For US, uprising a startling turn of fate
Thanassis Cambanis
BAGHDAD -- The armed struggle that erupted across much of Iraq last week has dramatically shifted fundamental assumptions about the country's future, as insurgents acquired a sense of their power and US authorities confronted their vulnerabilities.
Events have unfolded that would have seemed far-fetched a week ago. Yesterday, American forces came under attack in a downtown Baghdad neighborhood of diplomats and wealthy Iraqis that has long been considered safe. Across the Iraqi capital yesterday, shops were closed and streets were empty on what is usually the busiest day of the week, while gunfire rang out and shells pounded the occupation authority's Green Zone headquarters.
In a return to the visual props of last spring's invasion, the US military briefer pulled out a national map to tally all the of the country's trouble spots, and matter-of-factly listed major cities that were under resistance fighters' control.
"The situation is very dangerous. We place responsibility on the coalition," Sheik Ghazi Ajil Al-Yawar, an outspoken Sunni Muslim member of the Iraqi Governing Council who traveled to the besieged city of Fallujah yesterday, told AlJazeera television.
The shattering series of events that began a week ago with an uprising by followers of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr have raised questions about whether the United States will have to rethink the plan for a handover of authority by June 30 and free elections by January 2005. President Bush yesterday brushed aside suggestions by some Republicans and Democrats in Congress that it now may be necessary to push back the handover.
The guerrillas "want to dictate the course of events in Iraq and to prevent the Iraqi people from having a true voice in their future," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "The enemies of freedom will fail."
But even Secretary of State Colin L. Powell admitted Friday that it has been a "tough week," leaving 47 US soldiers dead, the highest weekly combat toll since the United States declared the end of major fighting last May. The Iraqi death toll has also surged, with about 500 killed, more than half of them in Fallujah.
Anger runs deep It only takes an hour in Sadr City, among a throng of angry Shi'ites, to feel the current of bitterness ripping through the poor and disenfranchised slum.
Viewing the week's developments through the lens provided by their fiery imam at Friday prayers, people there perceive a widening war between Iraqis and occupation forces; an apparent crackdown on free speech and Shi'ite rights; a blistering offensive in Fallujah that has claimed hundreds of civilian lives; and a deteriorating security environment that has made this year's annual pilgrimage to Karbala, the holiest trip for Shi'ites, into a nightmare of anxiety about terrorist attacks.
From an American perspective, the challenges appear daunting. For a year, coalition officials have blamed a minority of Ba'athists, international terrorists, and Sunni extremists for attacks against soldiers. Last week, it became apparent that coalition forces had little or no authority in at least three Iraqi cities -- Kut, Najaf, and Fallujah -- and that sympathy for anti-American attacks runs deep and wide through many sectors of society. US officials have acknowledged they need more troops to handle the insurgency.
The atmosphere inside Iraq also changed dramatically on other fronts last week.
The 70,000-member police force the US-led coalition has sought hard to promote collapsed in disarray in many parts of the country. Hundreds of police officers and members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps quit during the fighting, as barracks and police stations were taken over by militias. Many switched sides and fought US troops.
In Shuala, a Shi'ite suburb of Baghdad that saw fierce fighting between Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, and US troops last week, police officers pulled up to the Sadr office in pickup trucks throughout the day to get instructions from the clerics.
"We are policemen, yes, but also Mahdi. And the Mahdi is stronger," said Natik Hussein, a 21-year-old policeman busy taping a poster of Sadr to his police truck as his colleagues played with the siren, turning it on and off. "Sadr is the ultimate authority. The Americans are Jews."
In Sadr City, the Shi'ites have added Iraqi flags -- a new nationalist symbol -- and slogans of cross-sectarian unity to their repertoire.
Sa'ad abu Teba, a foot soldier in the Mahdi Army who said he used to peddle soft drinks before signing up to fight for Sadr for $300 a month, said many former officers in the disbanded national army had joined Sadr's forces.
Last year, he said, "we were so happy that the Americans had come. We thought everything would change."
But the two-time deserter from Saddam Hussein's army said he lost patience when after a year he didn't feel safer on the streets of Baghdad and still couldn't earn a decent living outside the militia.
"They kill our people. They arrest the wounded from hospitals," he said of coalition forces. "Nowhere is safe. Now this will be another sad year."
A return to war
The occupation authority has scrambled to return to combat footing, although officials point out that the war in Iraq didn't end when major combat operations were stopped. "It's a gross mischaracterization to suggest that the entire country is at war, that the entire country is now under the grips of combat," the US military spokesman, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said Friday.
Still, it was a dramatic shift, after a year of military briefings in Baghdad, to see officials talk of cities like Najaf and Kufa being in rebel hands, Fallujah up for grabs in bloody fighting, and Kut retaken by US soldiers after three days in Mahdi Army hands.
After a year of assurances that there were enough troops in Iraq, US military commanders are talking about extending the tours of soldiers who have already been here a year. They have also raised the possibility of boosting total deployments from the current number, 145,000 troops, all but 20,000 of them American -- at a time when some US allies are considering pulling out.
Meanwhile, the fighting has roiled relations between the US-appointed Governing Council and occupation authorities, just 80 days before a sovereign Iraqi government is scheduled to take control.
Two government ministers quit in the past week, several Governing Council members lashed out at the US assault on Fallujah, and a key American ally on the council suspended his membership on the security committee.
Another threat to the reconstruction effort emerged with a spate of kidnappings of foreigners. Aid workers, security contractors, journalists, diplomats, and ministers were believed among the dozens kidnapped by insurgents; many were quickly released.
The battle for the US-led authority here is to regain military control of the country without derailing the political process leading to a June 30 handover and elections in January 2005.
"We will continue to see this violence for some time until Moqtada al-Sadr turns himself in or his militia is destroyed. Coalition military forces will conduct powerful, deliberate, very robust military operations until the job is done," Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq, said last week. "We will not let a small group of criminals and thugs control the destiny of this country."
But US-led forces will have to contend with the highest level of popular vitriol since the occupation began.
"Bremer, you are the outlaw!" the crowd of 300,000 Shi'ites chanted in Sadr City on Friday, a reference to the US adminstrator, L. Paul Bremer III.
Saying collaborators would be judged and "amputated" by the Iraqi people, Imam Sheik Nassir al-Saidi issued a final plea for the people to aid the resistance.
"If you are scared, don't get in our way," he thundered. "We have a fight with the American people."
boston.com
lurqer |
