THE ROVING
EYE The real fury of
Fallujah By Pepe
Escobar
"The Romans create a desolation and
call it peace." - Tacitus
"The enemy has a face. It is Satan's. He is
in Fallujah, and we are going to destroy him." -
Colonel Gary Brandl, US Marines
President George W Bush is "reaching out" to
Fallujah - the first major foreign policy initiative of
the second Bush administration. The name: Operation
Phantom Fury. The strategy: precision-strike democracy.
The message: kill them all, and let God sort them out.
Former US intelligence asset turned prime
minister without a parliament Iyad Allawi - widely known
in Baghdad as "Saddam without a moustache" - has got
himself another title: the Butcher of Fallujah. On
Sunday, before co-launching with the Pentagon the
biggest urban war since the storming of Hue in 1968
Vietnam, Allawi installed de facto martial law in Iraq
for 60 days. Historians and political scientists are
breathlessly trying to explain to the world that no
democratic election can possibly be preceded by a state
of siege.
To add insult to injury, Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld is saying that Allawi is
responsible for all major military decisions regarding
Fallujah: only the Bible Belt may be gullible enough to
believe that an Iraqi civilian without an army rules
over the Pentagon. So it's the Vietnam tragedy all over
again, replayed as farce - a biblical crusade in
Mesopotamia. Those who learned their lessons from
history know full well what happened after Hue.
The new Hue, or the new Grozny The
Pentagon spin machine is selling Operation Phantom Fury
as a battle of good against evil to root out
"terrorists" in the "militant stronghold" of Fallujah.
It is selling war on civilians as "the liberation of the
people of Fallujah" as well as the next step towards
implementing "democracy" in Iraq. These are outright
lies. Fallujans insist they are not harboring al-Qaeda
fighters, or even the elusive Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The
Pentagon insists that Fallujah is the headquarters of
Zarqawi's al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Unity and Holy War)
movement. So if there's no Zarqawi - if he really does
exist, he has already left the building, sources tell
Asia Times Online - and no al-Qaeda, what's the point of
unleashing this fury?
The code name betrays it
all: the real motive for turning Fallujah into Grozny is
revenge. In the first siege of Fallujah in April, the
mujahideen inflicted a severe defeat on the Americans.
Fallujah had already become the symbol of the Iraqi
resistance after Marines killed 15 civilians in May 2003
- when the city even had a pro-American mayor. Last
April, up to 1,000 Iraqis were killed, blown up, burnt
or shot by the Americans - two thirds of them civilians,
mostly women and children. Now, one of the first targets
of Phantom Fury was a Fallujah hospital, qualified by
the Pentagon as "a center of propaganda". The fact is,
in April hospital doctors were carefully detailing to
the world media the hundreds of innocent civilians
killed by the American assault. Now, under a strategy of
what could almost be called collective punishment, the
hospital has become a military target.
No
images, no sound This is the ultimate asymmetric
war - ultra high-tech F-16s, Cobra and Apache
helicopters, AC-130 gunships, tanks, Bradleys and
awesome firepower against a bunch of youngsters in
tracksuits and trainers with mortars and
rocket-propelled grenades. A few hundred of them are
Arabs - Saudis, Yemenis, Jordanians, Tunisians - the new
generation of the jihad diaspora. But the majority are
Iraqi fighters, many of them former or retired military
officers, engaged in a war of national liberation. The
Pentagon is pitting between 2,000 to 2,500 fighters in
Fallujah and environs along with another 10,000 Iraqi
civilians against at least 12,000 troops - four US
military brigades and one 500-strong Iraqi brigade,
trained by the Marines and included in the American
payroll.
Serious fighting rages in al-Guaifi, in
the northern part of the city, in the Golan and Military
neighborhoods to the east, and in the Industrial and
al-Shuhada neighborhoods to the south. The mujahideen,
at least for the moment, are holding their positions.
