Doug Lorimer
"Fallujah will be their Stalingrad. The Euphrates will be a river of their blood. Now the resistance is spreading all over Iraq and everyone is coming to Fallujah to help us. It will not be conquered." These comments by Amar Abbas, a Fallujah electrical engineer, were quoted by the April 26 London Daily Telegraph.
Abbas and other members of his extended family had been forced to flee Fallujah when the US marines launched their offensive on April 5 to retake the city, which had been liberated by its armed residents from the control of US Army paratroopers in early February.
Abbas spoke from his bed in a temporary hospital on the outskirts of Fallujah, where he was preparing for an operation to remove shrapnel from his jaw. The family had taken refuge in the nearby village of Naamiya. However, a US missile strike on the village had killed a dozen people and left Abbas' eight-year-old son horribly disfigured. The only words his son had spoken since he was so badly injured were, "I hate the Americans".
Even before the US occupiers launched their assault on Fallujah, Iraqi public opinion was solidly opposed to the US-led occupation. According to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll of 3444 Iraqis conducted between March 22 and April 9, 71% said they saw the US and allied foreign troops in Iraq as "occupiers", while only 19% said they viewed them as "liberators". Fifty-seven percent wanted the foreign troops to leave "immediately".
The US assault — using warplanes, helicopter gunships, tanks, artillery shelling and snipers — on Fallujah's 250,000 residents, however, has turned Iraqis' opposition to the occupation into outright hatred toward the US occupiers.
"More and more Iraqis who once resented — but tolerated — Americans now refuse to even talk to them", the April 18 Los Angeles Times reported.
Bessam Jarrah, a Baghdad surgeon who has been coordinating efforts to send volunteer physicians to treat the wounded in Fallujah, told the LA Times: "In the first months of the occupation, we, the educated people, thought America would show us a humanitarian way, a political way, to solve problems. But America is using Saddam's approach to problems: brute force."
He added that the US occupiers had "lost the war on April 9 this year — that is what Iraqis feel".
The April 22 New York Times reported that when it interviewed shopkeepers along the up-market commercial boulevard of Baghdad's Outer Karada neighbourhood, they made comments "dripping with venom at the American occupiers".
"More than anything else", the NYT reported, "Falluja has become a galvanizing battle, a symbol around which many Iraqis rally their anticolonial sentiments".
Referring to the US assault on Fallujah, Towfeek Hussein, the owner-operator of an electronic goods shop, said: "Frankly, we started to hate the Americans for that. The Americans will hit any family. They just don't care."
His sentiments were echoed by Hassan al Wakeel, the owner-manager of a men's designer clothing shop: "My opinion of the Americans has changed. When the Americans came, they talked about freedom and democracy. Now, the Americans are pushing their views by force. All of us feel that."
"People like Mr Wakeel and Mr Hussein", the NYT added, "are the kind of middle-class Iraqis that the Americans are relying on to help them rebuild the country, with livelihoods already rooted in the principles of free-market capitalism. Yet their sense of kinship with Iraqis in Falluja, Najaf and elsewhere runs deeper than any pull toward abstract notions of democracy offered by the Americans — notions that to them appear increasingly hypocritical given the reliance of the occupiers on overwhelming force as a means to an end."
Of course, the real capitalists in Iraq — unlike these middle-class shopkeepers — tend to have a different view of the US-led occupation. Their attitude was more typically expressed by Abbas Ali, the Shiite owner of an electronics factory. The April 7 Kansas City Star reported: "Pro-American to the core, he's taught his three children, aged 3 to 13, to say, 'Long Live USA!'... He wants Washington to pour more US forces into the country, and estimates 750,000 would do the trick."
The hatred of the US occupiers expressed by the shopkeepers interviewed by the NYT, however, is widespread among Iraqi working people. The April 11 NYT cited the comments of Maneer Munthir, a 35-year-old labourer in Baghdad, as being typical of the views of working-class Iraqis: "Americans are attacking Shiite and Sunni at the same time. They have crossed a line. I had to get a gun."
The article added that while many Iraqis "said that they did not consider themselves full-time freedom fighters" — because they "have jobs in vegetable shops, offices, garages and schools" — when "the time comes, they say they will line up behind their leaders — with guns" — against the US occupiers.
Despite their having launched repeated attacks into Fallujah over the previous two weeks, on April 27 General Mark Kimmitt, the US military spokesperson in Baghdad, claimed that the US marines were "peacefully waiting until a resolution has been established with the people of Fallujah to end this hostage situation in Fallujah by the foreign fighters, by the terrorists, by the people of Fallujah, some who are brainwashed by some of these organisations to think that somehow this is a great act of resistance".
The key political problem for Washington is that the Iraqi people agreed with Kimmitt's claim that the people of Fallujah are being held hostage and terrorised by foreign fighters. But they recognise that these foreign fighters are the US troops besieging the city.
On April 30, the Pentagon announced that US troops would end their seige of Fallujah if its residents accepted that "security" in the city was put under an Iraqi military force that Washington can claim is part of the US-recruited and US-commanded puppet Iraqi army.
The next day, US commanders allowed the former Iraqi Republican Guard general Jasim Mohammed Saleh to drive into Fallujah to assume command of what Kimmitt called the "1st battalion of the Fallujah Brigade".
According to the May 1 British Independent newspaper, this force is to be made up of "1100 soldiers from the disbanded Iraqi army who live in the city" , and were suspected to be the core of the armed insurgency in the city. "A US marine officer said it would not be a problem if those who had been fighting the [US] soldiers joined the new force", the Independent added.
"Saleh", it reported, "was greeted by cheering crowds waving the old Iraqi flag, abolished by the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council".
"We have now begun forming a new emergency military force", Saleh told journalists before he entered the city, adding that the people of Fallujah had "rejected" US soldiers.
The May 1 London Daily Telegraph reported that US commanders "argued that there had been no deal with the insurgents and the marines leaving the city were not handing over control but simply 'repositioning' their forces". However, it added that US troops and tanks had "left Fallujah after pulling down barbed wire defences around the soft drinks factory where they had set up a base for the past three weeks. Up to 80 marines remained but were expected to withdraw to a base outside Fallujah last night."
The Telegraph added that US officials in Washington had "decided the political risks of fighting for Fallujah street by street were too great. Abandoning much bellicose rhetoric about wiping out the foreign fighters and Saddam loyalists, US commanders decided to allow at least some of these elements to police the city with their blessing."
US officers who had been beseiging Fallujah expressed bitterness at the marines' "repositioning". Marine Captain Elias Chavez "said the new force, largely made up of Fallujah residents, would be unlikely to apprehend or clamp down on anti-coalition fighters".
The Qatar-based Arabic satellite TV station Aljazeera, which had reporters in Fallujah throughout the US seige, commented on May 1: "After promising to 'liberate' Fallujah for the second time in a year, the US failed to do so and as they retreat the Fallujah fighters are viewing this as a military victory against the occupation forces."
It added that the US decision to hand over Fallujah to an Iraqi-commanded military force "sets a dangerous precedent" for the US-led occupation forces "as if/when other cities turn against the occupation they will know if they can beat the siege for long-enough they will soon get their own Iraqi army back into their town".
From Green Left Weekly, May 5, 2004.
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