The U.S. occupation of Iraq has become increasingly chaotic. Last November, U.S. forces insisted that Fallujah, a Sunni town in central Iraq, was the hub of Iraq‘s guerrilla organisations, and launched an all-out attack. The Bush administration had been insisting that if U.S. troops wiped out the guerrillas there, resistance in other regions would easily be brought under control, and this would allow the general elections, planned for January 30th, to proceed smoothly. Japanese foreign affairs specialists also predicted that ‘if the U.S. forces bring Fallujah under control, Iraq will become stable.’
The two-week operation in Fallujah that began on November 8th, however, ended as a major failure. As the plan was reported widely prior to the operation, the majority of guerrillas fled Fallujah. When the U.S. troops controlled the town, it was empty of guerrillas. The guerrillas later returned, and in the 70% of the region that was supposedly under U.S. control, began attacking. U.S. troops were unable to withdraw, and for an extended period they continued fighting in a location where the battle had supposedly ended.
Fallujah, located 60 km West of Baghdad, is a center of Sunni Muslim tradition. People there have strongly resisted outside conquerors. In 1920, when Britain crushed the Ottoman Empire and occupied Iraq for the first time, a British Lieutenant Colonel was killed in Fallujah. A battle involving British forces and armed citizens of Fallujah resulted in the deaths of 10,000 Fallujah citizens and 1,000 British soldiers. Similarly, but on a smaller scale, in early April 2003, just after the U.S. occupation had begun, a clash ended with U.S. troops killing 15 Fallujah citizens.
Guerrillas in Fallujah are of course greatly inferior in military equipment. Nevertheless, the U.S. operation failed to wipe them out because of the naivety of their analysis and plan. For example, the U.S. incorrectly defined the enemy. Although U.S. authorities had announced that the core of the guerrillas in Fallujah were ‘foreign terrorists who belong to Al-Qaida, led by a Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,’ among some 1,000 guerrillas that U.S. troops captured, there were only 15 foreigners. The rest were Iraqis.
Not until the mopping up operation was widely reported as a failure did U.S. authorities acknowledge that key members of the security force of the former Hussein’s government (rather than Al-Qaida) were the heart of the Fallujah guerrillas.
The Illusion of Zarqawi
According to the U.S. authorities, Zarqawi is ‘the central figure in the Iraqi guerrillas, ‘an executive member of al-Qaida and more important than Osama Bin Laden.’ U.S. authorities also insist that he kidnapped and beheaded a number of foreigners including Japanese. The Bush administration seems intent on using his name to prove that Iraqi guerrillas are part of Al-Qaida and that the American occupation of Iraq is a part of the ‘war against terror.’
Zarqawi is an Islamist militant, who spent 7 years in prison after his involvement in a conspiracy to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy in 1992. After imprisonment, in 1999, he was again involved in a terrorist attempt to blow up a hotel in Jordan, and then fled Jordan to Afghanistan. In 2001, he escaped from the
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate