"The U.S. likes to think that all it confronts are a few die-hard Saddamists, but..."

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.

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.".....

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.

Don't forget our friends the Saudi's. You are correct. I know of no gurrilla movement that was totally indigenous, that was totally devoid of outside support from countries who used the gurrillas as their proxys.

Iraq is bordered by several countries who's interests are, or have been known to have been, very hostile to ours. The continuing support of these countries is responsible for the deaths of our soldiers. If Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi A., Iran, and Kuwait locked down their borders, the Iraqi "resistance" would rapidly dry up. I wouldn't put the Russians out of reach either. After all, these guys generally carry AK's, not M16s, and I don't know of many AK factories in the Middle East. Whether it's material aid, money, or intelligence information, I'm sure some or all of these countries are playing "realpolitik" at the expense of our servicemen and women.

I hope Bush acts to shut down the outside support. He hasn't been all that "PC" about prosecuting the war thus far, but word I've heard is that the White House want's to cool things down as much as possible between now and election day. They don't want any new wars, or expanded conflicts. But then again, we didn't want one on 9/11 either.

SFS

Haqi: "One night I was driving during the curfew hours with a box of grenades in the car. The Americans stopped me and I told them that my wife was in the hospital. 'Go, go,' they yelled without searching the car. We thank God they are so stupid."

This seems to be an insight into how they think:

The Americans acted with compassion, believing it was a husband rushing to be with his wife in the hospital, and as a result just waved him on and yelled at him to him to go without stopping to search the car. Then this Haqi laughs about it and calls them stupid.

Er, Ahmed, If we wanted to, we could have turned your entire country into a broiling cauldron of molten silicates within a few minutes, you ignorant fool. Second, if we were so inclined, we could easily take every one of your vaunted militants upon capture and send them running down your neighborhood street in flames after having been doused in gasoline and set afiire. And this would be the least that we could do.

Hey, Tom, I like the way you think! Seriously, if I was in charge of operations in Iraq, every attack on an American GI would be avenged with indiscriminate napalm strikes on the local mosques.

But then again, I'm not a politician or a diplomat - just a bloody-minded America Firster who thinks the Islamic world needs to be utterly crushed, burned, and beaten into complete submission.

The U.S. military in Iraq is like a giant crackling purple bug zapper light, attracting all of the Islamocrazies in the world to their doom.......

Guerilla warfare but the guerillas are foreign, don't have the support of the Iraqi people. But ya know what? They are gonna work on that and start propagandizing. These scum have the tactical advantage with their RPG ambushes of our convoys.
We need to have a network of paid informers and rats just like the Israelis.

After all, these guys generally carry AK's, not M16s, and I don't know of many AK factories in the Middle East. ==

You didn't never heard about egiptian AK the Maadi? Then you have to check it out.
Arabs carry the old soviet models of AK. AK-47 clones.
Plenty of countries produce them. Probably near hundred of countries. Including Pakistan, India, China, Egypt, Siria, Iran and so on.

Russian models today are AK74M and the AK100 line. Those the models of 90th. They doewsn't have those.

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