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Robert Fisk on Iraq: This is a Resistance Movement, Whether We Like It or Not?

Wednesday, October 29th, 2003

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/29/1613248

Britain Independent?s Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk discusses the increasing resistance against the U.S. occupation in Iraq and counters the Bush administration?s claims that attacks on U.S. troops are coming from foreign fighters.

Robert Fisk of the London Independent writes on Tuesday about the series of bombings: ?In Baghdad, the message of the past two days was simple: it told Iraqis that the Americans cannot control Iraq; more important, perhaps, it told Americans that the Americans could not control Iraq. Even more important, it told Iraqis they shouldn't work for the Americans. It also acknowledged America's new rules of combat: kill the enemy leaders.? Fisk continues to say: ?Some of America's enemies may come from other Arab countries, but most of the military opposition to America's presence comes from Iraqi Sunnis; not from Saddam "remnants" or "diehards" or "deadenders" (the Paul Bremer titles for a growing Iraqi resistance), but from men who in many cases hated Saddam. They don't work "for" al-Qa'ida. But they have learnt their own unique version of history. Attack your enemies in the holy month of Ramadan. Learn from the war in Algeria. And the war in Afghanistan. Learn the lessons of America's "war on terror". Kill the leadership. You're with us or against us, collaborator or patriot. That was the message of yesterday's bloodbath in Baghdad.?

Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for the London Independent. Speaking from Beirut.

TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk joins us on the phone right now. Middle East correspondent for the London independent. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Robert.

ROBERT FISK: Hello, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Well, the killings in Iraq continue. We hear about one side. We hear about the continual killings of U.S. service men and women. We hear about the bombings of the Red Cross, the bombings of the police stations in Baghdad and Fallujah. You've spent a lot of time in Iraq. Can you explain?

ROBERT FISK: Well, I think, you know, part of the explanation needs to include a kind of a cultural comment. We were just listening to your reading of the news where we were hearing you quoting American statesmen as saying that-- talking about the number of foreign fighters in Iraq. Well, I can tell you there are at least 200,000 foreign fighters in Iraq and 146,000 of them are wearing American uniform. You know, Americans in Iraq did not grow up in Tikrit eating dates for breakfast. The largest number of foreign fighters in Iraq, a thousand times over anything Al Qaeda can do, are western soldiers. And we need to realize that we're maintaining an occupation there. Are there foreign Arab fighters, which is really what your question is about. I think there are probably a few, though we don't know how many and we don't know how many of them actually entered Iraq. Not as friends of Al Qaeda, but in heeding the call of Saddam Hussein to defend Iraq before the American invasion. But, you know, at the end of the day, this is what we call a canard. It's a game. It's a lie. The resistance to the American presence, and these ferocious, brutal, cruel attacks on Iraqis themselves are being carried out largely by Iraqis. The Americans claimed, after the bombings, oh, they managed to get one of the suicide bombers who didn't kill himself and he had a Syrian passport. I noticed we've not been given his passport number or his nationality, date of birth or, indeed, his name. Well, he may be real. He may be real. But the vast majority of the, quote, resistance, unquote, are Iraqis and my own investigations, particularly around the city of Fallujah, which is where so many Americans have been killed, American servicemen, is that these people were originally Iraqis with a growing interest in the politics of Islam, who, under Saddam Hussein, were permitted, because Saddam knew when to let the top off the kettle and let it not boil over. Were permitted to form an organization called the committee, or the organization, of the faithful. They weren't pro-Saddam; in many cases they, like the people of Fallujah, were arrested and very cruelly treated by Saddam's henchmen. But they were allowed to form individual groups who could discuss religion, providing they didn't talk about politics. When the regime fell, when the Americans entered Baghdad on the ninth of April this year, these groups became the only focused resistance against American rule. And they did decide, individually and then in coordination, that they would become the Iraqi resistance. I wrote about this actually on April 9. But, these people did begin to believe that they could be the new nationalists, aided, of course, with the weapons of Saddam, the former henchmen of Saddam, and, to some considerable extent, by a population which felt that the American occupiers were behaving brutally. One man, a tribal leader around Fallujah, whose village I went to and, indeed, I had lunch with him a few weeks ago said to me, you know, originally when the Americans came here, we shouted our greetings to them. But when we staged a protest against their presence, they shot 14 of us dead. There were indeed 14 Iraqis shot dead in Fallujah. After that, he said, it became a question of tribal honor. We had to take our revenge against the Americans, and as they shot back, it became a question of resistance. So, what you found is that the way in which the Americans behave, the way in which the Iraqis behaved, plus this cellular system of groups of the faithful, which were permitted to exist under Saddam, though not with much enthusiasm from the previous regime, turned a war of resistance-- or, rather, turned a war of revenge into a war of resistance. And the people who are killing Americans, at the moment, and killing fellow Iraqis, are largely Iraqis. Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Bush can go on talking till cows come home about foreign fighters. These are not, for the most part, people who were born outside Iraq, which most Americans were. They are people who are called Iraqis. This is a resistance movement, whether we like it or not.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, you described your experience simply at Baghdad Airport, who was there, the rocket attacks that were coming in as you were trying to leave, what the soldiers there were saying, what the perimeter is there.

