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Despite the 26 August
‘peace plan’ ending the siege of Najaf, US forces
have continued to kill Iraqis in large numbers elsewhere in
Iraq. Meanwhile US Army officials have declared their intention
to ‘retake’ Baghdad’s impoverished Sadr City
slum and to launch major assaults on cities such as Fallujah
and Ramadi within the next four months should other methods
of regaining control fail.
The
Killing Continues: Sadr City
Two days after the ‘peace plan’ was agreed, on the
28 August, the US fought members of Moqtada al-Sadr’s
militia in Baghdad’s Sadr City slum – to which hundreds
of militiamen had returned from Najaf (Washington Post,
29 August). ‘US soldiers in Humvees drove through the
impoverished neighbourhood with loudspeakers, demanding people
stay home because coalition forces were “cleaning the
area of armed men”’ (AP, 29 Aug) –
but with no important religious sites to worry about this was
barely news.
On 7 September, following ‘a weeklong calm’ after
Moqtada al-Sadr declared a unilateral ceasefire, gun battles
broke out in Sadr City ‘leaving at least 40 Iraqis and
1 American soldier dead and 202 people wounded’ (NYT,
8 Sept). Locals claimed that ‘a provocative American patrol
.. deep into Sadr City’ had sparked the fighting (Guardian,
8 September). “The Americans tried to arrest some people
from the Mahdi army,” Abu Hussein, a 20-year old shop
keeper told the Guardian. “They come here, and start randomly
arresting and randomly shooting. Then the Mahdi army fires back.”
Get
Sadr
According to the ‘leaders of the Mahdi Army … and
two well-placed Iraqi sources … an agreement had been
reached late[on 30 Aug] that called for the disarming of the
rebel force and a halt in American military operations in Sadr
City.’ Two days l.ater, on 1 September, the New York Times
reported that ‘a tentative peace pact’ between the
US-appointed Iraqi Government and the Sadrists had been ‘abruptly
cancelled by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.’
Mr Allawi was not available for comment but ‘an Iraqi
source said [Allawi] had decided to take a harsher approach
toward [Sadrist leader Moqtada] Sadr and the Mahdi Army, possibly
including the use of military force.’ The same source
told the paper that ‘Dr Allawi appeared to be motivated
by disappointment with the agreement in Najaf … [which]
left the Mahdi Army intact and made Mr Sadr stronger than ever
in the eyes of many Iraqis.’ The source also suggested
that Allawi had ‘recently come under intense pressure
from Shiite political parties that fear that the entry of Mr
Sadr into the political mainstream could diminish their own
potential at the polls’ and ‘would prefer that Mr
Sadr be eliminated’ (NYT, 1 September) [1].
‘Different Parameters’
According to Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commander of the US
Army's 1st Cavalry Division, ‘[t]he fight with renegade
Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is not over and the U.S. military
must retake his stronghold in Baghdad's Sadr City slum’
(AP, 2 September). ‘The job will take a matter
of weeks, Chiarelli said, giving no timetable for the start
of an operation.’ “We’re going to go in and
first, make Sadr City safe for the residents,” he said,
apparently without irony. ‘If it comes to a showdown with
the U.S. military in Sadr City, no ultra-sensitive Muslim holy
places will get in the Army's way, Chiarelli said, harking to
how sensitivities over damaging the revered Imam Ali Shrine
prevented a full-bore attack on al-Sadr's militia in Najaf.
“We feel very strongly that Sadr City is not Najaf,”
Chiarelli said. “You have a totally different set of parameters
in Sadr City.”’
‘Unarmed
people live here’
Sadr City residents have already had ample experience of being
‘made safe’ by the US military. Indeed, Sadr City
was the scene of intense fighting during the first US assault
on the Sadrist movement earlier this year – which killed
over 800 people in the slum, according to US military officials
(LA Times, 7 June) - as well as during the August assault
on Najaf. Last month the US claimed at one point to have killed
50 militiamen in a single night (Guardian, 20 August).
According to the owner of a local soft drinks shop, Riyadh Aabid
- who said he was ‘fed up with the Mahdi Army’ and
its tactics - ‘most of the victims were ordinary people’
(Guardian, 20 August). “My two children couldn’t
sleep,” Mr Aabid told the paper. “I held both of
them in my arms all night. The American bombs were so loud.
