BY DOUG LORIMER
The November 2 missile attack on a US Army Chinook troop transport helicopter — which left 16 GIs dead and 20 badly wounded — has finally forced leading officials in Washington to acknowledge that the US is involved in a protracted war against an increasingly sophisticated and stronger resistance force.
"In a long, hard war, we're going to have tragic days, as this is", US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on the American Broadcasting Corporation's This Week program on November 2. "But they are necessary. They are part of a war that's difficult and complicated."
The 10-tonne CH-47 Chinook helicopter was ferrying 57 US soldiers to Baghdad's international airport. It was shot down over the village of Buisa, in central Iraq, by a Soviet-made Strela shoulder-launched, surface-to-air missile.
The US-led occupation forces have only been able to account for about 1500 of the 5000 Strelas that were in the arsenal of the now-disbanded Iraqi army.
As US troops and Humvees guarded the helicopter wreckage on November 3, villagers celebrated the attack. "We will hold a celebration because this helicopter went down — a big celebration", local farmer Saadoun Jaralla told Reuters.
In the nearby town of Fallujah, a hotbed of guerrilla resistance, Iraqis described the downing of the Chinook as the perfect present to mark the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. "We usually celebrate Ramadan at the end of the month. Now we are celebrating in the beginning after these infidel Americans were shot down", taxi driver Abd Allah Hissein told Reuters.
Green Zone
The downing of the Chinook was the most spectacularly successful attack of the Iraqi guerrillas' Ramadan offensive. The offensive began on October 26 with the firing of eight rockets into Baghdad's Rashid Hotel while Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, was staying there.
The hotel is the home for US civilian administrators and military officers in Baghdad, and is located in the so-called Green Zone — an area on the west side of the Tigris River centred on ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's presidential palace, which now serves as headquarters of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority.
The Green Zone is the most fortified enclave in Iraq, ringed with four-metre-high concrete walls, razor wire, sandbag bunkers and guard posts staffed by US troops.
The rocket attack on the Rashid Hotel, in which one US colonel was killed and 15 people were wounded, was a major propaganda coup for Iraqi resistance fighters.
"It was a hell of a coup for the guys who did it", Toby Dodge, a terrorism expert at the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London, told the October 27 Los Angeles Times. "Politically, it shows people that they can deploy at will... By attacking the most famous landmark in the compound they are saying, 'We rule the streets, you don't'."
According to a former Iraqi security services colonel interviewed by the London Observer, the Rashid Hotel attack "showed a level of sophistication that was new for the resistance. An underground cell working with staff at the hotel, which was once virtually run by the Iraqi secret service, watched the arrival of guests while street cleaners worked with an underground cell to position the rocket launcher."
"US forces are losing the intelligence battle in Iraq to an increasingly organized guerrilla force that uses stealth, spies and surprise to inflict punishing casualties", the November 4 USA Today reported. "US military officers worry that the Iraqis who work for them, such as translators, cooks and drivers, include moles who routinely pass inside information back to insurgents."
A former senior director in the Iraqi intelligence service told USA Today that Iraqi guerrilla forces get detailed reports on what is going on inside the palace grounds occupied by Paul Bremer, the chief US civilian administrator in Iraq, Bremer's staff and the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
"At the beginning, the [resistance] operations were simple — just to test the American position", the October 27 Los Angeles Post was told by Nameer Nuiammy, a Baghdad used-car salesman who knows members of the resistance and openly sympathises with them.
"Now, day after day, it is getting stronger and more sophisticated", said Nuiammy. "Every operation now is organised; nothing is left to chance. There is planning, surveillance, gathering information, some intelligence... We can launch these attacks from anywhere, from rooftops, from the other side of the [Tigris] river."
Nuiammy's statement was confirmed when Iraqi guerrillas fired three mortar rounds into the US headquarters compound on the evening of November 3, and repeated the exercise the following night.
"The explosions shook the city", Reuters news agency reported on November 5, "with the concussion felt by reporters at a hotel on the opposite side of the river Tigris". A US military spokesperson said four US personnel were wounded by the mortar attacks.
"American military combat casualties also climbed on [November 4] to 252 since the invasion when a roadside bomb killed one soldier and wounded two troops in Baghdad", Reuters reported. "British combat deaths rose to 52 with the report of a Royal Marine killed by hostile fire during a military operation last Friday."
Escalating attacks
Guerrilla attacks on the US occupation forces have dramatically escalated over the last few months and are now running at an average of 35 a day.
Illustrating the range of these attacks, Associated Press reported on November 4: "In the northern city of Mosul, insurgents using small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades attacked a hotel housing American troops but caused no casualties, the [US] military said.
