In early May I took a taxi from
Amman to Baghdad. After passing through Jordanian
customs and approaching the Iraqi border post, my driver
warned me to remain in the car. The Iraqi resistance
had people working for it at the border post, he said, and
if they saw my US passport they would contact
their friends on the road ahead. They would welcome us
with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. I pushed
the seat back as he said and closed my eyes. Soon we
were driving east to Baghdad on Iraq's Highway 10, and I
had sneaked into the country without any US or Iraqi official’s
cognizance. As we drove past the charred hulks
of sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) whose drivers had been less savvy than
mine, and whose passengers had been less lucky than me,
I wondered who else was infiltrating Iraq with the same
ease I did.
When I got to
Baghdad my colleagues were aghast to hear that I had taken
the road. Nobody drove into Iraq anymore, not since
April, when a rebellion had virtually severed
the western Anbar province from the rest of the
country. Thousands of mujahideen had manned roadblocks,
searching for foreigners to kidnap or kill, at least
80 US military convoys were attacked and anybody who could
was flying into the country. The locus of fighting had
been Fallujah, a dusty town emerging from the desert about 60
kilometers west of Baghdad. Not a place you would remember unless
you were kidnapped there.
Fallujah had always
been a little different from the rest of Iraq. An
American non-governmental organization project manager
told me with bewilderment of his meeting with a women’s
group from the town who shocked him by being more
radical than the men. “We must be willing to sacrifice
our sons to end the occupation,” they told him.
Combining rigid religious
conservatism, strong tribal traditions and a fierce loyalty
to Saddam Hussein, Fallujah battled five different
US commanders who were brought in to tame the wild western
province of the country. According to Professor Amazia
Baram, an Iraq expert from the University of Haifa
and the Washington-based United States Institute
of Peace, Saddam found greater loyalty in the
300,000-strong city of Fallujah than he did even in his home town
of Tikrit. He never executed Fallujans, though he
did kill Tikritis who were his relatives,
and Fallujans dominated his security and military
services. Their proportion of the intelligence services was
the highest in the country. This was already beginning to
be the case under the Iraqi monarchy, continuing
under the regime of the Arif brothers from 1963-68. The Arifs
themselves hailed from Fallujah. After the first Gulf
War of 1991, Saddam went to Fallujah, not Tikrit, to
declare his victory in “the mother of all battles”. He
was greeted there with genuine love. Also unlike Tikrit,
where the tribes are urbanized, the tribes of Fallujah
are concentrated in the rural areas surrounding the
city, and thus have not modernized and abandoned tribal
mores as much as tribes in other parts of the country.
Situated on a strategic point bridging the
Euphrates River in the desert, Fallujah is the center of
a fertile region on the outskirts of the desert leading
to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria. Its location makes it
a smuggling center. After the latest war, Fallujah did
not suffer from the same looting seen in other parts of
the country, as there was less reason to be hostile to
the former regime and its institutions. Saddam had given
Fallujah virtual autonomy. The religious and tribal
leaders appointed their own civil management council
even before US troops arrived. Tribes assumed
control of the city's institutions and protected
government buildings. Religious leaders, whose authority
was respected, exhorted the people to respect the law
and maintain order. Local imams urged the public to
respect law and order. Tight tribal bonds also helped
preserve stability. Trouble with Americans started soon
after they arrived, however.
A March 29 protest,
coinciding with Saddam's birthday, against the 82nd
Airborne Division’s occupation of a school turned
bloody when US soldiers killed 17 protesters and
killed three more in a follow-up protest two days later.
A cycle of attacks and retaliation had begun, with the
Fallujah-based resistance increasing in sophistication
and successive US units throwing their might upon the
city in futile efforts to pacify it. Finally, on March
31, four American contractors were killed and mutilated.
This was an Iraqi tradition called sahel, a word
unique to Iraqi Arabic, meaning the act of lynching. It
originally meant dragging a body down the street with an
animal or vehicle, but eventually grew to mean any sort
of public killing. Iraqis have a history of imposing
sahel, even on their leaders, as the former royal
family learned.
