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3 Death Street: A prelude to
madness By Michael Schwartz
In his Iraq policy address on January 10,
US President George W Bush promised three new
initiatives: a "surge" of US troops accompanied by
a new "clear, hold and build" strategy in Sunni
insurgent strongholds; an offensive against
Shi'ite militias, particularly the Sadrist Mehdi
Army that "US military officials now identify as
the greatest security threat in Iraq"; and
forceful action to prevent Iran from further
increasing its influence in Iraq and the Middle
East.
Events in the past few weeks make it
clear that all three prongs of this strategy are
being enacted, even while Congress is engaged
in a
prolonged debate over its (non-binding) opposition
to the "surge" part of the new regional plan.
The "surge" was actually initiated one day
before the speech was even given - in an offensive
on Baghdad's Haifa Street that briefly dominated
headlines in the US. The new initiative aimed at
Shi'ite militias appears to have begun with a
battle outside of Najaf in which about 200 members
of the Hawatim and Khazali tribes were killed by
US and Iraqi forces - apparently because the
tribal militias had been involved in a growing (if
under-reported) "anti-US and anti-Baghdad"
guerrilla war that "has been spreading like
wildfire" in the Shi'ite south. And the new
aggressiveness toward Iran is now being played out
not only in Iraq, but in the increasingly credible
threats of a US or Israeli, or combined US and
Israeli, air assault on Iran itself.
We
may have to wait weeks, or even months, to
evaluate the consequences of US actions against
those Shi'ite militias and Iran. But the Haifa
Street offensive, now almost a month old, already
offers us a vivid portrait of the horrific
consequences that are the likely result of the
Sunni insurgent part of the "surge" strategy.
Haifa Street as an enemy stronghold
Haifa Street, a moderately prosperous
3-kilometer-long avenue just outside the
US-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad, has been a
center of Sunni resistance since early in the war.
Despite the imagery of constant violence
associated with the neighborhood in the media, it
has, like most insurgent areas, largely been quiet
- except when US troops attempted to pacify it.
Soon after the fall of Baghdad,
anti-American forces became the military and
political leadership in the Haifa Street
neighborhood, setting up local militias to combat
a wave of criminal violence that swept through the
capital after the Americans dismantled the Iraqi
military and police. By 2004, the insurgents were
the local government in the area,
institutionalizing their form of Sunni
fundamentalism but at that early date still
tolerating the presence of a Shi'ite minority, who
continued to live peacefully among the Sunni
majority.
Sustained violence only occurred
when US patrols entered the area. Then snipers,
improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and gun
battles would - often successfully - be brought
into play to divert the Americans from their goal
of arresting or killing suspected insurgents. The
ferocity of the resistance led American soldiers
to dub the route "Death Street". After one
abortive attempt at conquering the neighborhood,
the number of US patrols dwindled as Haifa Street
became one of many virtual "no go" areas in the
capital (not to speak of the country), "off-limits
for American and even Iraqi soldiers".
In
November 2004, an IED exploded near one of those
occasional US patrols, demolishing a Humvee and
triggering a cascading set of events that
culminated in a US helicopter shooting into a
crowd and killing Mazen Tomeizi, a Palestinian
reporter for the Al-Arabiya satellite news network
of Dubai. Because Tomeizi was filming his
follow-up to the earlier incident when he was
shot, his death became one of the most horrific,
widely viewed images of the war - at least in the
Middle East - with his blood splattering on the
camera as he cried, "I'm going to die, I'm going
to die." This incident, apparently, persuaded the
US military command to make another attempt to
pacify Haifa Street.
Under the headline "A
violent street finds calm", Christian Science
Monitor reporter Scott Peterson described how the
Americans took control of the neighborhood in a
six-month military offensive, involving "rooftop
snipers" and other "tough measures that reportedly
included abuse of detainees". This running battle,
which began in January 2005, qualifies as the most
violent period in recent Haifa Street history -
until the latest offensive. But in US reportage,
the emphasis was on the pacification and
quiescence achieved, once - by the late spring of
2005 - the Americans had suppressed the active
resistance.
Sprinkled in with the positive
stories of grateful residents welcoming the end of
the fighting were telltale signs of an unpopular
military occupation: some residents would "glower"
when US troops passed by, "tensions [were] a
little higher" whenever US troops entered a
street, and graffiti proclaiming "Long live the
mujahideen" were quickly restored after American
soldiers tried to obliterate them. Nevertheless,
in June 2005, American Broadcasting Co (ABC)
reporter Nick Watt declared, "Death Street is
indeed a thing of the past."
That battle,
now two years past, was a perfect example of how
the new "clear, hold, and build" strategy that
Bush announced in his recent speech is supposed to
work. A US clearing-and-holding operation was to
be followed by a transfer of power to Iraqi
military units, supposedly already "stood up"
through intensive US training and advising.
This particular turnover operation was
hailed at the time by occupation authorities as "a
high-profile example of how Iraqi National Guard
troops - trained, supported, and let loose by US
advisers - can claw back territory from
insurgents". It was heralded as a giant step
forward, "a template for spreading government
control across Iraq and undercutting the
insurgency".
The template, however,
ultimately collapsed because the Haifa Street
guerrillas did what guerrillas normally do: they
melted into the population and awaited new
opportunities to attack the occupation. Just
before the declarations of success were issued,
they initiated their own "surge of violence"
before again melting into the neighborhood. And
even at the moment when ABC reporter Watt was
offering an obituary to "Death Street", US troops
and their Iraqi proteges were conducting dozens of
weekly patrols, breaking into homes in the Haifa
Street neighborhood to arrest or kill suspected
insurgents.
These patrols, together with a
massive increase in unemployment, the precipitous
deterioration of public services, and economic
shocks generated by the removal of government food
and fuel subsidies, only led to increased support
for, as well as membership in, the resistance.
This ever-growing resistance ensured that
the "build" part of "clear, hold, and build"
remained undone. Last February, the
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