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No End to the
Carnage in Iraq
by Gerry Foley /
April 2005 issue of Socialist Action
Spectacular reports of suicide bombings by relatively small Islamist
groups in Iraq have overshadowed revelations about U.S. atrocities during
the November 2004 siege of Falluja—which, however, will have a much
wider and longer-lasting impact on public opinion in Iraq and the
Arab East.
Thus, the Al Jazeera website reported March 17: "All is quiet
in Falluja, or at least that is how it seems, given that the mainstream
media has largely forgotten about the Iraqi city. But independent
journalists are risking life and limb to bring out a very different story.
"The picture they are painting is of U.S. soldiers killing
whole families, including children, attacks on hospitals and doctors, the
use of napalm-like weapons, and sections of the city destroyed."
Among other examples, it cited an interview done by an Inter-Press
Service reporter with a doctor who had filmed the testimony of a
16-year-old girl: "She
stayed for three days with the bodies of her family who were killed
in their home. When the soldiers entered she was in her home with her
father, mother,
12-year-old brother, and two sisters.
"She watched the soldiers enter and shoot her mother and father
directly, without saying anything. They beat her two sisters, then shot
them in the head.
After this her brother was enraged and ran at the soldiers while shouting
at them, so they shot him dead."
The account also documented reports that the U.S. forces had used
napalm and phosphorous bombs against civilians and shut down the local
medical facilities to prevent the doctors from reporting the civilian casualties.
In the meantime, the political isolation of the Iraqi armed
resistance has continued to deepen since the elections at the end of
January. However, there are indications that forces in the resistance are
coming to grips with the problem.
The most damage has been done by the Sunni Islamist suicide bombings
aimed at crowds of Shiites. Thus, in Mosul on March 10, a suicide bomber
ignited an explosion near a throng of mourners at a Shiite mosque, killing
scores of people. Shiite funeral processions were called off to avoid
providing targets for the Islamist bombers.
The armed organization of the Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr offered
guards for private Shiite funeral ceremonies. This is a dramatic turnaround
from the situation in April when al Sadr’s movement and the Sunni resisters
in Falluja fought a parallel struggle against the U.S. occupiers.
A suicide bombing on Feb. 28 in the majority Shiite town of Hillah,
south of Baghdad, aimed at applicants for government jobs, killed 125
people. In that case, the rage of the community turned against the U.S. and
Iraqi government forces that had failed to prevent the attack.
AP reported the shock to the Shiite community caused by the bombing
in Mosul: “Hundreds of men, women, and children crowded the main hospital
in Mosul, trying to find and identify the 50 dead and more than 100 wounded
in Thursday’s blast at a funeral tent jammed with Shiite mourners. … ‘I
cannot describe the amount of despair I feel,’’ said Sher Qassim Mohammed
Ali. ‘I
lost seven of my sons, brothers and cousins. I want to know who
carried out this attack ... we will avenge those who did it.’
“With a dozen bodies covered in blankets laying in the cold outside
a morgue that had no space to put them, others screamed: `This is a crime!
This is a crime!’ One man said:
‘May God avenge them.’”
In Hillah, a reported 2000 people demonstrated against the slaughter
of Iraqis carried out in the name of the resistance to U.S. occupation. The
March bombings of Shiite crowds were preceded by multiple bomb attacks on
Shiite processions during the sect’s holy days of Ashura. Al Jazeera’s web
site reported Feb. 20 that scores had been killed.
However, an Associated Press commentary of March 4 noted: “The anger
over deaths caused by insurgents does not always translate into acceptance
of U.S. troops, who are still widely blamed for the chaos in Iraq. And many
people support the insurgents, arguing they are fighting a just war to rid
the country of U.S.-led troops who invaded in 2003.”
The ruthless killing of Iraqi civilians, especially Shiites, seems
to be essentially the work of the Islamists identified with al Qaeda and Abu
Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian. This grouping includes foreign volunteers
from other Arab countries and from Islamic communities in the West. It
undoubtedly represents only a small part of the resistance fighters but clearly
has financial resources, training, and self-sacrificing operatives. They
seem to be basically the ones who carry out the suicide operations, which have
multiplied since the elections in January.
Within the resistance itself, it seems that attempts are underway to
try to stop the damage being inflicted on the movement by the al Qaeda
group. The March 4 AP commentary noted that Sunni supporters of the resistance
are beginning to speak out against attacks on Iraqi civilians: ”’The real
resistance should only target the occupiers, and no normal person should consider
dozens of dead people to be some kind of collateral damage while you are
trying to kill somebody else,’ cleric Ahmed Abdul-Ghafur told worshippers
Friday at Um al-Qura, the main Sunni mosque in Baghdad. ‘Everybody should
speak out against such inhumane acts.’”
A webzine called the Post-Colonial Iraq Newsletter (http://jelloul.blogspot.com) reported
the formation in late February of a an anti-occupation front centered
around the Association of Muslim Scholars, a broad Sunni organization that
has functioned as sort of legal arm of the resistance. According to it, the
front includes al Sadr’s Shiite opposition movement. If this account proves to be accurate,
this would represent an important step to unifying Shia and Sunni resisters
against the occupation.
The website notes the following point in the founding statement of
the front: “Paragraph 3 calls for a clear distinction to be drawn between
the legitimate
resistance against occupation forces and terrorism, meaning the resort
to violence against innocent civilians, whether Iraqis or foreigners, and
to sectarian attacks.”
It certainly seems reasonable to think that the more politically
conscious forces in the resistance are thinking about ways to unify the
opposition to the U.S. occupation and to counter the division being caused
by the al Qaeda sectarian bombings. These attacks play so obviously into
the hands of the U.S. rulers that a lot of Iraqis reportedly think that
they are provocations staged by the CIA.
It would be disastrous for the resistance to get into a position of appearing
to wage war against a Shiite-Kurd government that could claim to represent
the majority of the Iraqi population. That would create a de facto
civil war that a resistance movement based primarily on the Sunni minority
could not win.
Already, the outrages by the Islamists are distracting attention
from the project of the U.S. and its client government to build a massive
repressive apparatus. In the typical neocolonial pattern, the Iraqi
government is likely to prove more ruthless than the occupiers because it
can hide behind a semblance of national independence.
The U.S. government has already been obliged to try to dissociate
itself from the human rights abuses of its Iraqi clients. Thus, The New
York Times reported March 1: “The State Department on Monday detailed an
array
of human rights abuses last year by the Iraqi government, including
torture, rape and illegal detentions by police officers and functionaries
of the
interim administration that took power in June.” Three days later, a New York Times
headline proclaimed: “American Jails in Iraq Are Bursting With
Detainees.” The article reported that the U.S. occupiers were now holding
about 9000 prisoners. It gave a depressing picture of the results of the
seizure and imprisonment of large numbers of Iraqis: “On a recent
morning here, military policemen marched 50 handcuffed men off a convoy
that had just arrived from Tikrit, Mr. Hussein’s hometown. Old and young, the
detainees wore thin shirts or robes. Some were barefoot.”
Overall, Iraq remains a powder keg and a human disaster area created
by the U.S. invasion and occupation. It is clear that nothing good for the Iraqi
people can come out of the U.S. operations there. But at this point the
political situation is very fluid and it is difficult to predict when and
how a unifying alternative to the U.S. client government can emerge.
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