[News] A Nation Whose Govt Rules Only Its Capital

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Tuesday, 20, July, 2004 (03, Jumada al-Thani, 1425)

<http://www.arabnews.com/?artid=48646>A Nation Whose Govt Rules Only Its 
Capital
Robert Fisk, The Independent ­

NAJAF, 20 July 2004 ­ It was Afghanistan Mk2. For mile after mile south of 
Baghdad yesterday, the story was the same: Empty police posts, abandoned 
Iraqi Army and police checkpoints and a litter of burned-out American fuel 
tankers and rocket-smashed police vehicles down the main highway to Hilla 
and Najaf.

Iraqi government officials and Western diplomats tell journalists to avoid 
driving out of Baghdad; now I understand why. It is dangerous. But my own 
fearful journey far down Highway 8 ­ scene of the murder of at least 15 
Westerners ­ proved that the American-appointed Iraqi government controls 
little of the land south of the capital. Only in the Sunni Muslim town of 
Mahmoudiya ­ scene of a car bomb that exploded outside an Iraqi military 
recruiting center last week ­ did I see Iraqi policemen.

They were in a convoy of 11 battered white pick-ups, pointing Kalashnikovs 
at the crowds around them, driving onto the wrong side of the road when 
they became tangled in a traffic jam, screaming at motorists to clear their 
path at rifle point. This was not a frightened American column ­ this was 
Iraq’s own new blue-uniformed police force, rifles also directed at the 
windows of homes and shops and at the crowd of Iraqis, which surged around 
them.

In Iskanderia, I saw two gunmen near the road. I don’t know why they 
bothered to stand there. The police had already left their post a few 
meters away.

Yes, it is a shameful reflection on our invasion of Iraq ­ let us solemnly 
remember ‘weapons of mass destruction’ ­ but it is, above all, a tragedy 
for the Iraqis. They endured the repulsive Saddam. They endured our 
shameful UN sanctions. They endured our invasion. And now they must endure 
the anarchy we call freedom.

In Baghdad, of course, it was the usual story yesterday; a suicide bomber 
killing 15 Iraqis and wounding another 62 when he blew up his fuel tanker 
bomb next to a police station, and an Iraqi Defense Ministry official 
murdered outside his home. And true to the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the 
new Iraqi government, 43 new Iraqi ambassadors were appointed around the 
world. But who did they represent? Iraq? Or just Baghdad? After the city of 
Hilla, I came across the police and a scattering of new Iraqi Army 
soldiers. At Kufa, they insisted on escorting my car into the holy city of 
Najaf. But miles from the city center, they turned round and told me that 
under the terms of the cease-fire with Syed Moqtada Sadr’s ‘Mehdi Army’, 
they could drive no further. They were right. Sadr’s militia ­ which the 
American army promised to “destroy” last April ­ guards the old city, the 
main roads to the mosque and the entrance to the great shrine of the Imam Ali.

Indeed, deep inside this wondrous and golden tiled contribution to Islamic 
architecture ­ in an air conditioned office heavy with Chinese pots and 
Iranian carpets ­ I found the man who helped draw up the map for the US 
military to retreat after they abandoned their siege of Moqtada Sadr’s 
forces. “The Americans gave us a map and asked us which roads they could 
patrol,” Moqtada Sadr’s right-hand man, the turbaned Sheikh Ali Smaisin, 
told me in the Najaf shrine yesterday. “I sat with the other members of the 
‘Beit Shia’ (the Shia House, which combines a number of local political 
groups, including the Dawa party) and we set out the roads on which the 
Americans would be permitted to make their patrols. This map was then 
returned to the American side and they accepted our choices for roads they 
could control.”

I was not surprised. US forces are now under so many daily guerrilla 
attacks that they cannot move by daylight along Highway 8 or, indeed, west 
of Baghdad through Fallujah or Ramadi. Across Iraq, their helicopters can 
fly no higher than 100 meters for fear of rocket attack ­ the insurgents 
have little time to fire when US helicopters approach at so low an altitude 
and at such high speed ­ and, save for a solitary A1M1 Abrams tank on a 
motorway bridge in the Baghdad suburbs, I saw only one other American 
vehicle on the road yesterday: A solitary Humvee driving along a patrol 
road in Najaf agreed by the ‘Mehdi Army.’ Three far-away American Apache 
helicopters were hedge-hopping their way toward the Euphrates River.

