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THE ROVING
EYE
Fallujah: A multilayered picture
emerges
By Pepe Escobar
FALLUJAH - This is the heart of the Iraqi
resistance. Fallujah, with a population of almost
500,000 people, traditionally "the city of mosques", is
now called "the city of heroes" as it is at the core of
the Sunni triangle (Baghdad-Ramadi-Tikrit) where most of
the resistance to the US occupation is taking place.
President George W Bush told the United Nations
on Tuesday that he is not willing to give back full
sovereignty to Iraq any time soon. US Proconsul L Paul
Bremer said last week that Iraqis are not yet capable of
ruling themselves. The citizens of Fallujah have other
ideas.
The highway from the capital to Fallujah
- 43 miles (69 kilometers) west of Baghdad and the scene
of one of the fiercest tank battles of the war in April
- passes past Abu Ghraeb prison, one of the symbols of
Saddam Hussein's repression which is now the American
occupation's largest prison.
Practically every
day in Fallujah there are attacks against the Americans.
And the repression is also fierce - all around Fallujah.
This Tuesday, for example, the 82nd Airborne intervened
with full force in al-Sajr, a village 15 kilometers
north of Fallujah, leaving two big craters in the
courtyards of two houses.
At the Fallujah
hospital, Abed Rashid, a 50-year-old retired civil
servant, said that he was sleeping with his family on
the roof of his house when he heard Kalashnikov fire. As
he ran downstairs, American helicopters started firing
what he believed were rockets. Rashid, wounded in the
chest and left foot, says, "This is genocide. This is
not about overthrowing a government or regime change."
Two boys, Hussein, 11, and his brother Tahseen, nine,
were also severely wounded. Their father, Ali Khalaf
Mohammed, 45, was killed.
The
mayor
The mayor of Fallujah, Taha Bdaiwi,
officiates in the Qaem Maqameiah - a building that not
without irony was the former general security
headquarters of the Ba'ath Party. The ante-chamber of
his office is a true court of miracles, where an endless
stream of citizens wait patiently to express all sorts
of grievances. Says a local sheikh, "When the Americans
are attacked on the highway, they always come to the
nearest villages. And they take many prisoners, without
any evidence. There was an attack near a factory: they
took all the families living around it, including the
women. They are using families as human shields. Some of
the arrested are older than 50."
Many people in
Fallujah repeat the same story: when American soldiers
search houses for guns and find nothing, they take all
the cash and gold. Fallujah's erratic supply of
"national electricity", as the locals put it - two hours
on, two hours off - is due to resistance attacks: "Last
week there was no electricity because of resistance
attacks. Electricity depends on loyalty to Americans." A
pipeline was bombed twice in one week "because people
believe this oil is not benefiting Iraq". But a local
branch of Rafidain Bank was never attacked - even if
there are always two American soldiers inside: "People
know they are protecting their money."
Taha
Bdaiwi's office walls are conspicuously adorened by two
military maps of Fallujah, from Fort Stewart, Georgia,
one of them a satellite photo, as well as two diplomas
offered by the American military for his collaboration.
The new chief of police keeps coming in and out. The
mayor cannot give any orders without first negotiating
with an American military official sitting in the same
building. Bdaiwi, already involved in civil
administration beforehand, says, "This area is bigger
than Tikrit. People complain services are very poor." He
spends most of his time in meetings with teams in charge
of rebuilding and reconstruction. The money will come
from the city's budget, but mostly from the Americans,
who from April to September spent US$1.9 million. The
city gets a paltry monthly 360 million dinars (US$1 =
roughly 2,200 dinars) from the Ministry of Finance to
pay for salaries and services. Anything else has to come
from the Americans.
"There are many projects in
the pipeline - a water project, a bridge, a hospital,
civilian complexes - but no new projects," says the
mayor. He is trying to bring energy from Baghdad and
Ramadi. "I demanded two big generators, but they have
not arrived yet." He bought two generators for water
plants, but at present the Americans deliver water for
some areas every day. He lists the key popular demands:
water, electricity, security and health. The mayor
admits indirectly that the real story about the
pipelines is that the Americans want Iraqi police to
protect them because they don't want more American
casualties. But the mayor is a realist, "We need the
Americans to pay. We do everything we can. We can't do
anything without money. We need them."
