarmiya, which is 60 kilometres north of Baghdad, the road is scorched and gouged. Two local farmers, brothers Muhammad and Ibrahim Al Mishadani, insist three US soldiers died when the tail-end vehicles in a convoy were hit.
But the Americans reported no deaths from Tarmiya on Tuesday.
The postwar US death toll in fighting in Iraq now stands at 60, with almost 500 wounded. The conflict is showing all the early signs of what could be a protracted guerilla war.
When he took up his commission in mid-July, the new US military chief in Iraq, General John Abizaid, acknowledged the rapid development of the resistance: "They're better co-ordinated now. They're less amateurish and their ability to use improvised explosive devices combined with tactical activity - say, for example, attacking [our] quick-reaction forces - is more sophisticated."
Washington has been reluctant to accept that what is happening in Iraq constitutes a guerilla war.
It has repeatedly pinned the blame for instability on Saddam Hussein and Baath Party loyalists; and, particularly since last week's bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, on foreigners associated with the terrorist network al-Qaeda and its offshoots.
So it fell to Abizaid to finally acknowledge the Americans face a "classic guerilla-type campaign". But he, too, stuck to the Washington script, insisting the critical threat to the Americans was from "mid-level Baathists" and from an organisational and financial structure that was, at best, localised.
The Pentagon, the US military and American analysts are reluctant to acknowledge popular support for the Iraqi resistance. But the chaos has tribal sheiks, Baghdad businessmen and many ordinary Iraqis speaking in such harsh anti-American terms that it is hard not to conclude there is a growing body of Palestinian or Belfast-style empathy with the resistance.
If the accounts of the resistance given to the Herald in interviews in the past 10 days are accurate, US intelligence is way behind understanding that what is emerging in Iraq is a centrally controlled movement, driven as much by nationalism as the mosque, a movement that has left Saddam and the Baath Party behind and already is getting foreign funds for its bid to drive out the US army.
The warm night air is so heavy that, when Ahmed exhales, his cigarette smoke hangs just where he parks it. It is a week before the attack, and we are in the garden at the comfortable home of one of his relatives in a west Baghdad suburb.
Ahmed denies having served in Saddam's military or any of the security agencies. He offers a peculiar account of how he avoided military service: "I put lots of tea leaves in cold water and gulped it down so that it filled my lungs. The tea showed up as spots in my lungs and, after I paid the doctor some money, I was rejected on health grounds."
Asked why he has joined the resistance after going to such lengths to avoid doing time for Saddam, Ahmed declares: "Saddam was a loser. His wars were useless and he made enemies of our Muslim neighbours."
But this weapons dealer is uncomfortable talking war in a family environment, so he makes a call on a satellite phone, organising the use of a room in a nondescript hotel nearer to the city. Its ground-floor windows and all but one of its doors are still bricked up to fend off looters.
Slightly more at ease, Ahmed sits in a formal armchair at the hotel, the folds of his white dishdasha draped over the chair's red brocade upholstery. Toying with his beard, he describes a Sunni resistance that is a disciplined, religiously focused force. Asked where authority rests, he says: "It's with the sheiks in the mosques. Baath Party people and former members of the military are not allowed to be our leaders. Baathists are losers; they didn't succeed when they worked for the party.
"We now have a single, jihadist leadership group that operates nationally. Everything is done on instructions carried by messengers. There are 35 men in my cell and I'm a leader of three other cells. The number of foreigners who are coming to help us is increasing - Syrian, Palestinian, Saudi and Qatari.
"US claims about al-Qaeda and Ansar al Islam are just propaganda." But then he goes on: "We don't even ask the fighters if they belong to these groups or to political parties."
Speaking through an interpreter, he continues in guttural Arabic: "Our fighters are protecting our religion. We cannot allow foreigners to occupy our country."
Then he repeats the argument in much of the anti-American graffiti around Baghdad: "We suffered under Saddam and we hate him, but we would put him in our hearts ahead of a Christian or a Jew, because he is a Muslim."
This is a culture in which revenge is honourable, and Ahmed vents his opinion freely: "The Americans do not respect us, so we cannot respect them. They are a cancer of bad things: prostitution, gambling and drugs."
Haqi: "This struggle is not about Saddam. It's about our country and our God. Our aim is not to have power or to rule the country. We just want the US out and for the word of Allah to be the power in Iraq.".....
(Excerpt) Read more at smh.com.au ...
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Yup.
The sick, irrational mind of the anti-freedom collectivist
But... but I thought the headline said this was a widespread phenomenon, and not just a couple spoiled rich kids whose parents were Saddamites?
They're not defending their religion, they're trying to take over the world.
The author is an idiot, who has obviously been assimilated.
Arab Muslims can be so tolerant, can't they? Some prefer the FAKE Muslim Saddam who went on a decades-long torture/murder/rape spree though the country to a devout "Person of the Book" like Dubya.
Luckily, most of the Muslims in Iraq aren't like that.
The headline says what the reporter wants to believe. And what the spoiled rich kid Iraqi "freedom fighters" want him to believe.
The poor dupe...
Anyone who grew fat and comfy under Saddam was a Saddamist. Period. Anyone who claims otherwise is a fool.
Come on, fly at the light.
ZAP!
Better they go to Iraq to meet our snipers, than they come to America to meet our kids.
Standard al-Qaeda garbage.
The 911 attack was supposed to send a message to the U.S. that we should get out of the "Holy Lands" in the middle east. Fast forward and you now have American soldiers in control of Iraq and Afghanistan so Osama is peddling backwards pretty fast toward his goal.
I smell Iran and Syria in all this and pretty soon there will be American soldiers walking those streets as well. When that happens the sponsors of idiots like this guy will be long gone.
ZAP!"
I like it when you talk like that.
Islamofascist opposition rears its ugly head.
Okay, now all we need are Iraqis who dont believe in this cr*p to stand against it and help us build the free Iraqi Republic ... any takers?
Be careful, folks. Read between the lines. Remember that this war has nothing to do with race or religion. Be really, really nice to all the good Muslims in the world, and especially in the USA. Because Islam is a religion of peace, and all non-Muslims are infidels and dogs and deserve nothing but death, rape, torture, and to serve as slaves to Muslims...etc., etc.. < /sarcasm >
Islam has institutionalized deceit. In a Muslim's system of morality, nothing he/she could do to a non-Muslim (especially a Christian or Jew) can be considered bad. If they lie to us (non-Muslim Westerners), they can quite truthfully, from their perspective, say they never lied, because we are not people in their eyes. Lying to us would be like lying to a dog or a pig, i.e. conceptually an idiotic idea.
Bottom line: NEVER, ever, trust a Muslim. The more "devout" they become, the more evil and dangerous they are to everyone else.
SFS
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