Nobody will know the full extent of the horror
inflicted on Fallujah civilians because this is a war
micromanaged by the Pentagon - carefully built up for
weeks, timed to set off only after the re-election of
Bush, and now conducted with a few embedded journalists
on the side duly brainwashed by a barrage of propaganda
and spin. The Sunni triangle has become so dangerous
that independent journalism is out of the question. Thus
the absence of war images - apart from Pentagon
propaganda videos of Marines under night vision cameras
with the faint sound of explosions in the background.
There's no soundtrack to this war. No sound of
2,000-pound bombs falling on rows of houses and followed
by relentless wailing, the sound of missiles flying
overhead, the sound of prayers and cries of "Allah
Akbar!" trying to drown out the fear, the sound of
AC-130 Spectre gunships demolishing a whole city block
in less than a minute, the sound of bodies hitting the
sand targeted by Marine snipers. The only reliable
information of what's happening on the ground in
Fallujah comes from civilians who have left to Baghdad.
It's a blatant lie to describe a city of 300,000
as a "militant stronghold". Even if there were only
100,000 residents left, most of these, tens of
thousands, are civilians, and as usual in any war, they
are the most vulnerable: the poor, the elderly, the
sick, the ones who could not get way because of fate,
and the bravest of the brave - nurses and doctors.
Fallujah from the inside Senior
scholar Sheikh Omar Said identifies three major strands
in Fallujah - Sufism, the Muslim Brotherhood and
Salafism, all united at the moment against the
occupation. The city is being run by the mujahideen
shura (council) - led by influential imams and
mosque preachers like Abdullah al-Janabi, Zafir
al-Obeidi and Omar Hadid.
Fallujah has four main
clans: Zawbaa, al-Jamilat, Bu Eisa and al-Mahameda, plus
many secondary clans like Tamim, Bani Kabis, al-Fayad,
al-Aneen and al-Raween. Most of the clans are Sunni and
originally came from the Arab peninsula.
The
backbone of Fallujah is Islam and its tribal clans.
Bravery is the common staple. Vendetta is a must. People
prefer to die than to submit to a foreign invader: it's
considered their Islamic duty. More than 20 prominent
Saudi scholars recently qualified the resistance as a
legitimate right and obligation.
The Fallujah
mujahideen shura is a real unifying force. There
are no "terrorists" in the midst of these resistance
leaders, tribal chiefs and Sunni clerics - only Iraqis
fighting a war of national liberation. To counteract
Pentagon propaganda, the shura has promised to
protect journalists and house them in a "special
building". But considering what happened in Kabul in
2001 and Baghdad in 2003, there's every reason to
believe the Marines could have an "accident".
The local command in Fallujah is centered in two
mosques: Saad ibn Abi Wakkas, run by imam Abdullah
al-Janabi, and al-Hadra al-Mohammadiya, run by imam
Zafir Al-Obeidi. Janabi controls the mujahideen
shura and Obeidi controls the political
shura, presided by Sheikh Tarlub Abdel Karim
al-Alusi and uniting tribal and religious chiefs and
city notables. Tarlub is the de facto political chief of
the guerrillas in Fallujah - even though decisions are
collective and the word of the imams and the emirs
carries enormous power.
Asia Times Online
sources in Baghdad close to the resistance in Fallujah
confirm that Tarlub was saying as late as last week that
the city would have preferred negotiations, but the
Americans wanted a war. The sheikh also said that 80% of
the youth of Fallujah had joined the resistance, as it
would be a shame for their families if they were not
committed to defend their city. According to the sheikh,
there are more than 1,500 foreign jihadis in town (the
Pentagon says they are between 2,000 and 2,500), but no
al-Qaeda. The sheikh defends the presence of "the Arabs"
- as Iraqis call them: they are "Muslim brothers" who
came to help expel the invaders. Many nationalist Iraqis
though are angry with the foreigners' presence because,
they say, this serves the American strategy of labeling
everybody as "terrorists". But in terms of an attack on
Fallujah and as far as the Iraqi resistance is
concerned, the sheikh was sure that the mujahideen would
adapt, retreat and later come back in full force.