The
sheikh
Sheikh Khaled Saleh, a Sunni cleric in his
early 50s, says that "although unorganized and without
leadership, the Iraqi resistance is a ball of fire in
America's face that will bring its end in Iraq". His
sermons at Friday prayers draw thousands every week to
Badawi, one of the main mosques in the "city of
mosques". Sheikh Saleh is sure that thousands of young
men in Fallujah were and still are influenced by Osama
bin Laden and his positioning as an heroic Arab
mujahideen. The sheikh is also sure "we have made the
Americans dizzy".
Fallujah is littered with
graffiti. Some is pro-Saddam. None is pro-bin Laden. All
encourage local citizens to harass and kill American
soldiers. Posters plastered across the city warn
everyone to stay very far from US convoys to avoid being
hit. In the kebab shops, people say, "The Americans are
cowards. They are now afraid of any gunshot coming from
anywhere."
The citizens
A group of
prominent citizens of Fallujah got together and agreed
to talk to Asia Times Online to explain "the real
situation", as they put it. Considering the fact that
for the Governing Council in Baghdad and for Bremer,
anybody telling the truth about the occupation can be
accused of "incitement to violence", their identities
should be protected.
This week, the Governing
Council's spokesman, Intefadh Qanbar - a protege of
Pentagon protege Ahmad Chalabi - told the media that the
offices of television networks al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya
in Iraq would be closed. Within two hours, this decision
by the council turned into "no cooperation from the
council" for two weeks - which for all practical
purposes means nothing considering that the council sits
in a bunker in Baghdad and is extremely uncooperative
anyway.
Bremer's legal advisers have in fact
established press censorship in Iraq. And al-Jazeera and
al-Arabiya are prime targets as they remain fierce
critics of the occupation. Under the current press
censorship laws, even to report about the killing of
Iraqi civilians near Fallujah by missiles from American
helicopters could fall into "incitement to violence".
For starters, the citizens of Fallujah don't
agree with the usual statistics according to which the
Shi'ites make 62 percent of the Iraqi population. After
a careful tabulation of the population in the main Iraqi
cities, they insist more realistic figures would be 6
million Kurds, 8 million Shi'ites and 8.7 million
Sunnis: this would prove their point that Sunnis are
woefully under-represented in the Governing Council.
For Fallujah citizens, "The mayor is an honest
man. He was one of the most wanted by Saddam's regime.
His family is one of the top five families in the city.
Most of the population trust him and chose him." They
insist that "people here are as religious as the
Shi'ites in Najaf. So the population did not agree with
the way the Americans came to Iraq." Unlike Baghdad, no
shops in Fallujah sell alcohol or CDs. At least half of
the population was satisfied with the fall of Saddam:
"We didn't want Saddam. But after the invasion, with the
bad behavior of the Americans, people are saying it was
better under Saddam." The citizens are keen to stress
that in the first two months after the fall of Baghdad,
there was absolutely no resistance.
The
resistance officially began on June 28. "A peaceful
gathering went to the mayor's building. There were
troops inside. Then it went to a school: there was a
military base inside. People were shouting: 'We want
democracy, electricity, water'. The Americans opened
fire, at first in to the air. Then against people. An
old woman in her house beside the base was hit, along
with her three sons: one was dead, one lost his leg,
another lost his kidney. Many people went to hospital to
donate blood. There were 73 wounded. They had to wait
for more than two hours to be sent to hospital. No car
could carry more than one wounded - and one car only
every 30 minutes. The next day people went to the
cemetery. As is our custom, they opened fire in the air
to celebrate the dead. Many American helicopters and
convoys then came and opened fire. That's how it
started. There were 21 dead in two days."
The
citizens of Fallujah add, "The Americans have no right
to invade houses, search our women and also steal gold
and money. The Americans played a double game with the
Iraqis. They said they would give us democracy. People
only understood what they meant when they came. Outside
Iraq, they treat dogs better than Iraqis."
The
United Nations "is controlled by America. It will never
help Iraq. It's not independent. If the UN comes, it
will be attacked. Any foreign forces - Turkish or
Pakistani, even Arabs. These forces will do what the
Americans want, in an indirect way. No Arab countries
will send soldiers, because they support the
resistance."
The citizens of Fallujah say that
there are no American patrols in the city any more: only
convoys coming from and going to Baghdad: "If there are
three convoys, at least two will be attacked. Every
convoy crossing Fallujah is covered by air support. If
there is a patrol, the American soldiers attract
children living in the area and use them as human
shields. Is that freedom?"
