Rohan Pearce
In Green Left Weekly #582, Toma Hamid and Jalal Mohammad, members of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq (WCPI) residing in Australia and of the Socialist Alliance, took issue with the analysis of the Iraqi armed resistance movement that has been presented in the pages of GLW.
According to Hamid and Mohammad, socialists shouldn't give any political solidarity to the Iraqi armed resistance movement. They claim that it is composed solely of Islamic fundamentalists and Baathists, that it enjoys no popular support within Iraq and that it is a tool of the Iranian theocracy.
Hamid and Mohammad concentrate their fire on the Mahdi Army, a 5000-10,000 strong armed militia led by Shiite cleric Sayed Moqtada al Sadr. While the Mahdi Army is far from being the only resistance force, it has gained considerable prominence since launching a series of insurrections in early April in a number of Shiite holy cities — most notably Najaf and Karbala.
As the WCPI notes, the politics of Sadr and the leadership of the Mahdi Army are not left-wing — their anti-woman and anti-communist attitudes are noted in Hamid and Mohammad's article. But their claims that Sadr's militia is merely a criminal "gang" and enjoys no popular support are untrue.
A May 7 report by the Reuters news agency notes that Sadr's "popularity among Shiites, who make up about 60% of Iraq's 25 million people, seems to have soared since his uprising began a month ago, particularly among the young and the poor".
This is confirmed by a May 13 Washington Post article that reported on a poll conducted on behalf of the US-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority. The pro-occupation Post reported that the poll, conducted before the April uprisings, revealed that not only is there massive hostility toward the presence of occupation troops within Iraq, "a large proportion of Iraqis from the central and southern parts of the country said they backed [Sadr], with 45 percent of those in Baghdad saying they support him, and 67 percent in Basra".
Sadr's religious rank is lower than that of the more prominent Shiite clerics who have generally collaborated with the US occupiers, for example Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The leading Shiite clerics have occasionally called mass protests, but mainly as a way of allowing their followers to let off steam while not seriously challenging the occupation forces.
Sadr's mass support isn't a product of his Islamic fundamentalist politics, but of his outspoken opposition to the occupation regime and his defence of the democratic right of Iraqis to national independence.
What is the social composition of the Iraqi armed resistance? The WCPI claims that it is made up of "deprived, desperate and unemployed youth from the poorest slums of Baghdad and other cities" that are fighting because they are paid to. While it's true that many of Sadr's militia fighters are young unemployed workers, to claim they are simply mercenaries demonstrates that the WCPI's approach to the Madhi Army militias is driven by sectarian Islamophobia.
After all, if Sadr's forces are as universally hated as the WCPI claims, why wouldn't these "mercenary" unemployed youth join that other unpopular institution that provides much better pay — the US-commanded Iraqi puppet army?
Participants in the armed resistance also include large numbers of employed workers. According to the April 11 New York Times, "demonstrations in several cities by armed and angry people indicate that it probably runs in the tens of thousands. Many people said they did not consider themselves full-time freedom fighters or mujahedeen; they have jobs in vegetable shops, offices, garages and schools. But when the time comes, they say, they line up behind their leaders — with guns."
The claim that Sadr is merely a tool of the Iranian theocracy is also false. The Iraqi forces closest to the Iranian theocracy — the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party — have collaborated with the occupation regime, serve in its puppet Governing Council and have spoken out against the armed resistance movement.
While Hamid and Mohammad argue that the conflict in Iraq is pivoted around a struggle between the US imperialists and the Islamists, in reality most of the Islamic fundamentalist organisations have aligned themselves with the US-led occupation forces against the armed national liberation movement.
Hamid and Mohammad's Islamophobia has led them to adopt a grotesquely sectarian attitude toward the Iraqi national liberation movement — one in which their description of the resistance fighters as small, unpopular groups of Islamic fundamentalist "terrorists" is identical to the propaganda of the imperialist warmongers.
In some cases, the WCPI's "analysis" is simply ludicrous. For example, Hamid and Mohammed blame the resistance fighters (or at least apportion blame equal to that of the imperialist invaders) for "the collapse of all vital social services and necessities for life, and the elimination of all civil and political freedoms and rights"!
The WCPI's Islamophobic sectarianism has completely impaired its ability to make an objective assessment of the real character of the armed conflict in Iraq and the forces involved in it.
From Green Left Weekly, May 26, 2004.
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