ROBERT FISK: Yeah. Well, it was -- As I said in the piece which you quote, a crazy mixture of Walt Disney and Vietnam-- you know? They didn't even have any-- the only international flyer or airline operating out of Baghdad Airport, we can't call it Saddam Airport anymore, and who would want to, is Royal Jordanian, which is a comparatively small Middle Eastern airline company. Heaven knows who insures them for this trip. But they -- When I was flying out, they had a flight on the ground. There were supposed to be two planes of Royal Jordanian, one of which was a small executive jet, the other which was to be an Airbus and they kept changing the times, there were no seat numbers, etc. But as I was waiting hour after hour for the planes to take off, mortars started landing at the airport. Five in all. And I was actually chatting to a group of special forces, Americans, with their black webbing with lots and lots of radios and telephones and weapons. And they were actually-- as special forces tend to-being quite appreciative of their enemy. They were saying: Not bad. They're getting better. They're getting better. In other words, they were aiming their mortars to land closer to the actual runway of the airport. Each mortar landing would be succeeded by a large kind of smoke ring that would go up in the sky about 20, 30 feet wide. And then an Apache helicopter took off to try and rocket the attackers.One of the special forces men said to me that they previously had a five-mile-wide radius around the airport, a security screen, in which they had-- the Americans had successfully occupied, totally, a five-mile radius. But because of attacks, this had been reduced to a two-mile radius. The Americans in Baghdad, and all along the main highways to the south and north are cutting back the vegetation. Palm trees, olive trees, orange trees, the farmers and sometimes on government land. This is what the Israelis did to prevent attacks in southern Lebanon in the early 1980's, here where I'm speaking to you from now, and the purpose, of course, is to make sure that attackers have no cover of vegetation. But, of course, this in itself has caused much anger among Iraqis who live off the olive trees and orange trees and so on. In any event, the five-mile radius around the airport has now been reduced to two miles and with the maximum range of a ground-to-air handheld missile now being estimated at 8,000 feet. That, in the words of one of the special forces men, put any flier out of the airport on the edge-- in other words, any plane going out is now have at risk of being hit by a ground-to-air shoulder-fired missile because of too-little radius of security around the airport to prevent anyone firing at an aircraft and hitting it. We did eventually take off, and instead of making a gradual ascent to cruising altitude, the Airbus did this howling, air-biting G-forces turn up and up, a spiral like going up the side of a corkscrew, which you might open a wine bottle with, where the airport kept appearing through the right porthole, and the left porthole, and then upside down and so on. And as I said at the end, you know, when we leveled off at 35,000 feet and the stewardess came around and said, would you like a juice or a red wine, I said, Rita-- guess which one I chose.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert Fisk. He is the correspondent for The Independent newspaper, has spend much time during the occupation and the invasion in Iraq. He is speaking to us from Beirut and we want to ask, Robert, if you can stay with us.

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Eyewitness in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"

Robert Fisk

The Independent (United Kingdom)

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=457272

Posted 10/26/2003 10:00:00 AM

October 26, 2003, Headline: "The worst problem facing US forces in Iraq may

not be armed resistance but a crisis of morale. Robert Fisk reports on a

near-epidemic of indiscipline, suicides and loose talk." Iraq plumet into

anarchy as US helicopter gets shot down and the hotel housing US Deputy

Secretary of Defense gets hit with rocket attack ...

Eye witness: 'They're getting better,' Chuck said approvingly. 'That one hit

the runway'

Running the gauntlet of small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades after

check-in at Baghdad airport

Baghdad, Iraq (The Independent) - I was in the police station in the town of

Fallujah when I realised the extent of the schizophrenia. Captain

Christopher Cirino of the 82nd Airborne was trying to explain to me the

nature of the attacks so regularly carried out against American forces in

the Sunni Muslim Iraqi town. His men were billeted in a former presidential

rest home down the road - "Dreamland", the Americans call it - but this was

not the extent of his soldiers' disorientation. "The men we are being

attacked by," he said, "are Syrian-trained terrorists and local freedom

fighters." Come again? "Freedom fighters." But that's what Captain Cirino

called them - and rightly so.

