BAGHDAD - US and Iraqi forces
are claiming victory in a bloody three-day battle to
regain control of the Sunni triangle city of Samarrah.
Some 70% of the city is believed to be under the control
of US or Iraqi troops.
The US military says it
is continuing mopping up operations in the city after
American war planes again bombed targets on Monday
night. The US military issued a statement calling the
air raids "precision strikes" and said more than 200
insurgents have been either killed or captured. But at
what cost?
Residents and hospital officials say
many civilians, including children, have been killed or
injured in the fighting. Aid groups are expressing
concern about living conditions in the city. Meanwhile,
Baghdad was rocked by two explosions on Monday morning,
with at least 10 Iraqis dead.
US and Iraqi
commanders say that the battle to retake Samarrah is a
successful first step in a major push to regain key
areas from the control of insurgents before January's
scheduled elections.
Iraqi Interior Minister
Falah al-Naqib described the operation to reporters as
"one the best operations that has taken place anywhere
in Iraq". "We congratulate the people of Samarrah for
getting rid of the criminals who were in control of the
city from the beginning of July," al-Naqib said.
Military operations by some 5,000 US and Iraqi
forces are continuing in the city, including strikes by
US war planes overnight. US military officials said the
worst of the fighting is over, and that 125 insurgents
have been killed and 88 captured.
Some 70% of
the city - 100 kilometers northwest of Baghdad - is
reportedly in the control of US and Iraqi forces.
But local residents said the battle to retake
Samarrah came at a huge cost to civilians. In an
interview with Reuters, Samarrah resident Matra Shaker
said her sister and mother were killed in the assault:
"I hope God will destroy [US President George W] Bush's
house. It's a tragedy. Two from our house died."
Associated Press quoted an official at Samarrah
General Hospital, Abdul-Nasser Hamid Yassin, as saying
that of the 70 dead brought to the hospital since
fighting began, 23 have been children and 18 have been
women.
The US military called the air attacks
"precision strikes" and said everything is being done to
keep civilian casualties to a minimum.
Aid
organizations have expressed concern about a lack of
water and electricity and the fate of hundreds of
families who have been forced to flee. Reporters say
many buildings in the city's commercial district are
severely damaged.
Samarrah resident Khalil
Samarai said that he used the Tigris River to escape and
that city residents are desperate, "All of the roads are
closed. We crossed the river, and they shot at us three
times. I don't know if they are targeting us or not. You
can see the children. If the roads were open, half of
the city would leave."
Elsewhere in Iraq, US
warplanes bombed another rebel-held city, Fallujah,
early on Monday. Doctors said at least 11 Iraqis,
including women and children, were killed in two
strikes. The US military command in Baghdad said it was
targeting bases of the Jordanian-born extremist Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi.
Fears in Arab world over
Iraqi violence Chilling scenes of indiscriminate
car bombings, beheadings and mortar attacks, showing
dozens of dead Iraqi civilians, have become a regular
feature on Arabic TV news stations like alJazeera and
al-Arabiyah, alongside footage of civilians killed
during coalition bombing raids and firefights with
insurgents. Viewed by large audiences in the Middle
East, television coverage of the war has generated
predictable condemnation of the US's role in Iraq. At
the same time, these reports have also created the image
of Sunni insurgents, who claim to be battling coalition
forces, but are often seen killing Shi'ite Muslims.
The recent upsurge in violence has led more Arab
scholars, commentators and politicians to publicly
condemn terrorism aimed at Iraqi civilians as
counterproductive. Terrorism against civilians is not
only incapable of forcing coalition troops out of the
country, these critics claim, it could drag the entire
Middle East into a sectarian civil war.
The
Iraqi insurgents are "willing to kill 90 Iraqi civilians
in order to kill one US soldier," Hezbollah secretary
general Hassan Nasrallah said in June, Beirut's The
Daily Star reported on August 20. "Saddam's Ba'athists
and even Wahhabis are willing to negotiate with the
Americans, all in order to prevent a rise in Shi'ite
power," the newspaper quoted the leader of the Lebanese
Shi'ite group as saying. This network "will strike at
Shi'ite targets in the Arab world, outside Iraq, very
soon", he added.
In March 2003, Nasrallah
condemned these killings and "warned al-Qaeda's fighters
... that such behavior would damage the Palestinian
cause because it would lead to Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian
strife, an apparent goal of Zarqawi", The Daily Star
reported.
