- In the front yard of a half-built house in Falluja, a
dozen fighters sat in a semicircle. With Kalashnikovs in their laps and
copies of the Qur'an in their hands, they stared at us suspiciously.
-
- The silence was punctuated by the sound of mortar shelling.
With each explosion, the fighters would cry, "Allahu Akbar".
-
- Eventually, the mujahideen started talking: "Who
are you?" "What do you do?" "Why the big cameras?"
-
- But mostly they were interested only in converting us
to Islam. They were still describing the pains I would go through in hell
when another fighter, a short thin teenager, appeared. He was still dressed
in his white pyjamas and rubbed his eyes as he listened to the conversation.
-
- "What are you doing?" he asked one of the fighters.
-
- "We are preaching to them about Islam," said
the fighter.
-
- "Why? They are not Muslims?"
-
- "No."
-
- The young man looked with puzzlement at the other fighter
and said: "But then, why don't we kill them?"
-
- "We can't do that now. They are in a state of truce
with us," the fighter said.
-
- The fighters belonged to Tawhid and Jihad, the group
that has claimed responsibility for most of the violence sweeping Iraq.
Eradicating these men is one of the prime objectives of the US offensive
on Falluja.
-
- At first sight, they all looked and behaved the same;
young men in trainers and tracksuits preaching Islam. As time passed, they
became more relaxed and open about who they were and why they were there.
-
- It became apparent that they were an odd bunch of people
from different places and with different dreams.
-
- There were two kinds of mujahideen bound together in
a marriage of convenience. One kind, Arab fighters from the new generation
of the jihad diaspora, were teachers, workers and students from across
the Arab world feeling oppressed and alienated by the west; they came to
Iraq with dreams of martyrdom.
-
- The other kind, Iraqi fighters from Falluja, were fighting
the army that occupied their country.
-
- They were five Saudis - or the people of the peninsula,
as they called themselves - three Tunisians and one Yemeni. The rest were
Iraqis.
-
- Most of the time, when they weren't reading or praying,
they spoke about death, not fearfully, but in happy anticipation. They
talked about how martyrs would not feel pain and about how many virgins
they would get in heaven.
-
- I asked one of them, a young teacher from Saudi Arabia,
why he was there. He started reading the verses in the Qur'an that urge
Muslims to commit jihad. He read about the importance of martyrdom. After
20 minutes, he directed me to another fighter, an older man with a beard
and a soft voice who said his name was Abu Ossama from Tunisia.
-
- "We are here for one of two things - victory or
martyrdom, and both are great," he said.
-
- "The most important thing is our religion, not Falluja
and not the occupation. If the American solders came to me and converted
to Islam, I won't fight them. We are here not because we want to liberate
Iraq, we are here to fight the infidels and to make victorious the name
of Islam."
-
- He continued to explain his jihad theories: "They
call us terrorists because we resist them. If defending the truth is terrorism,
then we are terrorists."
-
- Suddenly, there was a heavy burst of gunfire. The young
Saudi teacher ran to fetch a machine gun. With ammunition belts wrapped
around his neck, he and a young Tunisian carrying a rocket-propelled grenade
launcher ran outside.
-
- The Saudi reached a trench. Opening his Qur'an, he read
for a while and then pointed his machine gun at the horizon, trying to
release the safety catch.
-
- He fiddled with the gun for a few minutes, then turned
to me: "Do you know how to make these things work?"
-
- Abu Yassir, a short, heavy-built, middle-aged Iraqi with
a grey beard, was the "amir", or commander, of this group. He
was a more experienced fighter and looked after the others.
-
- When it was time to break their fast, the men poured
food into a big tray and, exchanging jokes, scooped rice with their fingers.
I had to keep reminding myself that these people blow up civilians every
day in Iraq.
-
- After the food, the amir told his story.
-
- He was a retired military officer and ran a business
making electric generators. He was happy to see the back of Saddam Hussein
and to get rid of the Ba'athist regime.
-
- But, he said, "as the time passed by and as the
occupation became more visible, more patriotic feelings grew bigger and
bigger. Every time I saw the Americans patrolling our streets I became
more humiliated."
-
- He described how locals from Falluja and other places
started to organise themselves into small cells and to attack the Americans.
-
- "We just wanted them to leave our cities. In the
beginning I had a 'job' every month, setting IEDs [improvised explosive
devices] or firing mortars, and would go back to my work most of the time.
But then I realised I can't do any thing but jihad as long as the Americans
occupied my country."
-
- He closed his workshop, sold his business and used the
money to sponsor the group of fighters.
-
- "The world is convinced that we people of Falluja
are happy to kill the innocents, that's not true, even when we execute
collaborators and people working for the Americans, I feel sad for them
and sometimes cry, but this is a war."
-
- We slept in one of the many empty houses, but every few
moments we heard the sound of an explosion. Suddenly, there was a huge
blast. We ran outside.
-
- The fighters were already in the street, shouting "Allahu
Akbar" every time they heard explosions, believing it would divert
the missiles away.
-
- We walked in the darkness until we reached a mosque,
were we spent the night listening to the heavy bombing and the shrapnel
hitting the walls.
-
- The next day, the mujahideen left the house where they
had stayed for the last few days, believing they had been spotted by the
Americans.
-
- There they took their final fighting positions and designated
one of them, a young Iraqi, as the unit's martyr - a fighter whose task
is to explode himself next to the Americans.
-
- The amir told me: "All we want is the Americans
to leave, and then everything will be fine, the Kurds will stop talking
about seceding from Iraq, the Shias will stop talking about settling scores
with Sunnis and each province will elect a council and these councils will
elect a president.
-
- "That is the election we see democratic, not an
American one."
-
- But, he said: "We are besieged here now. It is a
great emotional victory, but bad strategy. It is very easy now for the
Americans to come and kill us all."
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1346708,00.html
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