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Now the war is being fought in the open, by people defending their <br>
homes <br><br>
Naomi Klein in Baghdad <br>
Monday April 12, 2004<br>
The Guardian <br><br>
April 9, 2003 was the day Baghdad fell to US forces. One year later,
<br>
it is rising up against them. <br><br>
Donald Rumsfeld claims that the resistance is just a few "thugs,
<br>
gangs and terrorists". This is dangerous wishful thinking. The war
<br>
against the occupation is now being fought out in the open, by <br>
regular people defending their homes and neighbourhoods - an Iraqi <br>
intifada. <br><br>
"They stole our playground," an eight-year-old boy in Sadr City
told <br>
me this week, pointing at six tanks parked in a soccer field, next to
<br>
a rusty jungle gym. The field is a precious bit of green in an area
<br>
of Baghdad that is otherwise a swamp of raw sewage and uncollected <br>
rubbish. <br><br>
Sadr City has seen little of Iraq's multibillion-<br>
dollar "reconstruction", which is partly why Moqtada al-Sadr
and his <br>
Mahdi army have so much support here. Before the US occupation chief,
<br>
Paul Bremer, provoked Sadr into an armed conflict by shutting down <br>
his newspaper and arresting and killing his deputies, the Mahdi army
<br>
was not fighting coalition forces, it was doing their job for them.
<br><br>
After all, in the year it has controlled Baghdad, the Coalition <br>
Provisional Authority still hasn't managed to get the traffic lights
<br>
working or to provide the most basic security for civilians. So in <br>
Sadr City, Sadr's so-called "outlaw militia" can be seen
engaged in <br>
such subversive activities as directing traffic and guarding <br>
factories from looters. In a way, the Mahdi army is as much Bremer's
<br>
creation as it Sadr's: it was Bremer who created Iraq's security <br>
vacuum - Sadr simply filled it. <br><br>
But as the June 30 "hand-over" to Iraqi control approaches,
Bremer <br>
now sees Sadr and the Mahdi as a threat that must be taken out - <br>
along with the communities that have grown to depend on them. Which
<br>
is why stolen playgrounds were only the start of what I saw in Sadr
<br>
City this week. <br><br>
In al-Thawra hospital, I met Raad Daier, a 36-year-old ambulance <br>
driver with a bullet in his lower abdomen, one of 12 shots fired at
<br>
his ambulance from a US Humvee. According to hospital officials, at
<br>
the time of the attack, he was carrying six people injured by US <br>
forces, including a pregnant woman who had been shot in the stomach
<br>
and lost her child. <br><br>
I saw charred cars that dozens of eye-witnesses said had been hit by
<br>
US missiles, and local hospitals confirmed that their drivers had <br>
been burned alive. I also visited Block 37 of Sadr City's Chuadir <br>
district, a row of houses where every door was riddled with holes. <br>
Residents said US tanks rolled down their street firing into their <br>
homes. Five people were killed, including Murtada Muhammad, aged <br>
four. <br><br>
And I saw something that I feared more than any of this: a copy of <br>
the Koran with a bullet hole through it. It was lying in the ruins of
<br>
what was Sadr's headquarters in Sadr City. On April 8, according to
<br>
witnesses, two US tanks broke down the walls of the centre while two
<br>
guided missiles pierced its roof, leaving giant craters in the floor
<br>
and missile debris behind. <br><br>
The worst damage, however, was done by hand. The clerics at the Sadr
<br>
office say that US soldiers entered the building and crudely shredded
<br>
photographs of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shia cleric in
<br>
Iraq. When I arrived at the destroyed centre, the floor was covered
<br>
in torn religious texts, including several copies of the Koran that
<br>
been ripped and shot through with bullets. And it did not escape the
<br>
notice of the Shias here that hours earlier, US soldiers had bombed a
<br>
Sunni mosque in Falluja. <br><br>
For months the White House has been making ominous predictions of a
<br>
civil war breaking out between the majority Shias, who believe it's
<br>
their turn to rule Iraq, and the minority Sunnis, who want to hold on
<br>
to the privileges they amassed under Saddam Hussein's regime. But <br>
this week the opposite appears to have taken place. Both Sunni and <br>
Shia have seen their neighbourhoods attacked and their religious <br>
sites desecrated. Up against a shared enemy, they are beginning to <br>
bury ancient rivalries and join forces against the occupation. <br>
Instead of a civil war, they are on the verge of building a common <br>
front. <br><br>
You could see it at the mosques in Sadr City on Thursday: thousands
<br>
of Shias lined up to donate blood, destined for Sunnis hurt in the <br>
attacks in Falluja. "We should thank Paul Bremer," Salih Ali
told <br>
me. "He has finally united Iraq. Against him." <br><br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1190300,00.html" eudora="autourl">http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1190300,00.html</a><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
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