"Three grenades hit the building and two others landed in the compound as US forces returned fire. A police station in Mosul was also struck overnight by a rocket-propelled grenade, the military said Tuesday. There were no casualties...
"Elsewhere, insurgents ... ambushed a US patrol with rocket-propelled grenades in Khaldiyah, a town west of Baghdad in the volatile 'Sunni Triangle', witnesses said. There were no reports of casualties and no confirmation from the US command.
"The Arabic language satellite television station Al-Jazeera reported an ambush Tuesday near Samara north of the capital and broadcast pictures of cheering Iraqis displaying American ammunition as a truck burned in the background."
Network of partisan groups
While US officials claim the guerrilla war in Iraq is the work of "foreign terrorists" and "Saddam loyalists", according to the November 2 London Observer, British officials now believe it is being carried out by a "network of local partisan-type groups".
"They are locally organised with each having its loyalty focused on middle-ranking former [Iraqi army] commanders", an anonymous British official told the Observer, which paraphrased his or her remarks: "The groups' communications — based, say Iraqis, on couriers, often teenage boys, to carry messages — have been equally difficult for the coalition to penetrate. And [the groups] have little difficulty in getting material for attacks or the money to finance the operations.
"Iraqi military doctrine under Saddam, especially after the first Gulf War, long envisaged the risk of a second US-led invasion that would attempt to depose the regime. The consequence was the placement across the country of hidden caches of weapons, explosives, fuel and cash, all in vast amounts — everything required to run a guerrilla war."
The armed resistance "is a mixture of different groups — former Mukhabarat [security services], religious groups and Baath party members", a former colonel in the Iraqi security services told the Observer. "Saddam is playing some role but he is not the only one. Some groups may not even know he is leading them. I think that he is moving around meeting as many of these groups as possible.
"These groups are separate, but work together more and more as the various leaders are contacting each other. Most people are not doing it because of Saddam, but for religious or nationalist reasons."
According to the Observer report, "a broad, post-Saddam ideology" is emerging across the network of partisan groups, "and, if recent polling in Baghdad is to be believed, it is rapidly gaining currency with ordinary Iraqis. It is crudely simple, insisting that the US-led occupation is an assault against both Islam and the wider Arab nation, that Iraqis must resist and that anyone who assists the occupiers is an enemy as much as US troops."
Fallujah battlefield
The most intense battlefield between the US occupiers and Iraqi partisans is the city of Fallujah, 45 kilometres west of Baghdad.
"I expect to get attacked every day — every single day", Lieutenant Colonel Brian Drinkwine, commander of the 1st battalion of the US Army's 82nd Airborne's 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which is responsible for policing Fallujah and its surrounding area, told the November 4 Washington Post.
"That may come in the form of a mortar attack, a drive-by shooting at the mayor's office, a vehicle ambush — or a combination of all three", said Drinkwine.
Indeed, over the weekend of November 1-2, after a bomb exploded inside the office of Taha Bedawi — Fallujah's US-installed mayor — and US paratroopers occupied the mayor's compound, a fierce firefight erupted when Iraqi guerrillas fired four or five rocket-propelled grenades into the compound, wounding four paratroops, two of them seriously.
"It felt like it was Beirut", Drinkwine said. The paratroopers abandoned the burned-out compound in the early hours of November 2, and Bedawi fled Fallujah that evening.
"The Americans are creating enemies by the way they are treating people", Feras Khalil, a psychology teacher, told the Post. Khalil said his house was hit with a 10-minute fusillade of US gunfire on November 1 after a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at the nearby mayor's office. The soldiers hit Khalil's house with 40 Mark-19 grenades, a light anti-tank weapon and 1000 rounds of small-arms fire.
Khalil told the Post that he initially welcomed US troops as "liberators", assuming they would quickly hold democratic elections, invigorate the economy and fund public works projects. "They promised us a lot", he said. "We haven't gotten anything from them."
In the weeks after Saddam Hussein's government fell, Fallujah was largely ignored by US commanders. However, tensions were ignited on April 28 when US soldiers opened fire on a group of unarmed protesters in front of a school, killing 15 and wounding more than three dozen. Exchanges of gunfire between residents and US troops soon became almost daily.
"Unlike commanders from the 101st Airborne Division in northern Iraq, the 4th Infantry Division north of Baghdad and the 1st Armored Division in the capital, officers with the 82nd do not express confidence that they are winning a war of attrition", the Washington Post reported.
"It seems like every enemy we get, there's another one to take his place", one lieutenant told the Post. "I don't know whether that's true or not. That's above me. But that's the way it seems."
From Green Left Weekly, November 12, 2003.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.