[lbo-talk] Armed Resistance Demonstrators March In Baghdad, Fallujah, Khaldiya; U.S. Soldiers Refuses To Confront Them

[Michael Pugliese]

http://www.notinourname.net/gi-special/
Armed Resistance Demonstrators March In Baghdad, Fallujah, Khaldiya;
U.S. Soldiers Refuses To Confront Them
By Rémy Ourdan, Le Monde, 30 September 2003
Now the American army must face armed demonstrations supporting Saddam
Hussein. On Monday five hundred people holding up portraits of the
former dictator marched in the north of the country. A ten year old
child was killed by American soldiers.
Another similar demonstration was held several days ago in Baghdad’s
big neighborhood, Al-Adhamiya, a former Baathist ghetto. The public’s
hostility to Americans was flaunted along with appeals for Saddam
Hussein’s return.
The American patrol that passed that way was disarmed by it.  On April
9, 2003, the evening of the “liberation”, even if many Iraqis didn’t
watch the American army’s installation with light hearts, who would
have believed that such an event would take place six months later?
Five days ago in Baghdad’s Al-Adhamiya neighborhood, hundreds of men
insolently marched, weapons in hand, demanding Saddam Hussein’s
return!
The scene took place Thursday September 25 without notice to the Iraqi
or international press.
The demonstrators were several hundred and a few thousand curious
onlookers stood in the doorways. Some threw flowers. Children in the
street remember it as a sort of holiday.
An American military patrol came and just asked the armed men to fire
into the air.  Which they did.  Then the patrol left.
Al-Adhamiya has a long history. This Sunni working class neighborhood
was a ghetto during Saddam Hussein’s reign. Kurds and Shiites did not
venture there. A Sunni opponent could be excluded long after having
finished his prison term.
Imam Al-Adhami, a descendant of an historic family that bears the
neighborhood’s name, is well-placed to know.  After having tasted
Baathist jails at age 20 because of his Islamist convictions, he was
banished from Al-Adhamiya for a decade.  Families here have suffered
from the regime’s ferocity, as everywhere in Iraq, but the majority of
the population was composed of soldiers and bureaucrats.
Al-Adhamiya, in both the Iraqi capital’s imagination and reality, is
the high place of anti-Americanism.  The neighborhood’s residents, not
incidentally, kept pious vigil at the obsequies of the foreign
mujahadijn who died April 10 and buried them in the mosque’s garden,
renamed the “Martyr’s Cemetery”.
Later, of course, at Abou Hanifa mosque, the principal of 30 places of
worship in the neighborhood, the Baathist imam who welcomed the
fedayin gave up his position to Imam Al-Adhami.  Certainly the Friday
sermons are known for never crossing the red line that separates an
anti-American from a pro-Saddam speech.  But signs do not deceive.
Right in the middle of a crowd these people are not afraid to assert
that “the president should raise an army and come back to power as
soon as possible!”  Satisfied smiles appear whenever an attack against
Americans is mentioned.
Graffiti blossoms on the walls. "Long live the mujahid President
Saddam!"  "Allah is great and Saddam is brave!"  "By our blood, by our
soul, we shall sacrifice ourselves for you, oh Saddam!"  "The jihad is
our way!"  "Patience, Baghdad, patience, we shall force the occupier
to leave!"
For Mouyad Al-Adhami, "there are spies who want to disfigure the image
of Al-Adhamiya", those who pay the armed demonstrators, those who
write the slogans on the walls.  Then the American army attacks
houses.  Since this army has no respect for the people, anti-American
feeling grows.”
An agent of Iraq’s official "secret services ", a Shiite military man
now working for American intelligence, who knows Al-Adhamiya, where he
has sources holds a similar theory. “This neighborhood is the center
of Baghdad’s resistance. Here is where men, money, and weapons arrive
from Ramadi, Falluja, Tikrit and Mosul –the conservative Sunni
bastions to Baghdad’s west and north-“, he thinks. “Infiltrated
Moukhabarat-Saddam Hussein’s former secret police-agents designate
artificial targets, or, more intelligently, real, but minor targets.
The American army raids, and arrests, but is remote-controlled by its
enemies. Meanwhile, the real resistance live in tranquility.”
Al-Adhamiya’s pro-Saddam demonstration is not the first of its kind in
Iraq.  There had already been two the week before in Falluja and
Khaldiya, to the west of the capital, with parades of hooded men
carrying Kalashnikovs and rocket-launchers.  Monday, September 29, in
Hawija in the north, a rather typical demonstration demanding the
departure of American soldiers turned into a pro-Saddam riot, which is
hardly the norm. Five hundred protesters held up portraits of the
fallen leader and threw stones at the GIs.
The American soldiers, as is often the case in Iraq, responded to the
streams of stones by firing on the crowd.  Balance sheet: a
ten-year-old child, Hussein Dakhil Ahmad, dead.  So "The Battle for
Hearts and Minds", intended to win the Iraqi people’s trust,
continues.

-- 
Michael Pugliese