That the invasion of Iraq has damaged
the image of the US among Muslims has been widely
reported. In such countries as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and
Morocco, the ratings of the US are at their lowest ever.
The findings of a June Zogby International poll
"Impressions of America - How Arabs View America"
concluded that "attitudes toward US policy in Iraq and
Palestine are extremely low, in the single-digit range."
However, few polls have been taken to gauge the
impact that terrorist acts against Iraqi civilians have
had on the same audience. In lieu of hard polling data,
one possibility is to turn to recent commentaries in the
Arab press for an insight into how some influential
Muslims view these events. A sampling of commentary in
the Arab press after the hostage tragedy at a school in
Beslan in Russia's North Ossetia compiled by the Middle
East Media Research Institute provides some examples.
Writing in the September 4 issue of the London
daily al-Sharq al-Awsat, Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid, a
former editor, commented, "Obviously not all Muslims are
terrorists but, regrettably, the majority of the
terrorists in the world are Muslims. The kidnappers of
the students in [North] Ossetia are Muslims. The
kidnappers and killers of the Nepalese workers and cooks
are also Muslims. Those who rape and murder in Darfur
are Muslims, and their victims are Muslims as well ...
What a terrible record. Does this not say something
about us, about our society and our culture?"
Iraqi columnist Aziz al-Hajj wrote on elaph.com
on September 4, "The Arabs and Muslims today contribute
nothing to civilization and progress except for blood,
severed heads, scorched bodies and the abduction and
murder of children. The jihad for religion and Arab
chivalry have turned into the art of exploding, booby
trapping, and spilling blood ..."
Bater Wardam,
a columnist for the Jordanian daily al-Dustur wrote on
September 5, "It is always easy to flee to illusions and
to place responsibility for the crimes of Arabic and
Muslim terrorist organizations on the Mossad, the
Zionists, and on American intelligence, but we all know
that this is not the case and that those who murder
innocent civilians in Iraq after having kidnapped them
... came from our midst ... Even worse, we are employing
the same moral double standard regarding people's lives
that the West uses."
The conflict in Iraq has
been central in molding public opinion in the Arab world
and many in the Middle East were suspected of accepting
the claims of terrorist leaders such as al-Zarqawi about
the Iraqi population and its "resolve and steely
determination" in opposing the occupation armies.
However, the real views held by Iraqis were unknown to
their neighbors until a poll was conducted in the
country in August 2003 by Zogby International.
Commenting on this poll, Abd al-Moneim Said, the
director of the al-Ahram Center for Political and
Strategic Studies in Egypt, wrote in the Egyptian weekly
al-Ahram of October 30-November 5, 2003, "When the first
public opinion poll was carried out in Egypt by the
al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in
1998, some national newspapers denounced such research
as a form of treason, the assumption being that foreign
intelligence services must never know what is on our
people's mind. We need to keep public opinion secret to
confound the enemy, even if we ourselves remain
confused.
"Many Arabs would be surprised to know
that Iraqis do not believe that the current occupation
necessarily bodes ill for the country ... In all, the
poll shows that Iraqis are relatively more united than
commonly thought. They believe that what happened to
Iraq is not all bad, that the country has a definite
chance of improvement, and that the occupation has to
end soon, preferably within a year."
The failure
of a jihad that is killing more Muslims then avowed
enemies was the subject of an article by David Ignatius
in The Daily Star on September 29. Citing a new book by
French Arabist Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim
Minds, Ignatius writes, "Rather than waging a
successful jihad against the West, the followers of
Osama bin Laden have created chaos and destruction
within the house of Islam. This internal crisis is known
in Arabic as fitna: 'It has an opposite and
negative connotation from jihad', explains Kepel. 'It
signifies sedition, war in the heart of Islam, a
centrifugal force that threatens the faithful with
community fragmentation, disintegration and ruin'.
"The principle goal of terrorism - to seize
power in Muslim countries through mobilization of
populations galvanized by jihad's sheer audacity - has
not been realized," writes Kepel. "In fact, bin Laden's
followers are losing ground: the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan has been toppled; the fence-sitting
semi-Islamist regime in Saudi Arabia has taken sides
more strongly with the West; Islamists in Sudan and
Libya are in retreat; the plight of the Palestinians has
never been more dire. And Baghdad, the traditional seat
of the Muslim caliphs, is under foreign occupation. Not
what you would call a successful jihad," Ignatius
concludes.
Copyright (c) 2004, RFE/RL Inc.
Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave
NW, Washington DC 20036
