|
|
| |
THE
ROVING EYE
Ayatollah's killing: Winners and
losers
By Pepe Escobar
PARIS
- Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, ripped to
pieces by the Volkswagen car bomb in front of the sacred
Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf which killed 125 and left more
than 230 wounded after last Friday's prayers, was the
quintessential martyr of the current Iraqi jihad. All
that was left of him was a charred fragment of muscle
which was sent to Baghdad for DNA identification. A
prominent cleric of a Shi'ite culture deeply imbued with
the concept of martyrdom, fate in the end dictated that
al-Hakim would tragically fall to a jihad conducted by
Sunni Muslims against a foreign invader just because he
was kind of a pacifist: although he wanted the end of
the American occupation, he was against armed resistance
under the current circumstances.
No Shi'ite
would dream of carrying out such blasphemous violence on
the doorstep of the Imam Ali Shrine, the third most
sacred site for Shi'ites after Mecca and Medina. Grand
Ayatollah al-Hakim was the victim of an assassination -
as was the UN's special representative Sergio Vieira de
Mello. The hundreds of dead and wounded in the horrific
Najaf massacre were just - to borrow Pentagon
terminology - "collateral damage". Al-Hakim may have
become another high-profile victim - like Vieira de
Mello - of what Iraqis are now calling "the Saddam
network", which has already sabotaged oil pipelines and
bombed the Jordanian embassy and the UN compound in
Baghdad.
But what if this was the work of
somebody else? European intelligence sources in Brussels
tell Asia Times Online that ordinary Iraqis are becoming
increasingly convinced the bombings are part of a
sinister American conspiracy to plunge the country into
total chaos and so force the UN to take responsibility
for mopping-up operations, thus saving American face.
Others blame Israel's Mossad, which infiltrated Iraq
even before the invasion. Israel - with a history of
political assassinations - would be the big loser in the
event of an Islamic government coming to power in Iraq.
Al-Hakim, a key political player, wanted a moderate,
Shi'ite-led, Islamic regime for the country.
A
few days before his death, he was still telling a
Spanish newspaper he hoped the American-appointed
governing council would become representative, "but for
the moment nothing very real has come out of it". He
believed the Constitutional Assembly which will write
the future Iraqi constitution should be democratically
elected, "otherwise the constitution would be rejected".
And he stressed that "the occupying troops are neither
qualified nor capable of resolving our problems, which
are very serious and could provoke a social explosion.
In which case, they would be responsible." He was a
moderate, and he had a broad constituency, but he was a
post-Saddam leader-in-the-making who did not please
either the Americans, the secular "Saddam network" or
Wahhabi jihadis.
The resistance against the US
occupation has been carried out by myriad groups, which
call themselves names like Iraqi Resistance Brigade,
Army of Mohammed, Muslim Fighters of the Victorious
Sects, General Command of the Iraqi Armed Resistance and
Liberation Forces, and Islamic Armed Group of al-Qaeda
(Fallujah branch). They have upgraded from attacking and
ambushing American soldiers to organizing complex
operations like the UN and Imam Ali Shrine bombings. The
Americans at first thought they were fighting a hard
core of 600 former Republican Guards and Saddam fedayeen
with up to 11,000 "reserves". But now the hard core is
estimated at at least 7,000, all responding to local
command and self-sufficient in terms of funds, weapons
and military know-how.
It's wrong to view the
resistance as "remnants of Saddam's regime", as the
Pentagon insists on doing. The Saddam remnants - former
soldiers and Ba'athists - are joined by any number of
Iraqis angered by the occupation, and of course by
Saudi, Syrian, Egyptian, Yemeni and northern African
jihadis, many of them Arab-Afghans trained in the Afghan
jihad. In this particular sense, we are finally able to
see something of the missing link between Saddam Hussein
and al-Qaeda that the White House and the Pentagon were
so desperate to announce in the run up to the war. But
Saddam Hussein seems to have been clever enough to
prepare the conditions for the linkage to emerge only
after the war, as a time bomb designed to blow up in the
Pentagon's face.