What will the world say? Even before
Phantom Fury, American bombing had been killing Fallujah
civilians for weeks. Now the Marines are invading
hospitals, targeting ambulances and in the next few
hours and days may even bomb mosques: so much for
capturing Iraqi hearts and minds. The souk in the city
center used to be open until noon and still had some
food - but this was before Allawi cut off the roads from
Fallujah to Baghdad and Ramadi. The hospitals are
overflowing, but with no supplies, medicine and only
occasional electricity. The brand new Nazzal hospital -
funded by Saudi donors - was destroyed last Saturday by
two American missiles.
A few days ago, a message
from "the mosques of Fallujah" threatened a jihad all
over Iraq against the Americans and those who helped
them if Fallujah was attacked. A fatwa - approved by top
religious authorities in Baghdad - officially
proclaiming the jihad may be issued in the next few
hours or days, something that would set the whole Sunni
triangle on fire and promote even closer collaboration
between the jihadis and Iraqi nationalists.
The
civilian victims of Phantom Fury can barely count on
global public opinion expressing outrage. It didn't
happen last April, under the first siege of Fallujah,
and it didn't happen last August, when Najaf was
attacked. According to a study published by the British
medical paper The Lancet, the American invasion and
occupation has caused at least 100,000 Iraqi deaths -
September 11 dozens of times over. Fallujah may add one
more September 11 to the list. More than half of the
dead were women and children.
Fallujah as the
road to civil war What will be achieved by
turning Fallujah into Grozny? Absolutely nothing
positive for the US. History shows that a people
fighting a war of national liberation is never easily
intimidated. The resistance will melt away and regroup.
Top Sunni clerics all over the Sunni triangle and beyond
have reminded Iraqis - as if they needed any reminding -
that they should help the guerrillas to escape. On the
jihadi front, the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, the group
linked to al-Qaeda which has claimed responsibility for
the Madrid bombing, has already threatened the US with
"unbearable hell" - and did not forget to hold the
American electorate responsible for condoning Bush's
Phantom Fury-style strategies.
Mohamed Bashar
Faidhi, a member of the Sunni Association of Muslim
Clerics, promised the powerful association would boycott
the January election if Fallujah was attacked. The
association - as well as the majority of Iraqis - knows
that "Saddam without a moustache" Allawi is alive and in
power only because of 137,000 US troops.
On
Tuesday, a major Sunni Muslim political party, the Iraqi
Islamic party (Hizbul Islami al-Iraqi), quit the interim
government and withdrew its single minister from the
cabinet in protest against the assault on Fallujah. The
Iraqi Islamic party is the Iraqi branch of the Muslim
Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamic party well established in
the Middle East.
Its members have a long history
of oppression under Saddam Hussein's rule. As a result,
party leaders went into exile, mostly in London.
Immediately after the fall of Saddam, they restored
their activities, and somewhat surprisingly adopted a
peaceful political struggle to give the US a chance to
hand over power to the Iraqi people. This chance has now
been lost.
Martial law means in practice a daily
curfew, no political meetings and no free press - but
the resistance won't go away. The dynamic is inexorable:
Sunnis will increasingly view themselves as excluded
from the new Iraq as Shi'ites keep gaining power. This
is the road for civil war.
There could not be a
more tragic exercise in futility than Phantom Fury as
Vietnam revisited - to destroy Fallujah in order to
"save" it. The new Grozny, filled with rubble, will
either become a garrison - with scores of Americans
being blown up by roadside bombs - or the resistance
will eventually get the city back when the Americans
leave. Few Sunni Iraqis will believe this was all about
protecting them from "terrorists" and promoting
"democracy". Precision-strike democracy is a
neo-conservative phantom, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.
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THE ROVING
EYE