Our message to the Americans is ‘stop shooting into houses
– unarmed people live there’.”
The
Killing Continues: Fallujah
Since the end of the siege of Najaf the US has also launched
at least eight air assaults on Fallujah - the city that was
subjected to a massive US attack in April, killing hundreds
of civilians (see Voices briefing Fallujah
and Beyond for more info). The first such attack, on 27
Aug, killed three people and wounded 13 others, including a
6-year-old girl according to medical officials (AP,
28 August). A subsequent strike on 2 Sept. killed 17, including
3 children, a woman and an elderly man - again, according to
local doctors (Reuters, 2 September). After US jets
and helicopters ‘pounded Fallujah all night’ on
7 September, the US military boasted that it had killed ‘up
to 100 militants’, though local hospital sources reported
“only” 6 dead and 23 wounded (AFP, 8 Sep).
‘Precision
Strikes’
By now a familiar pattern has developed, exemplified by an attack
on 9 September.
‘[C]iting what it said was compelling evidence from multiple
sources’ the US military announced that it had conducted
“a precision strike on a confirmed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
operating location in northern Fallujah’ in the early
hours of the morning (NYT, 10 September). However ‘as
the day progressed, news accounts and photographs of dead women
and children along with credible witness reports, told a different
story. At least eight people died, including four children and
two women, a local doctor told the Associated Press and another
16 people, including 8 children were wounded. In the rubble
of a demolished house, workers found only one survivor, a 10-month-old
infant, said Ahmad Jabir, a member of the rescue team.’
According to the LA Times, ‘the air campaign
[against Fallujah is] expected to continue and possibly intensify’
(11 September). ‘Recent airstrikes have heightened tension
in the city, feeding fears that an all-out American attack may
be imminent. That has prompted hundreds of families to flee
their homes, transforming neighbourhoods facing US positions
into ghost towns’ (AP, 10 September).[2]
The
Killing Continues: Tal Afar
Large numbers of Iraqis have also been killed in Tal Afar, a
city near the Syrian border, which US and Iraqi forces overran
on 12 September ‘after a nearly two-week siege that forced
scores of residents to flee and left a trail of devastated buildings
and rubble’ (AP, 13 September). A few days earlier,
on 9 September ‘[US] forces said they had killed 57 enemy
fighters with great precision, and without a single American
casualty’, though a local hospital said it had received
scores of civilian dead and wounded, including women and children’
(NYT, 10 September). ‘For long periods, witnesses
said, the fighting prevented ambulances from collecting the
wounded and the dead.’
In what may be an indication of the way things will play out
elsewhere in future, the city was attacked ‘follow[ing]
a failed attempt by the Iraqi authorities to secure government
control through talks with tribal and community leaders.’
Losing
Control
Of course, the killing in Iraq today isn’t confined to
Sadr City, Fallujah and Tal Afar.
According to the New York Times, in Fallujah, Ramadi
and much of Anbar Province, ‘American troops [are] confined
mainly to heavily protected forts on the desert’s edge’
and ‘what little influence the Americans have is asserted
through wary forays in armoured vehicles, and by laser-guided
bombs that obliterate enemy safe houses identified by scouts’
(29 August). Meanwhile ‘for the first time, more Americans
were probably killed by Shia fighters last month than by Sunni
guerillas’ (Independent, 9 September) and British
troops from B Company 1st Battalion (‘The Cheshires’)
came under ‘continuous attack’ throughout August
(Observer, 5 September). ‘We fired more rounds, killed
more people and took more casualties [than during the invasion],’
the Cheshires’ commanding officer explained. British forces
claim to have killed 400 Iraqi ‘insurgents’ over
the past four months (Telegraph, 30 August).
Roughly 1,100 US soldiers and marines were wounded in August,
‘by far the highest combat injury toll for any month since
the war began and an indication of the intensity of the battles
flaring in urban areas’ (Washington Post, 5 Sept).