The slayings of the
American mercenaries provoked a Stalingrad-like response by
the Americans called Operation Vigilant Resolve. After
a month-long siege of Fallujah, during which US
forces battered the city in pursuit of about 2,000
armed fighters, the United States received an offer from a
coalition of former generals, tribal leaders and
religious leaders. The Americans described it as a success
but Fallujans were clear that they had liberated their
city. The arrangement struck with the Americans was
simple: Leave us alone or we will fight you. The details
of the agreement went largely unpublished, but the
US, which only a week before had vowed to take the city
by force, had agreed that General Jassim Muhamad Saleh,
a former Republican Guard commander, would establish
what has been called both the Fallujah Brigade and
the Fallujah Protection Army (FPA). After the
US-trained Iraqi army had mutinied, refusing to fight in Fallujah
on the grounds that they had joined to defend Iraq,
not kill Iraqis, General Jassim and his
supporters approached marine commander Lieutenant-General James Conway
and offered salvation. "It got to the point that we
thought there were no options that would preclude an
attack," Conway said. Lieutenant-Colonel Brennan Byrne described
it as “an Iraqi solition to an Iraqi problem”. They
would crown General Jassim as warlord of Fallujah. "The
plan is that the whole of Fallujah will be under the
control of the FPA," Byrne said.
One senior US official
explained to the Washington Post on May 19, "What we're trying
to do is extricate ourselves from Fallujah." But
Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, deputy commander of operations for
the coalition, maintained that marines were not
"withdrawing" but were rather "repositioning" and would
remain "in and around Fallujah". I saw no marines inside
the city and I was told by Fallujah police and soldiers
that they would shoot at Americans if they came in,
contradicting a statement by the
commander of
US military operations in the Middle East, General John Abizaid,
who said, “We want the marines to have freedom of
maneuver along with the Iraqi security forces." Kimmitt
insisted, "The coalition objectives remain unchanged,
to eliminate armed groups, collect and positively control
all heavy weapons, and turn over foreign fighters
and disarm anti-Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah." I found
no evidence of such policy. Though Kimmitt claimed General
Jassim and his 1st Battalion of the Fallujah Brigade
would subdue the resistance and foreign fighters, I found
the general beholden to the mujahideen leaders,
seeking their approval, collaborating with them, and
under their command; quite the opposite of Kimmitt’s claim
that “the battalion will function as a subordinate
command under the operational control of the
First Marine Expeditionary Force". And though Jassim was to
have been replaced by General Muhamad Latif over allegations of
war crimes committed during Jassim’s repression of the
1991 post-Gulf War uprising, I found Jassim still in
"command".
April was the worst month
for the US-led occupation, which fought a two front
war in the Sunni Triangle as well as against the Army
of the Mahdi, a militia controlled by radical
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, in Baghdad’s Shi'ite neighborhoods
and the Shi'ite south of the country. Fallujah had
become a rallying cry for Iraq, uniting its
antagonistic Sunni and Shi'ite communities against the
occupation, and solidifying the bonds between their militias,
creating a popular resistance in Iraq for the first
time. After their Fallujah siege, during which
all ceasefire attempts had failed, the marines began
their withdrawal from the city on April 30.
Obstinate resistance fighters who rejected the ceasefire terms
killed two marines with a roadside bomb that
day, trying unsuccessfully to provoke the marines to
violate the accord, and the US withdrawal went ahead
as planned. US marines described their May 10
half-hour incursion into the city as the first of the new
joint patrols they would make with the Fallujah Brigade,
but Fallujans described it as the last time Americans
would be allowed to enter their city. There have been
no further US patrols in Fallujah.
On the main street of Fallujah, once
called Habbaniya Street but renamed Sheikh Ahmad Yassin Street in
honor of the Hamas leader killed by the
Israelis, laborers with scarves protecting their faces from the
dust gather to be picked up for day jobs. It
was these angry, unemployed young men, armed with
their shovels and pipes, who dismembered the four
contractors after the mujahideen had ambushed their vehicles.
