THE ROVING
EYE The Islamic
emirate of Fallujah By Pepe Escobar
Taliban leader Mullah Omar, one of
America's most wanted, would love it: it's the new Kandahar,
the Afghan city that was once the Taliban stronghold.
Under Sharia (Islamic) law: Fallujah is now totally under
the control of the Sunni Iraqi resistance and their
emirs (chieftains). More than 10,000 mujahideen armed to their
teeth rule more than 500,000 people, just 50 kilometers west of
Baghdad.
Writers and professors in Baghdad
with close family and tribal ties to Fallujah have
explained to Asia Times Online the new order. In today's
Fallujah, every military commander is an emir. They may
be strident, conservative Salafis, philosophical
Sufis, al-Qaeda admirers, former Ba'ath Party army
officials, former secret-service agents, or even the average
neighbor, a father of six.
If you qualify as
an emir, you are a leading member of what is
popularly described as "the Iraqi resistance" in control
of "liberated Fallujah", a region off-limits to US
troops ever since the United States handed over control of the
city in May after a month-long siege.
Along with
local imams and tribal chiefs, all emirs are also part
of a Shura, a mujahideen council, created last winter
and directed by two imams, Abdallah Janabi and Dhafer
al-Ubeidi.
These imams may be considered the
spiritual leaders of the resistance in Fallujah. Janabi,
from the Saad bin Abi Wakkas Mosque, is a true radical:
he is the leader of the takfiris - the fiercest
warriors, some Iraqi, some from other Arab countries,
some voluntary, some linked to Arab groups. Janabi was
the first imam in 2003 to call for armed resistance
against the occupation of Iraq, and for the summary
execution of spies. Dhafer, from the al-Hadra
al-Muhammadiya mosque, is a senior to Janabi in the
Shura. His fatwas (religious edicts) carry
enormous influence.
Fallujah is mujahideen
country: it is where the resistance undertakes military
training, hides weapons, contacts foreign fighters and
organizes operations against a variety of targets in and
around Baghdad. A selected group of mujahideen work as
couriers between mosques in Fallujah and Baghdad. Many
mujahideen are boys who started their military training
in early 2002. Some went as far as becoming experts on
modified Sidewinder missiles now used as shoulder-fired
rockets.
The mujahideen paint a picture of
a city where Sharia law may be the norm, but the air
hangs heavy with paranoia - just as it did in
Taliban Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The city may
now be free of marines, but is under an informal siege
by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's new secret-service agents
and Central Intelligence Agency operatives. These spies
are executed the minute any of the emirs identify them.
The emirs parade around town in luxury Western cars with
tinted windows, just like the Taliban with their Toyota
Land Cruisers did in Afghanistan.
An
undeclared "foreigner-hunting
season" is in effect. It has claimed, among other
victims, a Lebanese businessman, the South Korean national
Kim Sun-il, and six Shi'ite truck drivers. Janabi
justifies all the executions. During the past three
months, the mujahideen have also executed more than
30 Fallujah residents, all of them denounced as spies
for the Americans.
Sharia law applies to the
500,000 Iraqis living in Fallujah and its surroundings.
On a stretch of the busy Fallujah-Ramadi road, the local
unemployed youth used to hang out drinking beer or
whisky and talking about soccer and girls. After their
de facto victory against the marines in April, the
mujahideen took over the stretch and paraded some
youngsters around the city taking a beating in the back
of a pickup truck, Taliban style, just to show how
things had changed.
"Allah's decrees" are
splashed all over Fallujah. They warn against every
foreigner, forbid alcohol and threaten any women not
wearing the abaya
(veil) or tempted to apply some counterfeit
foreign perfume over their unveiled faces. Hairdressers
and ordinary Iraqis trying to make ends meet
by selling compact discs also received a mujahideen visit.
Talibanization By
intimidation, by the force of arms and with full support of
the mosques, Fallujah, unlike Baghdad, is now a haven of
order and security, just like Kabul and Kandahar in the
late 1990s at the height of the Taliban rule. Americans
are out. Their two bases are in Saqlawiyah, a small
town near Fallujah: Qa'idat al-Bayt, in the eastern part
of the town, and Qa'idah ad-Dahhamiyah, in the
western part. The resistance fires rockets at these
bases almost daily, in response to US air raids that usually
kill dozens of Iraqi civilians. The Americans - with
Allawi's backing - keep hitting Fallujah with one-ton
bombs.
The four Blackwater employees shot,
cremated and suspended from a bridge in April led to
American hell raining over Fallujah (and to more than
600 Iraqi civilian deaths). The Americans then created a
so-called brigade of former Ba'athists to provide
security to the city. This scheme also collapsed.
Instead of re-Ba'athization, what has happened in
Fallujah is Talibanization.
Every entrance to
the city is controlled by the mujahideen, who also
control the US-trained Iraqi policemen. Most men
now are mujahideen, either in the Iraqi National Guard
(the former US-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps);
the Iraqi police; and in the population as a whole. The
real Ba'ath military power in Fallujah is in the hands
of two people with very close ties to the emirs: Jassem
Mohammed Saleh - the first commander of the Fallujah
Brigade - and Abdullah Hamed.
The
Fallujah-connected sources tell Asia Times Online that
the new US-Allawi-appointed Iraqi secret services
hoped the Ba'ath military in Fallujah would circumscribe
the influence of the mujahideen. The exact opposite has
happened. In Fallujah, Ba'athists now answer to the
emirs in control of the resistance.
Armed
resistance or bust Imam Mahdi al-Sumaidai,
who spent five months in Abu Ghraib prison because
the Americans found weapons hidden in his mosque,
is considered in Baghdad the key Iraqi Salafi leader,
and the spiritual leader of Sunni guerrillas all over
the country. He strongly advocates that the only way
forward is through armed struggle - pointing to the fact
that the resistance has expanded, in one year, from a
few men to a few cities.
Jassem Issaoui, spokesman for the Council of Salafis and Sufis
in Iraq, claims that the world refuses to judge US
war crimes, while condemning some Iraqis as terrorists:
"The Americans are cowboys, while we are a movement
of popular resistance," he says. This popular
resistance, in his eyes, has nothing to do with the interference
of foreign groups. Qays al-Fakhri, a spokesman for
the Salafis, adds that the resistance has proved
some incontrovertible points: the US military machine
is not invincible; security in Fallujah is now
excellent; and "history teaches us that only armed
resistance can end a foreign military occupation".
From a Salafi point of view, the Iraqi
resistance is "a coalition of Salafis, Sufis, Ba'athists
and tribal leaders without a unique leader, so the
degree of coordination is very superficial". Unlike the
Shura in Fallujah, apparently there has never been a
single meeting between the emirs and tribal leaders on a
national level. The Salafis do recognize the presence of
foreign fighters - the White House and Pentagon mantra
for 15 months now - but say they may be "10, 50 or 100
at the most, our Arab and Muslim brothers" - just a drop
in the resistance ocean.
So what does Fallujah
represent? The mujahideen believe that if they can push
the Americans out of Fallujah, they can win the rest of
Iraq. For them, Allawi is just another temporary
nuisance. As the Taliban in Kandahar in the late 1990s
did, the Iraqi mujahideen believe the whole country can
be theirs. Once again, that's the essence of the jihad
spirit: a war waged as much in the terrain as in the
mind, and therefore eternal.
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