The number of Iraqis killed is unknown, though on 7 Sept. US
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ‘proudly claimed …
that US forces [had] killed between 1,500 and 2,500 insurgents’
(Independent, 9 Sept). An official in the Iraqi health
ministry estimated that roughly 400 civilians were killed and
2,500 wounded during the fighting in Najaf.
Whilst ‘US officials have stuck with an estimate from
last year that the number of hard-core insurgents remains between
4,000 and 6,000’, many field commanders, are ‘openly
skeptical of official U.S. estimates of the insurgency's size’
(LA Times, 31 Aug). U.S. Army Col. Dana Pittard of
the 1st Infantry Division in Baqubah ‘puts the hard-core
support at about one half of 1% of the Iraqi population of 24
million — or about 120,000’ – that is, 20
times the official estimate.
Recovering
Control: the plan to retake Fallujah
According to US commanders ‘US offensives in rebel-held
Iraqi cities in recent weeks are part of a major push to wrest
them from insurgents before the end of December to allow local
security forces to oversee elections’ (Reuters,
13 Sept). ‘The battle plan, drawn up last month, focuses
on the major trouble spots – Tal Afar, Samarra, Fallujah,
Ramadi and parts of Baghdad – but is nationwide in scale
and has economic as well as military aspects.’ “Our
strategy for the next several months, our political and military
strategy, will be to recover each of these places and put them
firmly back … under the control of the Iraqi interim government
so that elections can be held,” Colin Powell told Fox
News (AP, 12 Sept). According to the New York Times,
‘marine officers have said, American hopes of creating
stability [sic] in Iraq will necessitate a new attack on [Fallujah]’
– where the US massacred hundreds of civilians in April
– ‘this time one that will not be halted before
it can succeed’ (29 Aug). Indeed, Reuters notes that if
the ‘plan to pacify all towns is to be fulfilled, then
at some point in the next three months, military operations
will be needed in Falluja and Ramadi, since political cajoling
and economic temptation have so far failed to calm the cities’
(Reuters, 13 Sept).
“Four
Months”
According to the NYT ‘the preference is for Iraqi
forces to do the job’ and ‘force w[ill] be tried
by the Iraqi [sic] government only after a couple of months’
discussion with rebels’ (8 Sept). ‘A two-month hiatus
before major force is applied to rebel areas would also mean
a delay until after the American presidential election,’
though senior US officials insist, somewhat implausibly that,
‘there is no domestic political calculus in the decision
to wait.’
On 5 September Lt Gen Thomas, the land commander in Iraq, told
AP that a ‘U.S. assault on one or more of Iraq's
three main "no-go" areas – including Fallujah
– is likely in the next four months’: “I do
have about four months where I want to get local control”,’
he explained “And then I’ve got the rest of January
to help the Iraqis to put the mechanisms in place [for elections]”
(AP, 6 Sept).
We have been warned.
ENDNOTES
[1]
They are not the only ones: ‘[l]ast summer [ie. 2003]
… the Bush adminstration directed the marines to draft
a detailed plan … for the arrest and, if necessary, assassination
of Sadr’ (New Yorker, 28 June, see Voices briefing
So Long As You Win for more
background). According to the Washington Post, ‘US
officials have long argued that the solution to the Sadr problem
[sic] has to originate with Iraqis. Their calculation is that
the US position in Iraq would not be helped by having US troops
kill the rebel cleric’ (29 August). “At some point
the Iraqis themselves will take Sadr out – like the Colombians
taking out drug lords with [the] US in the background,”
a Pentagon official told the paper.
[2] During Britain’s occupation of Iraq in the 1920’s
the RAF used bombing to ‘police’ the country. Then,
the Air Staff noted that the “moral effect” of using
airplanes was “enhanced in the case of semi-civilised
people by the fact that it is a weapon against which they cannot
effectively retaliate” (Inventing Iraq by Toby
Dodge, p.147).
Voices
UK has been campaigning on UK policy towards Iraq, in solidarity
with the Iraqi people, since February 1998. For more information,
to receive further updates or to join our free mailing list,
contact: voices uk, 5 Caledonian Road, London N1 0845 458 2564
(local rate call); voices@voicesuk.org; www.voicesuk.org
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