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U.S. Assault on Falluja Spurs Iraqi Resistance
by Gerry Foley
Almost immediately after the U.S. elections, the
American military in Iraq launched its long promised
assault on Falluja. Even the timing belied
Washington’s claims that its forces were only backing
up the soldiers of the Iraqi interim government.
Obviously, Bush could not risk a bloodbath in Iraq and
many U.S. casualties on the eve of an election
expected to be close.
In any case, it seems that none of the serious press
is giving any credibility to the claim that Iraqi
troops are the battering ram of this operation. It is
essentially a U.S. operation and it was launched with
the characteristic macho noises of the U.S. military
about “kicking butt” and so forth, which set the stage
for a ruthless savaging of the city.
The first attack was against the only hospital in the
city. Even the reports in the big U.S. press made it
obvious that the objective was to prevent the doctors
there from reporting on the civilian casualties, which
had so embarrassed the U.S. rulers in the first
assault on Falluja in April and in the subsequent
bombing of the city.
A day later the only clinic remaining in the city was
blown away, depriving the population of any medical
help in the face of the U.S. firestorm. One of the few
doctors remaining free complained that the last
medical supplies were running out. He said that a
13-year-old child had just died in his arms.
The BBC website published a report from an Arab
journalist in the city that the mosques were being
bombed and that for the first day he had not heard any
call to prayer. Electricity and water were cut off.
Food was becoming scarce.
The U.S. forces were encountering fierce resistance
and suffering casualties, according to local
witnesses, although the military authorities denied
it. It will probably take some time for the truth
about the U.S. losses to come out.
The political costs of the operation for the U.S. and
its local puppets were also beginning to appear. A
report in the Nov. 9 Los Angeles Times noted that a
500-man Iraqi unit had been reduced to 170 men by
desertions. A Sunni party, the Islamic Party, withdrew
from the interim government.
Virtually all of the Sunni religious authorities
called on Iraqi soldiers not to participate in the
operation, as did the Shiite militant leader Moqtada
Al Sadr. The interim government declared martial law
throughout the country, except for Kurdistan.
The U.S. military had carefully prepared the assault,
leaving as little as possible to chance. The Paris
daily Le Monde reported Nov. 2 that 65 percent of the
city’s population had already fled out of fear of the
American attack.
The objective of the U.S. bombing of the city,
continuing almost every day for weeks, was almost
certainly designed to drive out the civilian
population in order to open the way for destroying the
resistance by heavy aerial bombardment. That was a way
of minimizing U.S. casualties in ground fighting.
Civilians on the spot reported that the bombing was
apparently random. Therefore, its main effect was to
terrorize the local people.
There is little doubt that the U.S. military has the
power to flatten Falluja if it is determined to do
that. According to an estimate published in the
British medical journal The Lancet, U.S. military
operations since the start of the war against Iraq
already resulted in at least 100,000 Iraqi deaths.
However, the political cost of destroying this
middle-sized provincial city could be prohibitive.
The U.S.-sponsored interim government was already
divided over the question, with President Ghazi
al-Yawar opposing an assault on Falluja and the other
Sunni towns dominated by the resistance.
But it appeared that the premier, Iyad Allawi, and his
U.S. backers did not really want a peaceful solution
of the Falluja negotiations since they imposed
impossible conditions on the local authorities. Allawi
had demanded that they hand over the terrorist leader
Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. However, the Falluja leaders
claimed that he was not in the city and they did not
know where he was. They pointed out that even the
occupation forces, with their enormous resources, were
unable to find him.
The governing body of the resistance in Falluja, the
Shura Mujahadeen, voted Oct. 6 to accept the
government’s main conditions for surrender of the city
to occupation by the armed forces of the interim
government.
“By a vote of 10 to 2,” the Nov. 7 Washington Post
reported, “the council agreed to eject foreign
fighters, turn over all heavy weapons, dismantle
checkpoints and allow the Iraqi National Guard to
enter the city.” But the interim government,
undoubtedly pushed by the U.S. commanders, upped the
ante and scuttled the chances for an accord.
The U.S. strategy for subduing the Sunni centers of
resistance is to present the local leaders with the
choice of surrender or the destruction of their towns.
This is the so-called Najaf strategy, by which the
military commanders hope to repeat what they did in
the Shiite holy city of Najaf against the poorly armed
and organized Mahdi Army of Moqtada Al Sadr—most of
whom had flooded into the city from the huge Baghdad
slum of Sadr City.
However, both the military and political conditions in
the Sunni belt are quite different. The rebel units
there are well armed and skilled and there is not the
same sort of conflict between them and the local
merchants as there was in Najaf.
Resistance throughout region
The U.S. encirclement of Falluja has already been
compromised by an upsurge of resistance in Ramadi,
another major Sunni town between Baghdad and Falluja.
The New York Times reported Oct. 28: “The American
military and the interim Iraqi government are quickly
losing control of this provincial capital, which is
larger and strategically more important than its
sister city of Falluja, say local officials, clerics,
tribal sheiks and officers with the United States
Marines.