Young boys sell bananas and Kleenex boxes. The boys serve
as an early-warning system for the city, notifying the
fighters if they spot foreigners. Fair-skinned journalists
told me of hiding low in their cars to avoid
arousing attention, only to have the Kleenex boys spot them
and shout “American! American!” At a major
road intersection, anti-American graffiti in English are scrawled on
the walls as a warning to US soldiers.
The
boys gathered around me and the laborers removed their
kafiyas
from their faces to
talk. They witnessed the attack on the contractors, they said,
describing how the two cars had stopped at a red light and
the mujahideen opened fire on them from other vehicles. The
rear car was hit and the front car sped off and made
a U-turn, but it too was hit. A mujahid shouted: "I
avenged my brother who was killed by the Americans!," and
the assailants left. An angry mob on the street
mutilated the bodies, burning them and beating them with
pipes until they were partially dismembered, a gruesome
scene captured on film. I asked one Kleenex salesboy if he had
done it. “I would even pull Bush down the street!” he
smiled. A laborer said, “God and the mujahideen gave us
victory. It will spread to all of Iraq and all the way
to Jerusalem.”
The bodies were dragged about a kilometer
and a half to the old Fallujah bridge and hung from
it. Blackwater, the company that employed the
four Americans, later claimed they had been held at
a roadblock, but in the films of the attack that I
watched on promotional jihad compact discs (CDs) sold in Fallujah, there
was no roadblock, and it is unlikely that
any Blackwater employees ever returned to Fallujah
to investigate. According to a US Army major familiar with
the events, the murder and mutilation of Americans three
kilometers from a US base provoked the marines into taking
premature action. “The result on marine operations was
that the marines were forced to respond to the incident
and thus were not able to choose the timing or location
for their operations,” he said. “In other words, they
had to attack Fallujah immediately, as opposed to being
able to go with their original highly publicized plan of
putting platoon-sized elements living with the people,
using minimal force combined with a visible maximum
presence and developing intelligence portfolios to allow
targeted action as opposed to blunt, broad-spectrum
action that has had the predictable results of pissing
off a lot of Iraqis while being a focal point for
nation-wide resistance elements.”
He blamed Blackwater's mercenaries who, in
Afghanistan, had almost gotten into firefights with US troops.
“Cowboys,” he said. "Their reputation is not good ...
basically they are good at shooting guns but do not have
a reputation for people with brains or
situational awareness. This comes from some friends that worked
with them in Afghanistan. My guess is that they did
not coordinate their move with the marines in the area
[who probably had no idea they were in Fallujah]. The
ones who were killed were driving in the city with
no crew-served weapons or anybody riding top cover
outside of an SUV. That is really stupid. Basically a bunch
of high-paid dumb-ass special-forces types who wanted to get
in a firefight because they thought they were
bulletproof.”
Near the old
bridge where the charred bodies were strung up is the
Julan neighborhood on the northwestern border of the town.
I found the neighborhood’s people sorting through the
rubble of their destroyed homes, flattened as if by an
earthquake. AC-130 gunships, attack
helicopters,
and even fighter planes had pummeled the
neighborhood where mujahideen held out. I found one man standing in the
center of an immense crater that had been his
home, his children playing on piles of bricks. Another man
sat collapsed in despair in front of the gate leading to
his home that had been crushed as if by a giant foot.
He played with his worry beads indolently. One by one the
men of the neighborhood asked me to photograph
the damage US marines had inflicted upon them. As I was doing
so a white sedan pulled up and two men covering
their faces with checkered scarves emerged, demanding to
know my identity. They were afraid of spies, they told
me. I convinced them I was just a journalist and
they escorted me to a mosque whose tower had collapsed
from a US attack. In the still-seething Julan
neighborhood, fighters were bitter about the compromise
reached with the Americans that ended the fighting, and
threatened to kill the leaders who had negotiated and
approved the settlement.
Down
the railroad tracks on the eastern edge of Fallujah,
the Askari neighborhood suffered a similar fate, its homes
eaten by US bullets and shells. It is here that US
troops man the Fallujah checkpoint alongside Fallujan
soldiers, some wearing the uniforms of the former army.
