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Nation & World
Paying The Price
Facing resistance on two fronts, U.S. forces battle insurgents challenging Bush's plan to remake Iraq
By Kevin Whitelaw
All of a sudden, it once again looks a lot like full-blown war. Marines encircling a hostile town and calling in airstrikes from AC-130 gunships. Kalashnikov-toting Iraqi fighters swathed in black roaming freely in several towns claimed as their own. Americans and Iraqis counting their dead and injured.
Last week's surge in violence--which claimed the lives of more than 40 American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqi fighters and civilians--expanded well beyond the persistent yearlong insurgency by the predominantly Sunni remnants of the former regime. Even as insurgents in the Sunni hotbed towns of Fallujah and Ramadi mustered some of their stiffest resistance since the fall of Baghdad, a small but surprisingly organized Shiite faction tapped into public discontent. Militants staged rolling riots in a number of towns throughout the south, startling U.S. officials and Iraqi leaders by temporarily ousting coalition forces from their positions in the southern towns of Kut and Kufa, as well as the holy city of Najaf. Led by Moqtada al-Sadr, an impetuous, firebrand cleric, the Mahdi Army militia numbers in the thousands.
The violence is not on the scale of a civil war, but it threatens the tacit support of the majority Shiites that America has been counting on. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared it a "test of will," but many Iraqis are calling it an "intifada," or uprising, echoing the term the Palestinians use in their fight against Israel. Either way, for President Bush, vacationing at his Texas ranch for Easter, it presents the most serious obstacle yet to his plan to hand over political authority to an interim government by June 30. Among the disheartening developments was that U.S.-trained Iraqi police fled their posts without putting up a fight. And even the mood on the streets has turned ugly, with crowds of Iraqis openly threatening western aid workers and journalists.
The unplanned convergence of these previously unconnected forces--Sunni former regime loyalists and hard-line Shiite Islamists--reveals the depth of anti-Americanism in Iraq today, even as it raises doubts about whether the Bush administration has deployed enough troops to control Iraq's burgeoning insurgencies. It also exposes the painful shortage of Iraqis openly and publicly siding with the U.S.-led occupation government. Indeed, despite a year of reconstruction efforts, Iraq's political scene remains a dangerous vacuum--providing an opening for an unsavory mix of hard-line Sunnis, foreign extremists, and, now, Sadr and his disenfranchised Shiite followers.
Bastions of opposition. The worst violence is still concentrated in the Sunni Triangle, where the bodies of four slain American contractors were publicly mutilated two weeks ago. U.S. marines waged a ferocious battle to retake Fallujah. "It's what we should have done 12 months ago," says former CIA Iraq analyst Kenneth Pollack. "We allowed Fallujah, Ramadi, and those other Sunni towns to turn into bastions of opposition." The price of cleaning it up has added to an American casualty toll of more than 350 killed and over 2,700 wounded in action in what the Pentagon calls "post-combat ops" during the year of occupation.
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