“‘The provincial government is on the verge of
collapse,’ said Second Lt. Ryan Schranel, whose
platoon does 24-hour guard duty at the besieged
government center opposite the main bazaar. ‘Just
about everybody has resigned or is on the verge of
resigning.’”
The U.S. commanders suspect that the armed forces of
the interim government are collaborating with the
resistance against them. And the local resistance is
being reinforced by fighters dispersing from Falluja
to make it more difficult for the U.S. military to
target them.
According to The Times, “Marines here say they have
found it impossible to seal off either the highway or
the desert smuggling routes between the two cities.
Indeed, Marine officials say there is a high level of
coordination between insurgent groups in the two
cities.”
There are more and more signs that the resistance
groups are trying to form more representative and
united leaderships. The U.S. assault on the city of
Samarra, touted as a step toward Falluja, seemed to be
motivated in part at least because the resistance in
that city agreed to place itself under the authority
of the Shura Mujahadeen in Falluja.
An Agence France-Presse report in early October
reported on a videotape announcing the formation of a
united leadership of the Islamic resistance. The
dispatch quoted the tape as saying: “Many groups have
been formed to fight the infidels and liberate the
country, and the number of individuals flocking to
join the cause has been staggering.”
“‘This created an urgent need for the groups to
organize themselves better and to coordinate their
effort,’ it added, against images of masked men
preparing homemade bombs or squatting near rocket
launchers in an open field. ‘Our hard work has bore
fruit with God’s grace and we have united under the
banner of the Islamic Movement for the Mujahideen of
Iraq.’”
In the last week of October and the first days of
November, resistance groups demonstrated their
capacity to strike at points across the country,
including in Baghdad itself. On Nov. 1, insurgents
made their biggest strike yet against a strategic oil
line, this time in the north. Since the onset of the
Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a few weeks ago, the
number of attacks on U.S. forces has reportedly
increased by 30 percent.
Already in April, the Marines assault on Falluja
threatened to touch off a wide-ranging insurrection.
That is apparently why it was called off. Although the
“peace keeping force” accepted by the U.S. military
quickly fell into the hands of the resistance, the
deal at least temporarily divided the insurgents and
enabled the occupation forces to focus their efforts
on a few hot spots. At the time, spokespersons of the
resistance in Falluja denounced the agreement for that
specific reason.
In the Oct. 6 vote in the Falluja Shura Mujahadeen,
two out of the 12 members declared that their groups
would continue to resist the Americans and their local
stooges regardless of what others might do. There
appears to be a similar division in the Mahdi army,
with a wing resisting the truce accepted by Al Sadr
and the deal for surrendering weapons. Thus, there is
an intransigent core of the resistance that could
become dominant if the U.S. attack on Falluja creates
more outrage than fear.
Calls for election boycott
A military victory in Falluja and other Sunni towns,
especially if it is accompanied by large-scale
suffering for the civilian population, can easily be
counterproductive for the political objectives of the
occupation and the interim government. The stated
objective of these operations is to bring the entire
country under the effective control of the interim
government so that it can hold authoritative elections
and establish a government with some apparent popular
support.
The looming attack on Falluja has provoked Sunni
religious leaders to threaten to call a boycott of the
elections scheduled for January. The Society of Muslim
Scholars, one of the main legal Islamist
organizations, has already said that it will not
participate in the elections.
Not only have Islamist Sunni leaders raised the call
for a boycott but even Sunni leaders who collaborate
with the occupation are saying, according to The New
York Times of Oct. 11 that “they have failed to
generate any enthusiasm for nationwide elections.”
The U.S. and its local stooges can occupy Falluja but
they cannot force the people there to vote. The Oct.
11 Times report noted: “At a recent meeting in
Baghdad, a tribal leader from Falluja, a town still
under insurgent control, gave a grim assessment of the
coming elections. ‘You will not have one office to run
the elections in Falluja,’ said Ismail Abdid Fayad, a
tribal leader taking part in peace negotiations with
the government. ‘People will not vote. We will not
participate in the elections. We will not support
imperialism.’”
According to The Times report, the U.S. commanders
themselves recognize that their military campaign is
proving politically counterproductive: “While American
military commanders say they intend to open up many
predominantly Sunni areas now under the control of
insurgents, some Sunni tribal and religious leaders
say that so far the campaign appears to be having the
opposite effect, alienating the people it is supposed
to liberate.”
The dispatch gave dramatic emphasis to this point by
quoting a man in Samarra who lost his family in the
U.S. assault on the city.
“‘What elections are you talking about?’ said Raad
Rahim Ahmed, a 50-year-old resident of Samarra, who
said American soldiers killed his wife and two
children when they cleared the city of insurgents last
week. ‘I’ve lost my entire family,’ he said. ‘Why
should I trust this government? Why should I vote at
all?’”
Thus, in the buildup to a threatened U.S. holocaust in
Falluja, the pillars of the political project of the
American rulers seem to be collapsing. It is becoming
more and more obvious that they cannot prop up any
credible Iraqi government to do their bidding. And the
Iraqi security forces that they have created and
trained to fight the resistance are showing themselves
to be shot through with indifference and infiltration
by insurgents.
The article above first appeared in the November 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.
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