Resistance looks beyond
Fallujah By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - US military superiority has prevailed
in Fallujah, but it is certainly not a knockout blow to
the insurgency, which will continue its resistance, at
the same time working for the establishment of a
political movement involving exiles in Arab and non-Arab
nations for the liberation of Iraq from foreign
domination.
In the meantime, according to Asia
Times Online information gained from Iraq, the
resistance will continue on its present course of
limited engagements with US forces in as many different
places as possible. Already serious unrest has spread
to al-Anbar, Mosul, Samarra, Tikrit, Tamim, Baghdad,
Babil and other places.
Command and control of a
guerrilla war was mapped out well before the invasion of
the country last year. By February 2003, about
35,000 Fedayeen (the paramilitary "men of sacrifice" of
Saddam Hussein) had been trained for urban warfare. And
Saddam also restored ties with Salafi-based Islamic
seminaries in Fallujah, Islamic Sufi groups in Tamim,
and coordinated a strategy under which these groups
agreed to coordinate with Ba'ath Party security
committees.
A key element of the resistance was
that officially trained Iraqi militias and Ba'ath Party
members would not themselves commit to full battle. They
recruited civilians, who were given training and
equipped with arms and ammunition. These latter forces,
mostly religiously motivated zealots, were the cannon
fodder. This was amply illustrated in Fallujah, where
the leaders and "professional" soldiers had left long
before the US assault on the city began.
The
fleeing guerrillas took refuge in other parts of
al-Anbar province in which Fallujah is located, while
their colleagues in al-Tamim, Baquba and Mosul carried
out organized attacks. In Mosul, the Iraqi resistance
took control of the city for a time and then melted
away. The strategy is aimed at spreading US forces and
demoralizing the Iraqi troops which fight with them -
there have been reports of widespread desertions.
Political battlefield A number of
important Ba'ath Party members were assigned to Iraqi
intelligence missions abroad during Saddam's time. After
the US occupation of Iraq these Ba'athists mostly took
refuge in Syria, where they at present form a strong
political movement. Similar groups are believed to exist
in Egypt, Sudan, Russia, China, France and Libya. Their
aim is to organize themselves into some form of a
"government in exile".
The Iraqi Ba'ath
Party and the Syrian Ba'ath Party have a long history
of differences that badly dented the pan-Arab dream of a
united Arab republic comprising Iraq, Egypt and Syria,
as well as liberated Palestine. However, well before the
war, Saddam resolved many differences with Syria and the
government there strongly opposed the US attack on Iraq.
But under immense US pressure, Syria was not in a
position to support the Iraqi resistance. Nevertheless,
a second tier of the Ba'ath Party in Syria is strongly
in support of the Iraqi resistance, so they have given
shelter to their Iraqi counterparts.
A
significant development in the Iraqi resistance is their
Arab-language websites, which release photographs and
information on the resistance on a daily basis. Clearly
organized groups are behind these sites, for as soon as
one website is shut down, another springs up.
Facing reality
In another development, Iraqi Minister of the
Interior Faleh Hassan al-Naqib, speaking at a press
conference, accepted some ground realities never before admitted
by the US administration or even
al-Naqib's US-installed interim government. The minister accepted that
the resistance is not a scattering of Islamic groups,
but rather an organized and very well-coordinated movement
with a command structure. He also admitted that it
is an indigenous movement, with only 4-6% foreigners. And
unlike frequent US claims that Jordanian Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi and his group members are kingpins, he
accepted that the resistance comprises mostly Saddam
loyalists.
Al-Naqib also conceded that the
insurgency had developed some form of political
leadership operating from Syria. He named the principal
coordinator as Mohammed Yunus Ahmad, a former Ba'ath
Party security official.
Tribal
influences An important dynamic of the
resistance is the role of tribal society. It is a rule
in all Iraqi tribal societies that decisions are unified
and never defied by individual members of the tribe.
This nationalist trend goes beyond Shi'ite and Sunni
differences - at present, all Arab-origin Shi'ite
clerics from Baghdad, including Muqtada al-Sadr, have
raised their voice in favor of the resistance, and
Muqtada has suspended his support for the scheduled
January elections.
In
the south, marshland Bedouin tribes, where the Ba'ath Party
was very strong, have also started sporadic attacks
on British troops. Groups that remain excluded from
the resistance include those in the provinces of al-Karbala
and Najaf, where Arab tribal traditions are weak because of the strong
dominance of people of Indian and Iranian origin.
Syed Saleem Shahzadis Bureau Chief,
Pakistan, Asia Times Online. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.
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