After listening to a sermon by
Sheikh Dhafer al-Ubeidi, a key cleric in organizing the
resistance in Fallujah, the next day I returned to the
mosque for a formal interview with the 37-year-old
sheikh. A bevy of bony young boys hung around the mosque
for no apparent reason, but were always available on
command to fetch tea or water for guests. The oldest
among them, a lanky, grinning 17-year-old named Ala, had
been part of a delegation sent by Shi'ite cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr's militia, the army of the Mahdi, during the
fighting in Fallujah that ended in May with the
withdrawal of US forces.
Ala was from Baghdad's
Sadr City and had worked during the fighting in the
mosque's infirmary, helping the wounded. I asked him why
he had come to Fallujah. "It's my country and this is
also my city," he said. He was the mosque mascot, a
representative of the Shi'ite mukawama, or
resistance, that had helped Fallujahns in their battle,
cutting American supply lines near Abu Ghraib. Former
and current mujahideen stood by a fence. Muscular young
men, some still with bandages covering wounds from the
fighting, pulled up on Jawa motorcycles, popular with
the former regime's Praetorian Guard.
Sheikh
Dhafer was waiting inside for me. He would be
interviewing me as well, to decide if I should be given
permission to visit and work in Fallujah. The sheikh was
respected for having vocally criticized Saddam Hussein,
resulting in several occasions of imprisonment, but
Saddam never dared execute him because he was from
Fallujah. A friend of Dhafer's described him to me as
"the tongue of the mujahideen", meaning he was their
voice. Dhafer was the director of Aman al-ulia Lilifta,
the high council for fatwas, or religious
verdicts, of Fallujah. Fallujah's leading cleric, the
aging Abdallah Janabi, was known as the emir, or prince,
of Fallujah. As head of the Mujahideen Council, he had
given Dhafer authority over the city and its fighters.
Dhafer has a wide nose and long narrow eyes that
disappeared whenever he smiled, which was often, covered
by round cheeks. When I asked him if he was the real
leader of Fallujah, Dhafer smiled disingenuously. "I am
just a simple member of the city who lived through all
the suffering of Fallujah," he said. I told him I had
heard he was the architect of the victory over the
Americans and he grinned proudly but whispered, "Don't
mention that for my security."
Dhafer admitted
that he belonged to the unofficial City Consultative
Council of which Taghlub al-Alusi was the head. He
refused to tell me how many members the council had or
who they were, but he did tell me it had a core of about
50 professionals, tribal and religious leaders and
"those who stayed in the city", meaning mujahideen. When
I pressed him for details about the council he laughed
and squinted at me suspiciously. "What are these
intelligence questions you ask me?" he said. The council
appointed the team that negotiated with the Americans
for a ceasefire after a month-long siege and ratified
the selection of the Ba'athist officers who were placed
in charge of the city's security. During negotiations,
Dhafer admitted to me, he would meet with the teams and
follow events. In reality, all the members were
appointed with his approval and they returned to him for
acceptance of the accord they reached with the Marines.
"They must withdraw from all of Fallujah,
including the neighboring villages," he told me. Not
satisfied with limiting the liberation to Fallujah
proper, he sought to extend it to the surrounding
villages, several hundred thousand more people and a
much wider zone of freedom. Like all Fallujahns, he
viewed time as before or after "the events". "Before
April 4," he said, "the first day of the siege, all of
Fallujah was closed by American troops without us
knowing about it. The American administration said the
siege would not open until we got the people who killed
the four [US] contractors." He told me the Americans had
pictures of two men alleged to have led the mob that
killed them and then desecrated their bodies. "How can
you punish a whole city for two men we don't even know?"
he asked, adding that the city's religious leaders had
condemned the mutilations (though not the killings of
course).
Dhafer said that "the casualties of
tanks, mortars, aircraft and everything in their
arsenal, without counting the people under the destroyed
buildings, was 1,200 wounded, 586 martyrs, of whom 158
were women and 86 were children". By the time fighting
was over, Fallujah hospital officials would claim that
up to 1,000 people had been killed, mostly women and
children. At least 500 were still buried in the city's
two main soccer fields and others in people's gardens.