Dozens of cars line up there to wind slowly around
barricades and be searched for weapons and foreign
fighters. My driver resented the hour-long wait and took
the back roads into Fallujah, through a moonscape of
sand dunes, past abandoned cement factories with cranes
frozen atop like skeletons. Fallujah is a center for
cross-border smuggling in Iraq and apart from the
patronage it received from Saddam, smuggling was the
primary revenue earner. As long as Fallujah’s
businessmen are permitted to continue their smuggling
activities, the town will remain quiescent. Trails
carved out of the desert lead into the town from every
direction, and the main road is ignored by those who
know. On my way out we drove past a lot in the desert
where a dozen rusted trucks were parked, with Hebrew
writing on them and Israeli license plates, probably
stolen in Israel and sold in Jordan. No soldiers or
marines regulated traffic in the area, I noticed, as we
bumped our way over the dunes.
Fallujah’s lawlessness was actually threatening the economy
by obstructing the essential traffic coming in
through Jordan. Iraqi friends who had driven the western
roads described seeing thousands of mujahideen
manning checkpoints made of concrete blocks and logs in
the middle of the road and demanding identification cards
at gunpoint, searching for foreigners. For the month
of April, they had managed to take over the west. They
had not been killed or disarmed, so there is no reason to
think they cannot do it again.
Referring to Iraq’s Highway 10, a
former American marine currently working very closely in a
civilian capacity with the marine commanders in Fallujah
explained to me, “Fallujah sits on a major artery between
Baghdad and the rest of the world. There is no fucking way
we will let them stand in our path. We’re trying
to rebuild the country. Fallujah is in the way. We
will be moving massive amounts of people and material in
the region. We would have been using the western route a lot
more if it was safe.” I asked him who was in
control of Fallujah. “I can tell you who is not in control,”
he said. “The marines.” He told me of kidnapping
incidents he knew about. “People disappear into the hole
of Fallujah,” he said. “The mujahideen control the
city.” He was suspicious of anointed warlord
General Jassim's ability to control the city, telling me, “I
don’t trust Jassim or the Fallujah model.” He was convinced
that the status quo in Fallujah would have to be
corrected. “The situation will change,” he said. “We should
have never gone inside the city. This is not a
Marine Corps mission. The marines are a
mobile, self-sustainable fighting force. The Marine Corps doesn’t
do occupation. We would kick ass shutting borders. The Corps
does short displays of massive power. The Marine Corps goes
into violent situations, kicks ass and then lets the
army handle things. The Marine Corps cannot handle
logistics or stay long.” The planned handover of sovereignty
to the Iraqis on June 30 would not reduce the need
to reassert control over Fallujah, he said, adding,
“What will be gone after June 30? A three-letter acronym and
some Bush flunkies and third-stringers.”
The marines rely on private companies to supply
them with their arms, food, water and all
other essential materiel, from Baghdad, Jordan and Turkey.
Companies use their own private armies composed of
former intelligence and army servicemen to protect the convoys
that support the marines in the entire west. They too
are vulnerable to the mujahideen. Forgotten is the importance
of the Habaniya airbase, also called Al Taqaddum,
80km west of Baghdad. Seized by allied special forces
even before the war itself began, it was the main Iraqi
airbase outside the former "no-fly zone" imposed after
the 1991 Gulf War. It remains essential to support the
25,000 marines occupying western Iraq. The lines of
communication, or LOCs, that much of the occupation and
economy depend on are thus vulnerable to interdiction,
passing through inhabited and agricultural areas that
provide cover for the resistance.
US
marines conducted their last patrol into Fallujah on May
10. It was a hasty affair. A convoy drove up to the headquarters
of the new Fallujah military force for a brief
meeting and left. The mood was festive on the streets.
Thousands of residents came out for a carnival-like
victory celebration. Fighters carrying their
weapons piled on to pickup trucks and shot into
the air, songs were sung and a sheep was slaughtered on
the street. Men queued to sign up for a newly formed
military unit, collecting the forms from an Iraqi
officer wearing the uniform of the disbanded Republican
Guard, seated behind a desk.
A marine
colonel responsible for civil-affairs operations in Fallujah
admitted to me that he had no role in the negotiations
that led to the settlement and knew nothing about them.