It's the deadliest of
combinations, says a European intelligence official
monitoring global terror: "The former Republican Guards,
Ba'ath Party officials and members of security services
know the terrain, know everybody and have loads of cash.
And the jihadis not only focus on the special incentive
of fighting the American infidels on sacred Arab soil:
they have the necessary military knowhow." In the case
of the Najaf bombing, there's the added bonus of a
meeting of minds. Saddam's secular regime and its
sycophants persecuted the Shi'ites, and the jihadis are
essentially Wahhabis or crypto-Wahhabis, for whom the
Shi'ites are as perverse an enemy as the Jews and the
Christians.
Did Saddam plan all this? Of course
he did - at least a great deal of it. He knew he would
lose the war, but he had enough time to conceive a
three-pronged form of resistance: nationalist, Ba'athist
and Islamist. European intelligence knows that months
before the US invasion Saddam had already distributed
reserves of troops, weapons and cash around Iraq. He
himself recruited the key guerrilla chiefs, whose ages
range from 18 to 35. He conceived them as operating
independently, but with himself as commander-in-chief.
The Saddam view of the resistance is not necessarily
shared by most of the resistance groups, which consider
the Ba'athists a bunch of losers. These groups - all of
them tribal - are essentially nationalist: they are
defending Iraqi pride and Iraqi land. But in Saddam's
scenario they are also useful as added firepower and a
nuisance factor against the invaders.
After
Baghdad fell without a fight on April 9, scores of
Ba'ath Party cadres took refuge in Jordan, Syria, Egypt,
Yemen, Libya, Morocco and Mauritania. The Ba'ath Party
has operated cells in these countries since 1968. The
idea - brilliant in itself - was to have these cadres
rally the Arab masses in these countries to join a jihad
against the superpower which dared to occupy sacred Arab
land. The masses may not be responding yet - but
certainly professional jihadis already have. With the
Najaf bombing, the "Saddam network" has scored another
big hit: it has managed in one stroke to simultaneously
divide the Shi'ites (62 percent of the Iraqi population)
and hurl hundreds of thousands of them into the streets
chanting anti-US slogans. Ayatollah al-Hakim's brother
is a member of the American-imposed interim governing
council, which has absolutely no power and is considered
a sham by the majority of Iraqis. Al-Hakim's Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has been
vilified by other Shi'ite factions because it is - at
least for the moment - against armed resistance. And
many Shi'ites also remember very well that SCIRI backed
Iran in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
As Asia
Times Online has reported, holy Najaf is at the dead
center of what happens next in Iraq. Immediately after
the fall of Baghdad, first the imam at Ali's Shrine, Dr
Haider Alkelydar, and then Shi'ite cleric Abdul Majid
al-Khoei, who returned from exile in London, were
assassinated. As chaos takes over, Shi'ites are
increasingly in favor of armed resistance against the
Americans. But the top de facto religious authority,
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, does not want to get
drawn into any political wrestling match: he is still
adopting a "wait and see" attitude. The one character
who has everything to gain from al-Hakim's murder is
young Moqtada al-Sadr, extremely respected because he is
the son of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr.
Moqtada al-Sadr favors armed struggle - right now - and
that's exactly why he would be a useful ally to both the
"Saddam network" and the jihadis. Their objective is
total confrontation with the Americans - with no space
for appeasers like the UN's Vieira de Mello or SCIRI's
al-Hakim.
European diplomats are very cynical
about the possibility of the neo-conservatives
controlling the Bush administration swallowing their
pride and turning to the UN for help. Even the UN is
facing a no-win situation, and the diplomats in New York
and Geneva know it. In the unlikely event blue helmets
were deployed in Iraq, it's practically certain they
would be regarded by most of the population as the tail
end of the US occupying serpent. Especially if
Washington insists on not relinquishing one inch of
control of the whole, disastrous operation. So this is
the gift of Washington's neo-conservatives to the world:
instead of a democratic Iraq, a putrid state infected by
a guerrilla virus and on the verge of a devastating
civil and ethnic war.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for information on our sales and
syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