"Now all people in the world know that the US
administration has no honor," Dhafer said.
Though I knew from others in the mosque that
Dhafer had commanded foreign fighters in Fallujah, he
denied the presence of any, telling me that "everybody
knows Fallujah was the main source for the former army
and its officers, including high-ranking officers, so
many sent their families out and stayed to fight. This
is why the American Marines that managed to destroy
several South American countries in hours could not even
destroy the Julan neighborhood of Fallujah. We believe
God was involved in the fighting. We know we did not
have equal power, but God was on our side. They
demoralized us with their power and we demoralized them
by shouting 'God is great' from the same mosques they
were shooting at." I had seen at least four damaged
manars, or mosque towers, in the city. "We demand
that the manars not be repaired so that
generations remember what they did."
Someone
entered the office and whispered in the sheikh's ear
that the Americans were approaching the city. He left
hurriedly to see what was going on, so I spoke to
Colonel Sabar Fadhil al-Janabi, chief of Fallujah's
police force, known as the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, or
ICDC, who had come to complain to Dhafer about the
problems he was having with the mujahideen and seek his
help.
The 49-year-old former military officer had been
in the police for the past nine months, but only took
over control during "the events" of April. The police
were involved in defending the city against the
Americans, he told me, as well as evacuating wounded
people and preserving law and order. He refused to
answer questions about the number of police under his
command, and when I pressed him he smiled and said,
"This is an intelligence question," explaining that the
Americans did not know and were trying to find out. He
would not even provide me with a rough figure, except to
say, "We have enough."
The colonel had come to
seek Dhafer's assistance with the main problem he was
facing. "The people wearing kafiyas who are above
the law," he said, meaning the scarf-clad mujahideen.
They were mistreating his forces. He asked Dhafer for
his help and support in establishing the authority of
his policemen. Outside, his men waited for him in
civilian clothing with walkie-talkies and Kalashnikovs.
They were new, replacing the old police who had fled.
Though I repeatedly tried to meet General Jassim
Mohammed Salih of the Fallujah Brigade in private, I was
told he was out of Fallujah in a nearby secure village,
away from the mujahideen who sought to kill him. I
visited another officer, General Mohammed Saleh's
headquarters several times, and was told every time that
he was not present, though I could see his car and
driver inside. Outside his headquarters, six of his
soldiers languished in a pick-up truck with its doors
open to let in the breeze, should there be any. They
were listening to a tape of an angry cleric sermonizing
against the Americans. On the walls outside the
headquarters someone had written "Allah is great, come
to the jihad!" Instead of meeting the generals I talked
to some of the soldiers under their command, guarding a
roundabout near the train tracks. A dozen soldiers were
wearing at least half a dozen different types of
uniforms from the old army, though none had boots, and
they wore dusty leather dress shoes instead. They told
me that they did not all have boots when they served
under the previous regime, and some had to buy their own
boots in the market.
One man
wore a jungle-patterned uniform belonging to Saddam's
special forces, others had several shades of olive and
khaki, as well as the old Republican Guard uniform. They
mocked one man for
wearing an American Army-issued uniform with
the "chocolate chip" pattern, but he vehemently denied
it was American, insisting it was an old Iraqi desert
uniform. They were proud of their old uniforms, their
lieutenant explaining to me, "We are not Saddam's army.
We are soldiers for Islam and for the defense of the
city." Another agreed, explaining, "We did not volunteer
for Saddam but for the defense of the city and country."
They had all belonged to the army before the occupation,
and lost their jobs when US proconsul L Paul Bremer
dismissed the army in May of 2003. They had joined the
new Fallujah army when General Jassim formed it.
I asked them what they would do if Americans
crossed the railroad tracks and entered the city. "They
won't enter the city," I was told sharply. "We will
shoot them," said another. Another man elaborated, "If
Americans come inside the city we will fight them
again." The lieutenant explained that "we have direct
orders to fight the Americans without referring to our
commanders first for permission".