That the ‘muqawama’ ­ the resistance ­ controls so many hundreds of square 
miles around Baghdad should be no great surprise. The new 
American-appointed Iraqi government has neither the police nor the soldiers 
to retake the land. They announce martial laws and telephone tapping and 
bans on demonstrations and a new intelligence service ­ but have neither 
the manpower nor the ability to turn these institutions into anything more 
than propaganda dreams for foreign journalists and a population that does 
desperately crave security.

Even the cease-fire agreement set out between the Americans and the ‘Mehdi 
Army’ is astonishing in its breadth. According to Sheikh Smaisin, it 
allowed the police to return to their checkpoints outside the city and the 
abandonment of official buildings by members of the ‘Mehdi Army’.

I found the police back in control of their station at Kufa, a large 
American tank shell-hole through the wall as a reminder of the recent 
fighting. Article Three states that no-one can be arrested or captured, 
Article Four that there should be no public carrying of weapons ­ the 
‘Mehdi Army’ certainly appeared to be abiding by this clause yesterday. 
Articles Five and Six say that “occupation forces” ­ the Americans ­ must 
return to and remain in their bases except for small patrol routes which 
they can use to reach these fortifications. Astonishingly, the final clause 
­ still under debate when the Americans ‘transferred’ power on June 28 to 
the Iraqi government they created ­ calls for the withdrawal of all legal 
charges against Moqtada Sadr for the murder of Syed Abdul-Majid Al-Khoi 
last year. When revealed by the occupation authorities more than six months 
after they had been secretly drawn up, the second most senior US officer in 
Iraq said that as a result of the accu! sations, his forces would “kill or 
capture” Sadr.

But it was Sadr’s men who courteously greeted me at their checkpoint in 
Najaf yesterday and took me to speak to Sheikh Smaisin at the Imam Ali 
complex. He complained that US troops had several times broken the 
cease-fire. “Two weeks ago, two of their Humvees turned up outside Syed 
Moqtada Sadr’s home and the soldiers on them began questioning people. We 
told our forces not to open fire and we complained and then these soldiers 
were withdrawn.”

Sadr’s forces ­ “a public current,” Sheikh Smaisin calls them with 
unexpected discretion ­ supposedly suffered less than a hundred casualties 
in the American attack; the Americans say they killed 400 of them. Smaisin 
has little time for such statistics. “What we see in the occupation is 
American force with a British brain,” he says. “This is just the same as 
the British occupation of Basra in 1914 and Baghdad in 1917. Our movement 
cannot be overcome because we are patriotic and Islamic, just like the 
forces opposing the occupation in the Sunni areas of Iraq. The Westerners 
want to set up a sectarian government but we don’t accept this. Now they 
have an insurrection from Fao in the south to Kirkuk in the north. Shia and 
Sunni are together. And any government that is not elected in free and 
honest elections ­ well, there’s a problem there.” So much, then, for the 
Iyad Allawi government, even if the Shia insurrection is a shadow of the 
Sunni version.

But the evidence of my journey yesterday ­ through the southern Sunni 
cities which long ago rejected American rule, to the holiest Shia city 
where its own militia controls the shrines and the square miles around them 
­ suggested that Allawi controls a capital without a country.

It took me two weeks to arrange my trip and I traveled with a Muslim cleric 
in my car who urged me to read my Arabic newspaper whenever urchins 
approached in the crowded cities to urge my driver to buy window sponges. 
They would run their sponges over the windows of the car and stare inside, 
looking ­ so we believed ­ for foreigners. They were spotters. And they 
didn’t see me.

But what I saw was infinitely more disturbing: A nation whose government 
rules only its capital, a country about which we fantasize at our peril.



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