Smiles and shrugs speak volumes about nature of attacks on American troops By Charles Clover, Mark Huband and Roula Khalaf
The question of who is behind the near-daily attacks on US soldiers patrolling their region provokes a certain type of facial expression in Falluja - a picturesque town that is the new front line in America's war on terrorism. It is a mix between a wan, knowing smile, proud defiance, and a shrug.
"They are Mujahideen (holy warriors). We don't know them," says Sami Obeidi, a member of the 22-member city administrative council. But spend a little time with Mr Obeidi, or anyone else from Falluja, and they don't work very hard to conceal the truth: which is that they do know the Mujahideen who are "patriots", "nationalists", "good Muslims" and very likely their neighbours or friends.
"Al Anbar [the province where Falluja is located] has a bigger nationalist consciousness than the rest of Iraq. We are also more religious. We consider this resistance a religious duty, and a nationalist one as well," says Mr Obeidi.
Falluja - on the Euphrates river to the west of Baghdad - is often referred to as a stronghold of the formerly ruling Ba'ath party, but it is also known for its religious conservatism. Analysts suspect that "home-grown" radical Sunni Islamists, who were kept under check by the ousted regime of Saddam Hussein, now have a common interest with former Ba'athists in driving the US out of Iraq.
Religious clerics are said to issue sermons to the fighters at Friday prayers, telling them, for example, to avoid civilian casualties when they attack coalition troops.
Mr Obeidi, however, is no radical. He is an upstanding member of the community, whose salary as a member of the council is paid by the US-led coalition.
The strong language used by Falluja residents underlines the sympathies they no longer try to disguise in the presence of foreigners. They are written on the wall in graffiti no one bothers to erase: "Falluja is the heart of the resistance" and "Long live the leader Saddam Hussein".
US commanders may soon have to face the fact that they are facing a revolt by an entire region of Iraq, the Sunni heartland which accounts for 15-20 per cent of the population but formed the bedrock of support for Mr Hussein's regime.
Until now, US officials have said they are targets of a small group of terrorists who are holdovers from the previous regime or foreign fighters infiltrated from abroad.
Last week a senior US defence official told the Financial Times that the violence in Iraq had no military or strategic significance. "This is not a guerrilla war with public support. The base is very narrow . . . We don't see conditions existing for significant rebellion or resistance."
He insisted the number of incidents had been going down recently.
However, Hamza Hamadi, a member of the Falluja Protection Force (FPF), a US-backed militia which patrols the town, disagrees.
The guerrillas are not just former Ba'athists, as some US commanders have said, nor are they foreigners, on his account. "The whole city rejects the American occupation," he says. "The Mujahideen are inhabitants of the city, who have a strong belief in Islam, and reject the foreign presence."
Anti-US feelings are particularly high following a mistaken attack by US troops on FPF members earlier this month, in which eight people were killed. Asked if he sympathises with the US forces or with the guerrillas, Mr Hamadi is quick to say "with the guerrillas. We have no desire to co-operate with the Americans".
US officials say they have plenty of evidence to back their claims that they are indeed facing small groups of Ba'athists and foreign Islamists, rather than a popular revolt. A senior official in the Coalition Provisional Authority last month insisted that background checks on captured and killed fighters revealed that a majority of them were "former regime people", as he put it.
US officials say they are holding at least 220 foreigners in Iraq suspected of taking part in attacks on US forces.
Investigations into the devastating car bombs that rocked the United Nations' Baghdad headquarters, the city of Najaf, and the Jordanian embassy in August have not been concluded but officials said they are likely to have been the work of professional terrorists with large resources at their disposal and, possibly, foreign support.
But locals claim that Iraqis captured by anti-terrorist sweeps are indeed former Ba'ath party figures and former army men, but they are not the ones doing the fighting. "Every time there is an attack, the Americans go and round up some more Ba'athists. But they are not the ones doing the attacks. The Ba'athists, all they want is money and jobs, that's why they became Ba'athists in the first place," says Salam Saleh Fahd, a former army major from the city of Ramadi, who lost a leg in the Iran-Iraq war.
There also appears to be a pattern of revenge against aggressive tactics used by the coalition, in Falluja and elsewhere.
Capt Khalid Rashid of the FPF points out that the problems in Falluja started in early May, when US forces accidentally killed 15 demonstrators, after they claimed they were shot at from the crowd. "After that, they killed a little girl. Then it was two brothers, then it was this and then that. It started to add up. The people said it was enough killing."
Iyad Allawi, head of the Iraqi National Accord and a key member of the US-appointed Governing Council in Baghdad, says in many cases the attacks could have been carried out by ordinary people, but that they are working as mercenaries, rather than out of conviction.
The string-pullers in the background, he says, are indeed mainly Ba'ath party diehards or Islamist groups. "People are getting paid 250,000 Iraqi dinars ($150) to throw a grenade at US vehicles.
The terrorists know they can hire people who are hungry. "What has happened here in Iraq is a vacuum. You have hundreds of thousands of military and paramilitary units being dismantled, and you have lawlessness. You have created two things: a good climate for terrorist operations, and secondly, a professional Iraqi recruitable pool of people who were denied a lifeline in the new system."
While US commanders deny that the attacks are a "strategic threat" to their forces, a senior US official admits: "We have got to collectively admit that we don't really know who is attacking us."
In Falluja, US forces have largely withdrawn to the outskirts of the city, letting the police force and the FPF handle security within the city.
Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US-led forces in Iraq, said last week he would like to do things that way in more Iraqi cities as well. Ultimately, Iraqi politicians and US commanders alike want to see Iraqi police and security forces on the front lines of the fighting, rather than coalition troops. Additional reporting by Mark Huband and Roula Khalaf in London