- Lieutenant Colonel Saad Jasim is reluctant to talk in
the open courtyard. He orders his men to bolt the metal door to his small
office before he will agree to speak. Outside the brick hut is a large
walled compound in which dozens of his armed troops from the Iraqi Civil
Defence Corps are barking orders to each other in the bright morning sun.
Between them and Falluja's main high street is a vast concrete blast wall,
guarded by a handful of extremely anxious defence corps soldiers.
-
- It was on the other side of this wall and just a few
minutes' drive up the road that insurgents gunned down four American security
contractors as they drove past in their four-wheel-drives on Wednesday
morning.
-
- Where there are now two blackened circles on the carriageway,
a jeering mob quickly formed, dragged the burnt bodies from the cars and
hacked them apart, pulling some through the streets from the back of a
car, hanging others from the green metal pontoon bridge over the Euphrates.
-
- It was the most gruesome attack against Americans in
Iraq since the war last year, and a horror whose images clash conspicuously
with US talk of progress and rebuilding.
-
- None of the town's 900 defence corps troops went to intervene,
nor did the Iraqi police, whose headquarters is even closer, nor did the
thousands of better-armed, better-trained troops from America's 1st Marine
Expeditionary Force, based on the outskirts of town.
-
- "We were only told about it when it had finished,"
Col Jasim, 38, a former Iraqi army officer, offered by way of explanation.
"By the time we arrived there was no one there."
-
- It should come as no surprise that the Iraqi security
forces in Falluja are scared half to death.
-
- This Sunni town, 40 miles west of Baghdad, has produced
the most violent resistance to America's occupation of Iraq. There have
been dozens of fatal attacks on US troops and Iraqi police, who are regarded
by many locals as little more than collaborators. In turn, dozens more
Iraqi civilians have died in American raids and military operations.
-
- Six weeks ago a gang of well-armed insurgents rampaged
through Col Jasim's base and the nearby police station, killing 23 people
and releasing dozens of prisoners.
-
- In front of his men, Col Jasim continues to insist that
security is good here.
-
- "There is no town or city that is empty of insurgents
or criminals," he said. "We are passing through a stage where
there is no central state and where no one is dealing with law and order.
If the Americans deliver real authority to the Iraqis then no one will
have an excuse to make operations against them."
-
- Yesterday a joint police and defence corps team were
manning a barbed-wire checkpoint on the edge of town and simply waving
most cars through. There was no sign of American marines in the city.
-
- Few in Falluja will dare to criticise the muqawama ,
or resistance, yet yesterday even some in this town appeared shocked, if
not by the killings themselves, then at least by the brutality of the mob.
-
- "That was wrong. It was a mistake, it was against
the Islamic Sharia," said Ghazia Mohammed, a school teacher queuing
at a stationery store in the town centre. Yet even educated, middle-class
men like this are deeply angry with the US occupation.
-
- "It is not just a matter of resistance, it is a
matter of self-defence because they occupied our state and we should dismiss
them," he said. "They destroyed our houses, our stores, they
are raiding our families, they don't respect us. How should we accept that?
They said they would improve our lives while instead they are fighting
us. Is that democracy?"
-
- Abbas al-Hussein, a strident, English-speaking civil
servant from Falluja's education directorate, spoke with foreboding about
the future. "Anything could happen in this city from now on,"
he said. The people feel such injustice. The coalition forces have humiliated
people and treated them badly. Power and force will never stop these operations
because people are ready to sacrifice themselves according to their Islamic
beliefs."
-
- American officials in Baghdad insisted the attackers
were a "restorationist" movement that wanted to reinstall Saddam
Hussein. "I don't believe they want Saddam back," said Col Jasim.
"It is an Islamic movement. They are fighting to get the Americans
out."
-
- The gunmen who orchestrated Wednesday's attack disappeared
once the four Americans had been killed. It was the crowd, and particularly
a group of young, even teenage, men who dragged the bodies out of the cars
and mutilated them.
-
- Unbroadcast television footage showed them driving through
the streets, trailing a disfigured corpse from the back of a white car
as they waved Kalashnikov rifles and posters of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the
spiritual leader of Hamas who was assassinated by the Israelis.
-
- It was an act committed by "human jackals",
Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, said. His staff insist this
attack and others recently are merely an "uptick" in "localised"
violence.
-
- It is, however, ever harder for Iraqis to believe that
these killings will not seriously derail attempts at reconstruction. Yesterday
a trade fair due to be held in Baghdad next week - the largest business
gathering since the war - was postponed indefinitely.
-
- The US marines took over responsibility for the Falluja
area from the troops of the 82nd Airborne Division a few days ago. Before
they left the US, marine commanders promised a different, more measured
approach to the intractable problem of resistance in Iraq's Sunni heartland.
-
- The reality on the ground was quite dif ferent. Even
before the formal handover ceremony, five marines had been killed.
-
- Last week the troops launched aggressive raids through
one eastern district of Falluja that left at least six Iraqi civilians
dead, including an Iraqi cameraman working for America's ABC television.
It was enough to convince the people of Falluja there had been no change
in the military's approach.
-
- In the offices of Falluja's council yesterday, tribal
sheikhs met to discuss how they should react to Wednesday's killings. After
talking with the Americans soon after the attack, they issued a statement
condemning the crowd's behaviour.
-
- "It was against the noble Islamic beliefs, against
the instructions of the noble Sharia and against tribal values," it
said.
-
- Individually, they quickly admit their frustration with
the Americans. Sheikh Mohammed Hanad al-Shihane, a deputy leader of the
council and a tribal elder in his own right, blamed the crowd's anger on
unemployment, corruption that is delaying reconstruction and heavy-handed
soldiering by US troops. The council asked the marine commanders to keep
out of the city for the moment and to give more support and training to
Iraqi security forces to handle law and order.
-
- "It is not true that these people want Saddam back,"
he said. "All the city is against the occupation and all the mistakes
happened because of the occupation. That much is so clear."
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1184316,00.html
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