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 CONINUES: 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) [2]. ‘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).
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 in the Wilderness UK has been campaigning on UK policy towards Iraq, in solidarity with the Iraqi people, since February 1998. For more information see www.voicesuk.org.
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