- "We don't seek empires. We're not imperialistic.
We never have been. I can't imagine why you'd even ask the question."
- --Donald Rumsfeld, questioned by an al-Jazeera correspondent,
April 29, 2003.
-
- "No one can now doubt the word of America,"
- --George W. Bush, State of the Union, January 20, 2004.
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- BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Aadhamiyah.
After a day cooped up shuttling between hotel and Internet cafe yesterday,
I went out again, this time to the Sunni neighborhood of Aadhamiyah. I
have yet to write up what I saw in full, but here's the basics.
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- This is a followup to the Fallujah story. I <http://www.empirenotes.org#07apr043>wrote
earlier about the massive relief collections for Fallujah, coordinated
through the mosques of Baghdad and beyond, with the mosque of Abu Hanifa
in Aadhamiyah as the epicenter. We saw that on April 7, within hours of
the beginning of the operation.
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- Later on, as we saw when we were in Fallujah, there was
a massive exodus of refugees from Fallujah, many of whom were taken into
people's homes in Aadhamiyah.
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- The U.S. military has many suspicions that mujaheddin
are leaving Fallujah and that guns and fighters are being smuggled in through
the relief program for Fallujah. So they paid a visit to the mosque on
Sunday.
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- Built around the tomb of Abu Hanifa, the founder of the
moderate Hanafi school of Islamist jurisprudence and one of the most important
figures in the history of Sunni Islam, the mosque is 1250 years old. Although
Umm al-Marek is bigger, Abu Hanifa is probably the most important Sunni
mosque in Baghdad, and a site of pilgrimage for Muslims around the world.
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- We talked with Issam Rashid, the chief of security for
the mosque. He told us the story. At 3:30 am on Sunday morning, 100 American
troops raided the mosque. They were looking for weapons and mujaheddin.
They started the riad the way they virtually always do -- by smashing in
the gates with tanks and then driving Hummer in. The Hummers ran over and
destroyed some of the stored relief goods (the bulk of the goods had already
been sent to Fallujah -- over 200 tons -- but the amount remaining was
considerable). More was destroyed as soldiers ripped apart sacks looking
for rifles. Rashid estimated maybe three tons of supplies were destroyed.
We saw for ourselves some of the remains, sacks of beans ripped apart and
strewn around.
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- The mosque was full of people, including 90 down from
Kirkuk (many with the Red Crescent). They were all pushed down on the floor,
with guns put to the backs of their heads. Another person associated with
the mosque, Mr. Alber, who speaks very good English, told us that he repeatedly
said, "Please, don't break down doors. Please, don't break windows.
We can help you. We can have custodians unlock the doors." (Alber,
by the way, was imprisoned by Saddam for running a bakery. As he said,
"Under the embargo, you could eat flour, you could eat sugar, you
could eat eggs, all separately. But mix them together and bake them and
you were harming the economy by raising the price of sugar and you could
get 15 years in prison.)
-
- The Americans refused to listen to Alber's pleas. We
went all around the mosque and the adjacent madrassah, the Imam Aadham
Islamic College. We saw dozens of doors broken down, windows broken, ceilings
ripped apart, and bullet holes in walls and ceilings. The way the soldiers
searched for illicit arms in the ceiling was first to spray the ceiling
with gunfire, then break out a panel and go up and search.
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- They even went and rifled through students' exam papers
(in Arabic), messed up offices. An old man who is a "guard" at
the mosque (actually a poor man with a large family who is slightly lame
and is missing several teeth) was hit in the head with a rifle butt and
then kicked when he was down -- all because he was a little slow in answering
the door. He says he never carries a weapon -- the whole mosque has only
three Kalashnikovs, for security, kept in the imam's room. The Americans
took the ammunition there too. And, of course, they entered the mosque
with their boots on.