He and his men were not even permitted to enter the
city. Though marine commanders had claimed they would
conduct joint patrols with local forces in the city,
since May 10 the marines have stayed away. The colonel
admitted to me that he did not even know who was in
charge of Fallujah.
Brigadier-General
Kimmitt had announced: “We have to win this war in Fallujah
one neighborhood at a time. We’re going to do it on our
terms, on our timeline, and it will be overwhelming.”
But General Mattis and his men, escorted by the new
Fallujah Brigade for their own protection, had barely
been able to penetrate the city. After their safe exit
from Fallujah after that last incursion, and after Iraqi
forces had raised their own flag - not the new one issued
by the Iraqi Governing Council - over the eastern checkpoint,
Mattis concluded with a speech: "My fine young
sailors and marines, sometimes history is made in small,
dusty places like this. Today was good history because
we did not get into a fight. Not a shot was fired.
We did not come here to fight these people, we came
here to free them.” He had forgotten all his demands,
including the handover of heavy weapons, the men
who killed the four American contractors, and any foreign
fighters. The commander of the most powerful fighting
unit in the world was satisfied, according to the
Associated Press (AP), with the mere fact that “nobody shoots”, and
that “any day that there is no shooting it is good”. On
April 20, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had
warned: “Thugs and assassins and former Saddam henchmen
will not be allowed to carve out portions of that city
and to oppose peace and freedom.”
The police, civil-defense corps and Fallujah Bigade, all
ostensibly under final US authority, told me they would
attack Americans should they enter. Although the
well-dressed General Muhamad Latif was said to be in
control, and General Jassim dismissed, the men of the
Fallujah Brigade were still commanded by Jassim, it was
to him they gave their allegiance and it was to him the
town leaders came to discuss plans for the new army.
Jassim’s men were not arresting the mujahideen. Their
ranks included mujahideen. The general himself was
beholden to the mujahideen leaders, seeking their
approval, collaborating with them, and under their
command. The police were afraid of mujahideen units who
were terrorizing them and civilians.
If
Fallujah was quiet now, it was in part because mujahideen
leaders had left the city. Some had sought refuge in
Baghdad’s Aamriya district, home to Sunni radicals and
adjoining the resistance center of Abu Ghraib. Residents
of Aamriya told me that after the entrance
of mujahideen from Fallujah into their
neighborhood, attacks against Americans there had ceased in order
to avoid provoking the Americans and revealing
their identities. Mujahideen in Fallujah, eyeing
the surrounding villages where there tribes were based,
and the nearby city of Ramadi, expected similar battles
to occur there, leading to the liberation of more
territory and a country governed by the resistance. They had
been planning for this at least since February. Leaflets
had been circulated by “the Army of Muhamad”,
instructing people what to do when the Americans left. Meanwhile,
a group called the Mujahideen Brigades circulated
leaflets in Baghdad urging people to stay home because
“your mujahideen brothers in Ramadi, Khalidiyah, and
Fallujah will bring the fire of the resistance to the
capital Baghdad, and support our mujahideen brothers in the
Army of the Mahdi in liberating you from the injustice of
the occupation. Forewarned is forearmed.” Other
leaflets circulating in Fallujah after the accord condemned
the leaders who negotiated it for weakening the
resistance.
Should the Fallujah model be applied
elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle, it is clear that
radical Sunnis in alliance with former Ba'athist
officers would seize control - a warlord with a cleric
legitimizing him in every city. Within Fallujah, some
neighborhoods were still controlled by irredentist
mujahideen, bitter at the ceasefire that betrayed their
cause. They were threatening the very radical leaders
who had tenuous control of the city, condemning their
moderation. With no clear leader, the people of Fallujah
were worried about internal power struggles turning
bloody.
So could the Fallujah model be applied
elsewhere? And should it? Supporters of armed resistance
to the occupation had assisted the fight in Fallujah,
providing food and medicine and smuggling weapons in
with the aid that was trucked in from the Mother of All
Battles Mosque in Baghdad’s Ghazaliya district. Now
Fallujan leaders were supporting Muqtada al-Sadr’s
Shi'ite fighters in the south, and meeting with leaders
from other Sunni parts of the country.