Here's the reason. All American soldiers are supposed to believe - indeed

have to believe, along with their President and his Defence Secretary,

Donald Rumsfeld - that Osama bin Laden's "al-Qa'ida" guerrillas, pouring

over Iraq's borders from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia (note how those close

allies and neighbours of Iraq, Kuwait and Turkey are always left out of the

equation), are assaulting United States forces as part of the "war on

terror". Special forces soldiers are now being told by their officers that

the "war on terror" has been transferred from America to Iraq, as if in some

miraculous way, 11 September 2001 is now Iraq 2003. Note too how the

Americans always leave the Iraqis out of the culpability bracket - unless

they can be described as "Baath party remnants", "diehards" or "deadenders"

by the US proconsul, Paul Bremer.

Captain Cirino's problem, of course, is that he knows part of the truth.

Ordinary Iraqis - many of them long-term enemies of Saddam Hussein - are

attacking the American occupation army 35 times a day in the Baghdad area

alone. And Captain Cirino works in Fallujah's local police station, where

America's newly hired Iraqi policemen are the brothers and uncles and - no

doubt - fathers of some of those now waging guerrilla war against American

soldiers in Fallujah. Some of them, I suspect, are indeed themselves the

"terrorists". So if he calls the bad guys "terrorists", the local cops - his

first line of defence - would be very angry indeed.

No wonder morale is low. No wonder the American soldiers I meet on the

streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities don't mince their words about

their own government. US troops have been given orders not to bad-mouth

their President or Secretary of Defence in front of Iraqis or reporters (who

have about the same status in the eyes of the occupation authorities). But

when I suggested to a group of US military police near Abu Ghurayb they

would be voting Republican at the next election, they fell about laughing.

"We shouldn't be here and we should never have been sent here," one of them

told me with astonishing candour. "And maybe you can tell me: why were we

sent here?"

Little wonder, then, that Stars and Stripes, the American military's own

newspaper, reported this month that one third of the soldiers in Iraq

suffered from low morale. And is it any wonder, that being the case, that US

forces in Iraq are shooting down the innocent, kicking and brutalising

prisoners, trashing homes and - eyewitness testimony is coming from hundreds

of Iraqis - stealing money from houses they are raiding? No, this is not

Vietnam - where the Americans sometimes lost 3,000 men in a month - nor is

the US army in Iraq turning into a rabble. Not yet. And they remain light

years away from the butchery of Saddam's henchmen. But human-rights

monitors, civilian occupation officials and journalists - not to mention

Iraqis themselves - are increasingly appalled at the behaviour of the

American military occupiers.

Iraqis who fail to see US military checkpoints, who overtake convoys under

attack - or who merely pass the scene of an American raid - are being gunned

down with abandon. US official "inquiries" into these killings routinely

result in either silence or claims that the soldiers "obeyed their rules of

engagement" - rules that the Americans will not disclose to the public.

The rot comes from the top. Even during the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq,

US forces declined to take responsibility for the innocents they killed. "We

do not do body counts," General Tommy Franks announced. So there was no

apology for the 16 civilians killed at Mansur when the "Allies" - note how

we Brits get caught up in this misleading title - bombed a residential

suburb in the vain hope of killing Saddam. When US special forces raided a

house in the very same area four months later - hunting for the very same

Iraqi leader - they killed six civilians, including a 14-year-old boy and a

middle-aged woman, and only announced, four days later, that they would hold

an "inquiry". Not an investigation, you understand, nothing that would

suggest there was anything wrong in gunning down six Iraqi civilians; and in

due course the "inquiry" was forgotten - as it was no doubt meant to be -

and nothing has been heard of it again.

Again, during the invasion, the Americans dropped hundreds of cluster bombs

on villages outside the town of Hillah. They left behind a butcher's shop of

chopped-up corpses. Film of babies cut in half during the raid was not even

transmitted by the Reuters crew in Baghdad. The Pentagon then said there

were "no indications" cluster bombs had been dropped at Hillah - even though

Sky TV found some unexploded and brought them back to Baghdad.

I first came across this absence of remorse - or rather absence of

responsibility - in a slum suburb of Baghdad called Hayy al-Gailani. Two men

had run a new American checkpoint - a roll of barbed wire tossed across a

road before dawn one morning in July - and US troops had opened fire at the

car. Indeed, they fired so many bullets that the vehicle burst into flames.