-
- The American commanders will say this was a necessary
precaution to make sure no military goods got into Fallujah and that this
was legal under the laws of war. But the Abu Hanifa mosque was not involved
in this -- they found nothing. They didn't bother to ask. They didn't go
to the Imam and see if they could search to mosque. And, after a year of
being stationed in Aadhamiyah, they didn't know the people well enough
to know there would be nothing -- even though they were told repeatedly
that even the resistance in that area never fired from near the mosque
because they were afraid of drawing return fire that would hit the mosque.
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- You can guess how many hearts and minds were won by this
little operation -- the third time that the mosque has been raided since
the war.
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- Abu Hanifa mosque has a tower that is being reconstructed.
It was destroyed by the American attack during the war. It is only now
being finished. Rashid told me why. He said, "After the war, the Americans
came and offered money to rebuild the tower. We told them no. We will rebuild
the tower with our own money. We will take no money from you. You can't
just destroy this and then win our goodwill with money. This is not a game."
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- When I asked Rashid if we could use his full name, he
said, "Why not?" It's a response we get more and more these days,
from people who would have been afraid but have lost their fears through
anger. Dignity is one of the few things in Iraq that is not in short supply.
- April 12, 1:20 pm EST.Baghdad, Iraq -- Some people are
calling the killing in Fallujah "genocide." That's too strong
a term and shouldn't be overused. They are allowing women and children
to leave, for example. They haven't flattened the whole city.
-
- Let's just call it what it is. It's an incredibly brutal
collective punishment in defense of a regime, that of the occupation, that
is less brutal than Saddam was but more than makes up for that with its
negligence. Fewer people in the mass graves, more children dying for lack
of medicine, more people being murdered on the streets or kidnapped. Hard
to weigh all of the factors, but I've heard so many say, including Shi'a,
that things are worse now.
-
- And Fallujah is something further as well. The Marines
are corroborating my judgment, expressed previously, that the mujaheddin
of Fallujah (and we're really talking about all of al-Anbar province, which
includes Ramadi), are just the men of Fallujah, not some extremist faction.
They don't allow "military-age males" out of town. And check
out this <http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101040419/whow.html>quote
from Time Magazine:
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- In some neighborhoods, the Marines say, anyone they spot
in the streets is considered a "bad guy." Says Marine Major Larry
Kaifesh: "It is hard to differentiate between people who are insurgents
or civilians. You just have to go with your gut feeling."
-
- A colleague writes, "International aid agencies
are estimating 470 while doctors in local hospitals are claiming at least
600 dead -- in a town of 200,000. If we take 500 as a reasonable estimate
that's 1 in 400 -- would scale to 725,000 for the United States. I'm guessing
this is the biggest concentrated slaughter of a group that's mostly civilians
through direct U.S. military action since Gulf War I." It's worse
than anything in Gulf War I except for the al-Amiriyah bomb shelter (oddly,
al-Amriyiah is also an "anti-American" neighborhood) and the
"Highway of Death" slaughter, actually.
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- Not genocide, but not something even the U.S. spin machine
can put a good face on, except by outright lies. Which, of course, the
administration would never stoop to.
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- To repeat what I said earlier in different words: in
hindsight, people may well realize this is potentially as transformative
a week for the world as was the week of 9/11. It's unravelling a bit slower
and we are much more distracted with other issues. But any accommodative
solution to the occupation is virtually impossible -- it wasn't just a
few weeks ago. U.S. intent on staying and, therefore, it is determined
to "pacify" Iraq. It is no longer possible for Iraqi politicians
to preserve even the appearance of semi-legitimacy and accommodate the
United States.
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- It's getting dark now and I am out of here.
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- April 12, 1:00 pm EST. Baghdad, Iraq -- Word on the street
is that the risks to foreigners are very great. I will probably not leave
home in the evening any more. I will only be able to update once a day,
if things go smoothly. It's even possible I'll phone in my blog updates.
Going to Fallujah was very important, because literally nobody was reporting
the whole story in English, but risking kidnapping day by day here is a
foolish risk -- or so my colleagues have persuaded me.
-
- Everything you've seen in the press (if you're reading
very widely and carefully) about how the occupation is collapsing is true.