The 25-member,
American-appointed Governing Council is considered by
everybody in Fallujah "an imported government". With two
glaring exceptions: Dr Hashimi, a Shi'ite and a
diplomat, who barely escaped an assassination attempt
last Saturday (widely condemned in Fallujah); and Mohsen
Abdul Hameed, from the Iraqi Islamic Party, actually the
Muslim Brotherhood. During the Saddam era, Hameed lived
underground building the clandestine Brotherhood base.
Ahmad Chalabi, who is the rotating chairman of the
council until the end of this month, is regarded as an
"Ali Baba" - thief - and the butt of many jokes. It is
widely assumed that at least 85 percent of the Iraqi
population does not trust the Governing Council.
For the citizens of Fallujah, the Najaf bombing
in which Ayatollah Baqr al-Hakim was killed was the work
of the Americans, "to split Shi'ites and Sunnis". They
are totally convinced that the Americans engineered the
bombings of the Jordanian embassy, the UN headquarters
and in Najaf so that they could "go ask help for from
the UN to get rid of their problems".
The
resistance
The citizens of Fallujah are adamant:
the resistance is composed of members of families angry
with or victims of violent American behavior, as well as
former army soldiers and officers. They swear that they
have not seen any Arab fedayeen (fighters) - and
definitely no al-Qaeda. And there are no Ba'ath Party
members in this indigenous resistance: "They are bad
people. They have money. If you had money, would you
risk your life resisting?" They insist that "the main
reason for resisting is loyalty to your own country".
Dr Kamal Aldien Alkisim, born in the ancient
city of Heet on the Euphrates, tortured by Saddam's
regime and general secretary of a new political party -
the Iraqi National Fraction, which "emphasizes Iraq's
unity and independence on all its land" - supports the
struggle in Fallujah. "The resistance here does not have
any relation with any groups. It is led by families. The
main reason is the bad behavior of the Americans. There
is no relationship with Saddam or Islamic groups. These
groups are using the name of Fallujah." The locals are
adamant that they have never seen anybody from
self-described resistance organizations like Owda
(Return), led by one Mohammed al-Samidai from Mosul, or
Afaa ("Snake"), which sprang up from the Ba'ath Party in
Kirkuk, or even an alliance of the Ba'ath with tribal
elders coordinated by one Abu Hasan from Hajiwa.
The
citizens of Fallujah don't care about Saddam's cassettes
routinely broadcast by Arab satellite networks: "Saddam
is a spy. He sold Iraq. When CDs of Saddam calling for a
jihad were distributed, people in Fallujah stopped the
resistance for a few days." They insist on a big mistake
made by the West is "to think that Saddam is the
resistance just because he is a Sunni".
After a
lavish lunch, enter Sheikh Abu Bashir, one of the most
prominent sheikhs in the region, a high officer in the
Iraqi army, wounded in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
The sheikh does not mince his accusations against Jalal
Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
(PUK) and member of the Governing Council: he says that
he witnessed many episodes of cruelty against villagers
in the mid-1980s and accuses Talabani of complicity in
the Halabja massacre of Kurds in 1988.
The
Sheikh concurs that "the biggest problem for the
Americans is when they dissolved the army. "They were
trying to damage Iraqi society. So everybody immediately
joined the resistance." The sheikh says, "The Americans
now demand UN forces because they are in a circle of
resistance and they cannot get out. When they started
the war, they had no rights from the UN. So they have to
leave this country, even by force. This is not just my
opinion, our God ordered us to resist them as invasion
forces."
These citizens of Fallujah are not part
of the armed struggle. They only admit that the stream
of attacks against Americans are conducted by very small
groups armed with roadside bombs, rocket launchers and
Strella anti-aircraft guns. Most are former army
officers, with the operations financed by local
businessmen ready to donate thousands of dollars. The
regimental force is always the tribal chief.
Convincing tools for the young and the restless
are multiple: defense of tribal values, defense of the
motherland, and most of all defense against the "bad
behavior" of the Americans. The mujahideen can count on
total popular complicity. When al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya
- the nemesis of the Governing Council - show images of
American casualties, not only in Fallujah but also in
Baghdad, people stop talking and their faces lighten up.
The running commentary is inevitable: "We thanked them
for our freedom, but they should have left long ago." At
least in Fallujah, as far as the American occupation is
concerned, the battle for hearts and minds is
irretrievably lost.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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