And while the dead or dying men were burned inside, the Americans who had

set up the checkpoint simply boarded their armoured vehicles and left the

scene. They never even bothered to visit the hospital mortuary to find out

the identities of the men they killed - an obvious step if they believed

they had killed "terrorists" - and inform their relatives. Scenes like this

are being repeated across Iraq daily.

Which is why Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and other humanitarian

organisations are protesting ever more vigorously about the failure of the

US army even to count the numbers of Iraqi dead, let alone account for their

own role in killing civilians. "It is a tragedy that US soldiers have killed

so many civilians in Baghdad," Human Rights Watch's Joe Stork said. "But it

is really incredible that the US military does not even count these deaths."

Human Rights Watch has counted 94 Iraqi civilians killed by Americans in the

capital. The organisation also criticised American forces for humiliating

prisoners, not least by their habit of placing their feet on the heads of

prisoners. Some American soldiers are now being trained in Jordan - by

Jordanians - in the "respect" that should be accorded to Iraqi civilians and

about the culture of Islam. About time.

But on the ground in Iraq, Americans have a licence to kill. Not a single

soldier has been disciplined for shooting civilians - even when the fatality

involves an Iraqi working for the occupation authorities. No action has been

taken, for instance, over the soldier who fired a single shot through the

window of an Italian diplomat's car, killing his translator, in northern

Iraq. Nor against the soldiers of the 82nd Airborne who gunned down 14 Sunni

Muslim protesters in Fallujah in April. (Captain Cirino was not involved.)

Nor against the troops who shot dead 11 more protesters in Mosul. Sometimes,

the evidence of low morale mounts over a long period. In one Iraqi city, for

example, the "Coalition Provisional Authority" - which is what the

occupation authorities call themselves - have instructed local money

changers not to give dollars for Iraqi dinars to occupation soldiers: too

many Iraqi dinars had been stolen by troops during house raids. Repeatedly,

in Baghdad, Hillah, Tikrit, Mosul and Fallujah Iraqis have told me that they

were robbed by American troops during raids and at checkpoints. Unless there

is a monumental conspiracy on a nationwide scale by Iraqis, some of these

reports must bear the stamp of truth.

Then there was the case of the Bengal tiger. A group of US troops entered

the Baghdad zoo one evening for a party of sandwiches and beer. During the

party, one of the soldiers decided to pet the tiger who - being a Bengal

tiger - sank his teeth into the soldier. The Americans then shot the tiger

dead. The Americans promised an "inquiry" - of which nothing has been heard

since. Ironically, the one incident where US forces faced disciplinary

action followed an incident in which a US helicopter crew took a black

religious flag from a communications tower in Sadr City in Baghdad. The

violence that followed cost the life of an Iraqi civilian.

Suicides among US troops in Iraq have risen in recent months - up to three

times the usual rate among American servicemen. At least 23 soldiers are

believed to have taken their lives since the Anglo-American invasion and

others have been wounded in attempting suicide. As usual, the US army only

revealed this statistic following constant questioning. The daily attacks on

Americans outside Baghdad - up to 50 in a night - go, like the civilian

Iraqi dead, unrecorded. Travelling back from Fallujah to Baghdad after dark

last month, I saw mortar explosions and tracer fire around 13 American bases

- not a word of which was later revealed by the occupation authorities. At

Baghdad airport last month, five mortar shells fell near the runway as a

Jordanian airliner was boarding passengers for Amman. I saw this attack with

my own eyes. That same afternoon, General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US

officer in Iraq, claimed he knew nothing about the attack, which - unless

his junior officers are slovenly - he must have been well aware of.

But can we expect anything else of an army that can wilfully mislead

soldiers into writing "letters" to their home town papers in the US about

improvements in Iraqi daily life.

"The quality of life and security for the citizens has been largely

restored, and we are a large part of why it has happened," Sergeant

Christopher Shelton of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment bragged in a

letter from Kirkuk to the Snohomish County Tribune. "The majority of the

city has welcomed our presence with open arms." Only it hasn't. And Sergeant

Shelton didn't write the letter. Nor did Sergeant Shawn Grueser of West

Virginia. Nor did Private Nick Deaconson. Nor eight other soldiers who

supposedly wrote identical letters to their local papers. The "letters" were

distributed among soldiers, who were asked to sign if they agreed with its

contents.

But is this, perhaps, not part of the fantasy world inspired by the

right-wing ideologues in Washington who sought this war - even though most

of them have never served their country in uniform. They dreamed up the

"weapons of mass destruction" and the adulation of American troops who would

"liberate" the Iraqi people. Unable to provide fact to fiction, they now

merely acknowledge that the soldiers they have sent into the biggest rat's

nest in the Middle East have "a lot of work to do", that they are - this was

not revealed before or during the invasion - "fighting the front line in the

war on terror".