I don't mean this to predict prematurely what the outcome is, just to say
that the change I sense in public opinion seems close to irreversible.
-
- I'm sorry I can't provide links for all this -- it just
takes too much time -- but here's a little capsule review of what's going
on. The Governing Council is practically in hiding. Adnan Pachachi has
condemned the Fallujah operations on al-Jazeera. About 25% of the Iraqi
police and Iraqi Civil Defense forces are not showing up for work; some
of those have joined the resistance (I wrote <http://www.empirenotes.org/11apr043>earlier
about one IP mujahid that I saw). An entire battalion <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2680-2004Apr10.html>refused
to go and fight in Fallujah. They have two considerations. One is just
that very few Iraqis can condone the brutality and pointlessness of the
Fallujah attack. The other is that they're terrified, especially of Sadr's
Jaish-il-Mehdi, but also of various Sunni mujaheddin groups.
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- The British commander in Basra has condemned the American
methods. I read somewhere that in the midst of all this, John Kerry delivered
a major policy speech -- on the budget deficit. Not that that's not important,
but how about you talk about that next week and talk about Iraq going up
in flames this week? Oh, well, it's only 6 billion people who will be hurt
by his political incompetence and lack of principle.
-
- But I digress. The United States doesn't have enough
troops to deal with Iraq in flames -- unfortunately, however, more troops
would just be adding fuel to the fire.
-
- The United States has made the occupation of Iraq into
a simple revenge match. It's hard to say any longer it's about imperial
policies, controlling Iraq's oil, or the rest of it -- I'm sure that's
still what they want, but this is the most brainless way in the world of
getting it.
-
- As for democracy, shutting down newspapers and slaughtering
civilians is not a great way to go for it. Appointing Governing Councils,
imposing press censorship, detaining 10-20,000 people without charges (the
interim constitution of Iraq guarantees habeas corpus -- even though Bush
and Ashcroft have decided habeas corpus doesn't apply in the United States
-- but of course the U.S. military forces are above the constitution),
funnelling Iraq's oil money to corrupt military contractors, closing al-Hawza
(Sadr's newspaper), destroying Fallujah. There's more to write about this,
but the point is obvious.
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- And revenge is not a way to win "hearts and minds."
The Iraqi people -- Fool them once, fool them, fool them, won't get fooled
again. Perhaps they can be conquered now by brute force. Perhaps some leaders
can be bought -- although they'll likely be too scared to stay bought.
But the project of building a nice comfortable facade for the occupation
and control of Iraq is burning down along with Fallujah.
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- April 12, 8:00 am EST. Baghdad, Iraq -- I've just posted
my <http://www.empirenotes.org/fallujah.html>report from Fallujah
-- much like the blog entry below. I should be able to update again in
several hours -- Inshallah, as we say here in Iraq.
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- April 12, 7:05 am EST. Baghdad, Iraq -- We've heard through
various NGO's that the situation here in Baghdad for foreigners has become
very dicey. Bridges to Baghdad, an Italian group that has done amazing
work for years to help the Iraqi people, is pulling out -- with an Italian
military contingent here, they are natural targets for kidnappers. The
Christian Peacemaker Teams, who also have a very well-organized operation
over here, are thinking of pulling out. Royal Jordanian operates a daily
flight from Baghdad to Amman -- $600 one way -- but flights are often overbooked.
It's also no picnic to get out to the airport from the city center -- there's
fierce fighting in Abu Ghraib, along the way, with armed men blowing up
oil tankers and attacking U.S. convoys. There's some talk about an emergency
evacuation of some kind. I'll try to let people know if I get a chance.
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- A few words about this whole kidnapping thing. It's a
very unpleasant tactic. Most Iraqis I've spoken to (no names here), even
if they support the resistance completely (and after Fallujah there are
very few, except Kurds, who will condemn the resistance completely), are
not happy about the kidnappings. Perhaps the worst is the three Japanese.