Though they
were currently an army belonging to the city of
Fallujah, they admitted that "if the ministry of defense
is formed under the authority of the Iraqi people we
will join it". They saw themselves as a model for the
rest of the country. "All the governorates and cities
are trying to do what we did," one said to me, "we are
an example." They were the first to achieve liberation,
they explained, because "Fallujah is the mother of
mosques and we are committed to our religion and united.
Fallujahns are used to being independent and dignified.
Our dignity is the most important thing to us." They
were also the best-fed army in Iraqi history, with a
pile of finished dishes on the grass beside them.
Dhafer's Hadhra Mosque paid families to cook food for
the soldiers and deliver it to them.
The
following day I visited the mosque and found a new man
sitting behind the desk. Haji Qasim, a former army
intelligence officer, served as Taghlub's representative
on an advisory council, and was, they told me "Sheikh
Dhafer's right-hand man". Qasim, who received the
honorific "Haji" after making the pilgrimage to Mecca,
was also the founder of Fallujah's Center for the Study
of Democracy and Human Rights, formed in January 2004,
though in my visits I never found him studying either,
only running the mosque's affairs with his assistant,
Mohammed Tarik, the 32-year-old executive director of
the center and a member of the town council. Tarik was a
professor of the agriculture department of Anbar
University, having received a master's degree in
bio-technology from Baghdad University, but everybody in
the mosque called him "doctor". Tarik had been present
during the fighting, providing an administrative and
management role for the fighters and aid workers. He
admitted to me that the mosque had been a center for the
mujahideen where the defense of the city was organized.
As we were talking, a fit-looking teenager on
crutches hobbled in morosely. He wore a soccer uniform,
but his training pants had a hole for the screws coming
out of his right thigh. He had come to pick up forms
from Qasim to receive compensation. An American
helicopter had shot him in his car. When he saw me, a
foreigner, he turned incandescent. He demanded to know
who I was, what my identity was, and Tarik got up to
whisper in his ear. The young man threw his forms down
and walked out. The other men apologized uncomfortably,
explaining what happened to him while Tarik went to talk
to him.
While I was waiting for Tarik to return,
11 policemen stormed in and angrily complained to Qasim
about not being paid and about the dismissal of some
officers they respected. They said they were
representing 351 policemen and demanded higher salaries.
"Aren't you a journalist?" they shouted at me. "Record
this!" Following them, a man whose car had been
confiscated by the mujahideen came to complain. He had
come to deliver aid from the Abu Hanifa mosque in
Baghdad when it was stolen from him. Qasim made a call
and told the man where to go to pick up his car.
TOMORROW: Mean and clean
streets
(Copyright 2004
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
PART 5: The tongue of the
mujahideen 
Dhafer has a wide nose and long narrow eyes that
disappeared whenever he smiled, which was often, covered
by round cheeks. When I asked him if he was the real
leader of Fallujah, Dhafer smiled disingenuously. "I am
just a simple member of the city who lived through all
the suffering of Fallujah," he said. I told him I had
heard he was the architect of the victory over the
Americans and he grinned proudly but whispered, "Don't
mention that for my security."
The 49-year-old former military officer had been
in the police for the past nine months, but only took
over control during "the events" of April. The police
were involved in defending the city against the
Americans, he told me, as well as evacuating wounded
people and preserving law and order. He refused to
answer questions about the number of police under his
command, and when I pressed him he smiled and said,
"This is an intelligence question," explaining that the
Americans did not know and were trying to find out. He
would not even provide me with a rough figure, except to
say, "We have enough." 
wearing an American Army-issued uniform with
the "chocolate chip" pattern, but he vehemently denied
it was American, insisting it was an old Iraqi desert
uniform. They were proud of their old uniforms, their
lieutenant explaining to me, "We are not Saddam's army.
We are soldiers for Islam and for the defense of the
city." Another agreed, explaining, "We did not volunteer
for Saddam but for the defense of the city and country."
They had all belonged to the army before the occupation,
and lost their jobs when US proconsul L Paul Bremer
dismissed the army in May of 2003. They had joined the
new Fallujah army when General Jassim formed it.