What influence, one might ask, have the Christian fundamentalists had on the

American army in Iraq? For even if we ignore the Rev Franklin Graham, who

has described Islam as "a very evil and wicked religion" before he went to

lecture Pentagon officials - what is one to make of the officer responsible

for tracking down Osama bin Laden, Lieutenant-General William "Jerry"

Boykin, who told an audience in Oregon that Islamists hate the US "because

we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are

Judeo-Christian and the enemy is a guy called Satan". Recently promoted to

deputy under-secretary of defence for intelligence, Boykin went on to say of

the war against Mohammed Farrah Aidid in Somalia - in which he participated

- that "I knew my God was bigger than his - I knew that my God was a real

God and his was an idol".

Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld said of these extraordinary remarks

that "it doesn't look like any rules were broken". We are now told that an

"inquiry" into Boykin's comments is underway - an "inquiry" about as

thorough, no doubt, as those held into the killing of civilians in Baghdad.

Weaned on this kind of nonsense, however, is it any surprise that American

troops in Iraq understand neither their war nor the people whose country

they are occupying? Terrorists or freedom fighters? What's the difference?

October 28, 2003

Robert Fisk: Iraq's guerrillas adopt new strategy: copy the Americans

By Robert Fisk

28 October 2003

The Independent

Understanding the brain. That's what you have to do in a guerrilla war. Find out how it works, what it's trying to do. An attack on US headquarters in Baghdad and six suicide bombings, all at the start of Ramadan. Thirty- four dead and 200 wounded. Where have I heard those statistics before? And how could they be so well co-ordinated - well-timed, down to the last second? And why the Red Cross? I knew that building, and admired the way in which the International Red Cross refused to associate themselves with the American occupation - even at the cost of their lives, as the guards outside their Baghdad headquarters carried no guns.

So here's the answer to question one. Algeria. After the Algerian government banned elections in 1991 that would have brought the Islamic Salvation Front to power, a Muslim revolt turned into a blood-curdling battle between the so-called Islamic Armed Group - many of its adherents having cut their battle teeth in Afghanistan - and a brutal government army and police force. Within three years, the "Islamists" - aided, it seems, by army intelligence officers - were perpetrating massacres against the villagers of what was called the Blida triangle, a three-cornered territory around the very Islamist city of Blida outside Algiers. And the very worst atrocities - the beheading of children, the raping and throat-cutting of women, the slaughter of policemen - were committed at the beginning of Ramadan. At Ramadan, Muslim emotions are heightened; in these most blessed of days, a Muslim feels that he or she must do something important so that God will listen to him or her. There is nothing in the Koran about violence in Ramadan or, for that matter, suicide bombers, any more than there is anything in the New Testament to urge Christians to carry out genocide or the ethnic cleansing in which they have become experts in the past 200 years, but Sunni Wahabi believers have often combined holy war with the "message", the dawa during Ramadan.

So what was the message? In Baghdad, the message of the past two days was simple: it told Iraqis that the Americans cannot control Iraq; more important, perhaps, it told Americans that the Americans could not control Iraq. Even more important, it told Iraqis they shouldn't work for the Americans. It also acknowledged America's new rules of combat: kill the enemy leaders. The United States killed Saddam's two sons. It has boasted of killing al-Qa'ida members in Afghanistan and Yemen, just as Israel kills Palestinians in Hamas and Islamic Jihad. So was it by chance that the Black Hawk helicopter shot down in Iraq was hit over Tikrit, just after Paul Wolfowitz had passed through town?

And the assault on al-Rashid Hotel almost killed Wolfowitz. He was "a room away" from one of the missile explosions. The architect of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was almost assassinated by America's enemies.

And then there's the Red Cross, the very last neutral humanitarian organisation, after the double suicide attack on the UN, which might have provided some communication between the US and its antagonists. Now it, too, has been smashed. Some of America's enemies may come from other Arab countries, but most of the military opposition to America's presence comes from Iraqi Sunnis; not from Saddam "remnants" or "diehards" or "deadenders" (the Paul Bremer titles for a growing Iraqi resistance), but from men who in many cases hated Saddam.

They don't work "for" al-Qa'ida. But they have learnt their own unique version of history. Attack your enemies in the holy month of Ramadan. Learn from the war in Algeria. And the war in Afghanistan. Learn the lessons of America's "war on terror". Kill the leadership. You're with us or against us, collaborator or patriot. That was the message of yesterday's bloodbath in Baghdad.

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Posted by Keyvan at October 28, 2003 03:14 AM