One of them is an 18-year-old antiwar activist. Another is a woman who
works with street children. Jo Wilding, a British activist who knows the
latter, told me she used to wash their clothes for them -- not something
the average Third World street child gets much of. One Iraqi woman told
me she couldn't sleep after she saw the pictures of them on TV being menaced
by their kidnappers. When we were in Fallujah, our contacts there were
in communication with the kidnappers, and we got advance notice that they
were to be freed -- and got to see a plea, in Arabic, from the Japanese
antiwar movement. Now, it seems, there's no news one way or the other.
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- The mujaheddin are perfectly ready to use violently inhumane
methods, make no doubt of it. But it's awfully difficult to explain to
an Iraqi that these kidnappings are illegitimate because they target civilians
(and, of course, killing anyone in your custody is wrong, soldier or civilian)
but that the killing of civilians in the bombing of Fallujah (including
mosques and hospitals) or sniping at ambulances is OK because it's just
"collateral damage." The single most common complaint you hear
is that the Americans shoot indiscriminately, killing women, children,
other noncombatants. People here make a clear distinction between killing
combatants and noncombatants -- they just don't think that killing noncombatants
from the air is more civilized.
-
- I read a quote from a Marine commander calling the Fallujah
mujaheddin "cowards" -- don't have time to look up the link.
Because they fight from civilian areas, etc., i.e. use people as "human
shields." This is, of course, a standard of colonialist discourse
for at least 150 years now. There are two simple reasons for this. One,
the "natives" are always faced with overwhelming firepower; they're
not going to come out and gather together nicely at one intersection and
wait to be annihilated from the sky. Two, you're in their country; that's
why they have all those civilians to "hide" behind.
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- I've written at length trying to deconstruct this kind
of nonsense for Western audiences (see "The White Man's Burden"
in my book, "The New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism), and show
that, rather than being more humanitarian, the United States (and the West)
are just generally, at least post-Vietnam, more sophisticated in their
brutality. But the bottom line is this: you can posture all you want for
the American people, but no Third World people is going to believe this.
They'll hold on to the naive view that defending themselves in their country
against a foreign occupier is good and that going to other countries to
occupy them is bad, that to fight with inferior weaponry against overwhelming
odds shows courage and that to bomb from the air or to use heavy armor
and to kill civilians with indiscriminate strikes is cowardly.
-
- They will commit atrocities in doing so -- the "Black
Hole" of Calcutta, the kidnapping of the Japanese -- and I have no
interest in defending those acts. But it was the occupiers that started
the atrocities and only a damn fool would expect that a brutalized people
should fight back with restraint and civilization. It's happened at times,
but it's a miracle when it does.
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- April 11, 2:00 pm EST. Fallujah, Iraq -- Fallujah is
a bit like southern California. On the edge of Iraq's western desert, it
is extremely arid but has been rendered into an agricultural area by extensive
irrigation. The villages on the way to Fallujah are dirt-poor; Fallujah
is perhaps marginally better off. Farmers constitute a significant percentage
of the population. The town itself has wide streets and squat, sand-colored
buildings. The way we took in, there didn't seem to be a great deal of
bomb damage.
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- We were in Fallujah during the "ceasefire."
We had heard all kinds of horrible things about what was going on. I think
the current reports say something like 500-600 people killed in Fallujah,
including estimates of 200 women and over 100 children (there are no women
among the mujahideen, so all of the above are noncombatants. Many of the
men who were wounded also told us they were just going about their business
when they got hit). Here's a little bit of what we saw and heard.
-
- When the assault on Fallujah started, the power plant
was bombed. Electricity is provided by generators and usually reserved
for places with important functions. There are four hospitals currently
running in Fallujah. This includes the one where we were, which was actually
just a minor emergency clinic; another one of them is a car repair garage.
Things were very frantic at the hopsital where we were, so we couldn't
get too much translation. We depended for much of our information on Makki
al-Nazzal, a lifelong Fallujah resident who works for the humanitarian
NGO Intersos, and had been pressed into service as the manager of the clinic,
since all doctors were busy, working around the clock with minimal sleep.
