- BAGHDAD (IPS) -- A U.S. military
helicopter flies over the municipal building in the predominantly Shia
Baghdad neighbourhood Kadamiya. A U.S.- trained Iraqi soldier stands guard.
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- The guard says he signed up in the new Iraqi Army to
keep Baghdad safe from looters and thieves, but that if the Mehdi Army
of the Shia leader Muqtada al- Sadr who has taken on the United States
tries to take the municipal building, he will abandon his post.
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- He carries a photograph of Muqtada al-Sadr and his father
Ayatolla Mohammed Sadik al-Sadr in his wallet.
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- The soldier explains he was imprisoned by Saddam's regime
in 1979 -- the same year the government executed Muqtada al-Sadr's uncle
Mohammed Bakir al-Sadr for refusing to support the ruling Arab Ba'ath Socialist
Party.
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- While he was in prison he says he met many members of
Muqtada al-Sadr's father's organisation. He says he has great respect for
Ayatolla Mohammed Sadik al-Sadr, who was killed by Saddam's regime in 1999.
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- He draws a distinction between the Sadr family and the
terrorists he has sworn to fight. "I was in prison with this family,"
he told IPS, "and even before they were arrested I respected all of
them."
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- Across the centre and south of Iraq, the U.S. trained
Iraqi military is refusing to fight an increasingly popular insurgency.
This week U.S. officials acknowledged that half of its Iraqi Army refused
to fight when the U.S. Marines began a massive assault on Fallujah April
5. The assault was launched to crush rebel supporters of al-Sadr.
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- "Forty percent walked off the job because they were
intimidated, and 10 percent actually worked against us," Maj-Gen.
Martin Dempsey told reporters. Reuters reports the U.S. military has thrown
200 Iraqi servicemen in prison after they refused to participate in the
attack on Fallujah.
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- "It's kind of a revolution," Majid al-Samarai,
columnist for an Iraqi newspaper and former TV talk-show host during Saddam
Hussein's regime told IPS. "It's kind of a reaction to what the Americans
didn't know about. They made a very big mistake in Fallujah. They try to
say they were fighting foreign Arabs and terrorists like Zarqawi but they
were not -- just regular Iraqis in their houses who were tired of the occupation."
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- But while Arab sections of the new Iraqi Army defect
in droves, the United States has still been able to count on support from
former members of Iraq's Kurdish guerrilla armies, the Peshmerga, who fought
Saddam's regime for years before allying themselves with the Bush Administration
in last year's war.
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- "We are not going to fight Arab people," says
Abullah Fermande, a division commander for the Peshmerga of the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan. "We are going to stop terrorism. They may have
the opposite idea, but we are not fighting the Arabs in Fallujah and in
Najaf (where the U.S. military is now laying siege to al-Sadr). We have
so many friends there. But sometimes you see the terrorists are radical
Arabs and they want to do terrible things in Kurdistan and everywhere else."
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- Like many of his fellow Kurds, Fermende says he has a
debt to pay to the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. "He
was the worst kind of dictator," the commander says, "and now
we have a real chance for freedom and democracy in Iraq. That's something
worth fighting for."
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- But U.S. officials like Administrator L. Paul Bremer
are beginning to have second thoughts about their hard stand against the
apparatus of Saddam Hussein's regime. Faced with increasing defections
from the Iraqi Army, Bremer announced Friday he was easing the ban on top
members of Saddam Hussein's former Ba'ath Party.
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- "The (interim) minister of defence informs me that
he intends to have a meeting with vetted senior officers from the former
regime next week to discuss how best to build the new Iraqi military establishment,"
Bremer said in a televised address. "More of these officers with honourable
records -- from the former army and elsewhere -- will serve in the months
ahead as your new army grows."
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- Bremer clearly has a long way to go in constituting a
new Iraqi Army. Even before this month's defections, the Iraqi Army numbered
only about 6,000, with 32,450 serving in the paramilitary Iraqi Civil Defence
Corps. That is fairly small compared to the 350,000-member military Bremer
dismissed when he arrived in Baghdad last May.
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reserved. http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=23468
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