Leaving aside virtually independent Kurdistan, which has
been ruled by two US-supported benevolent warlords
for 14 years, there are no military figures who
could command legitimate authority in the
Shi'ite neighborhoods of Baghdad and the the Shi'ite
south. There are only religious leaders such as Muqtada and
the network of clerics and gangs he controls. This would
be ceding the country to Khomeinist thugs who would
impose the strictest form of Islam, meting out
religiously inspired death sentences like the Taliban. Abdel
Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi
National Congress and interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi
all command armies, but have no significant popular
support. Journalists are already asking for written
guarantees from militia leaders in Karbala and Najaf in order
to operate while Americans desperately search for
a suitable local leader to impose his own order. And
if US troops cannot deal with the mujahideen, how
will the inchoate Iraqi regime?
Members of the
former governing council have already voiced their
displeasure. Governing council spokesman Haydar Ahmad
told the Arabic news network al-Arabiya on May 2 that
the Ministry of Defense had not been consulted prior to
the formation of the Fallujah Brigade, adding, “The tragedy
of Fallujah cannot be ended by forming a force without
consulting the authority in this country." Erstwhile
US ally Chalabi, interviewed by alJazeera on May
3, said that “the issue is that those who carried arms
and the terrorists who fight against the new situation
in Iraq are from the Ba'athists and the remnants
of Saddam's regime. They should not be given legitimacy
to control any area in Iraq by force.” Chalabi
compared the solution in Fallujah to returning control
of Germany to the Nazis, adding that “The terrorists
are free in the secured haven of Falluja.” Chalabi
and two other governing council members, Muhammad
Bahr al-Ulum and Adil Abdel Mahdi, had co-signed a
statement supporting the Iraqi defense minister’s rejection
of what they termed "the Republican Guard brigade"
in Fallujah as part of the new Iraqi army. A spokesman
for leading moderate Shi'ite cleric Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani objected that “members of the Ba'ath Party
committed the worst crimes and made bloodbaths and the
biggest mass graves in the history of humanity”. The number
of armies in the country is only increasing, and unless
the United States wants an Iraq of warlord-controlled,
radical Islamic fiefdoms like it has in Afghanistan,
Fallujah looks like a model for disaster.
Tomorrow:PART 2, The fighting poets
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PART 1: Losing it
commander of
US military operations in the Middle East, General John Abizaid,
who said, “We want the marines to have freedom of
maneuver along with the Iraqi security forces." Kimmitt
insisted, "The coalition objectives remain unchanged,
to eliminate armed groups, collect and positively control
all heavy weapons, and turn over foreign fighters
and disarm anti-Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah." I found
no evidence of such policy. Though Kimmitt claimed General
Jassim and his 1st Battalion of the Fallujah Brigade
would subdue the resistance and foreign fighters, I found
the general beholden to the mujahideen leaders,
seeking their approval, collaborating with them, and
under their command; quite the opposite of Kimmitt’s claim
that “the battalion will function as a subordinate
command under the operational control of the
First Marine Expeditionary Force". And though Jassim was to
have been replaced by General Muhamad Latif over allegations of
war crimes committed during Jassim’s repression of the
1991 post-Gulf War uprising, I found Jassim still in
"command". 
helicopters,
and even fighter planes had pummeled the
neighborhood where mujahideen held out. I found one man standing in the
center of an immense crater that had been his
home, his children playing on piles of bricks. Another man
sat collapsed in despair in front of the gate leading to
his home that had been crushed as if by a giant foot.
He played with his worry beads indolently. One by one the
men of the neighborhood asked me to photograph
the damage US marines had inflicted upon them. As I was doing
so a white sedan pulled up and two men covering
their faces with checkered scarves emerged, demanding to
know my identity. They were afraid of spies, they told
me. I convinced them I was just a journalist and
they escorted me to a mosque whose tower had collapsed
from a US attack. In the still-seething Julan
neighborhood, fighters were bitter about the compromise
reached with the Americans that ended the fighting, and
threatened to kill the leaders who had negotiated and
approved the settlement. 