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- A gentle, urbane man who spoke fluent English, Al-Nazzal
was beside himself with fury at the Americans' actions (when I asked him
if it was all right to use his full name, he said, "It's ok. It's
all ok now. Let the bastards do what they want.") With the "ceasefire,"
large-scale bombing was rare. The primary modes of attack were a little
bit of heavy artillery and a lot of snipers.
-
- Al-Nazzal told us about ambulances being hit by snipers,
women and children being shot. Describing the horror that the siege of
Fallujah had become, he said, "I have been a fool for 47 years. I
used to believe in European and American civilization."
-
- I had heard these claims at third-hand before coming
into Fallujah, but was skeptical. It's very difficult to find the real
story here. But this I saw for myself. An ambulance with two neat, precise
bullet-holes in the windshield on the driver's side, pointing down at an
angle that indicated they would have hit the driver's chest (the snipers
were on rooftops, and are trained to aim for the chest). Another ambulance
again with a single, neat bullet-hole in the windshield. There's no way
this was due to panicked spraying of fire. These were deliberate shots
to kill people in driving the ambulances.
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- The ambulances go around with red, blue, or green lights
flashing and sirens blaring; in the pitch-dark of a blacked-out city there
is no way they can be missed or mistaken for something else). An ambulance
that some of our compatriots were going around in, trading on their whiteness
to get the snipers to let them throug to pick up the wounded was also shot
at while we were there.
-
- During the course of the roughly four hours we were at
that small clinic, we saw perhaps a dozen wounded brought in. Among them
was a young woman, 18 years old, shot in the head. She was having a seizure
and foaming at the mouth when they brought here in; doctors did not expect
her to survive the night. Another likely terminal case was a young boy
with massive internal bleeding. I also saw a man with extensive burns on
his upper body and wounds in his thighs that might have been from a cluster
bomb; there was no way to verify in the madhouse scene of wailing relatives,
shouts of "Allahu Akbar" (God is great), and anger at the Americans.
-
- Among the more laughable assertions of the Bush administration
is that the mujaheddin are a small group of isolated "extremists"
repudiated by the majority of Fallujah's population. Nothing could be further
from the truth. Of course, the mujaheddin don't include women or very young
children (we saw an 11-year-old boy with a Kalashnikov), old men, and are
not necessarily even a majority of fighting-age men. But they are of the
community and fully supported by it. Many of the wounded were brought in
by the muj and they stood around openly conversing with doctors and others.
One of the muj was wearing an Iraqi police flak jacket; on questioning
others who knew im, we learned that he was in fact a member of the Iraqi
police.
-
- One of our translators, Rana al-Aiouby told me, "these
are simple people." It is true that they are agricultural tribesmen
with very strong religious beliefs. They are not so far different from
the Pashtun of Afghanistan -- good friends and terrible enemies. They are
insular and don't easily trust strangers. We were safe because of the friends
we had with us and because we came to help them.
-
- The muj are of the people in the same way that the stone-throwing
shabab in the Palestinian intifada were. A young man who is not one today
may the next day wind his aqal around his face and pick up a Kalashnikov.
I spoke to a young man, Ali, who was among the wounded we transported to
Baghdad. He said he was not a muj but, when asked his opinion of them,
he smiled and stuck his thumb up.
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- Al-Nazzal told me that the people of Fallujah refused
to resist the Americans just because Saddam told them to; indeed, the fighting
for Fallujah last year was not particularly fierce. He said, "If Saddam
said work, we would want to take off three days. But the Americans had
to cast us as Saddam supporters. When he was captured, they said the resistance
would die down, but even as it has increased, they still call us that."
-
- Nothing could have been easier than gaining the good-will
of the people of Fallujah had the Americans not been so brutal in their
dealings. Now, a tipping-point has been reached. Fallujah cannot be "saved"
from its mujaheddin unless it is destroyed.
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