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Tuesday, 20, July, 2004 (03, Jumada al-Thani, 1425)<br>
<br>
<b><a href="http://www.arabnews.com/?artid=48646">A Nation Whose Govt
Rules Only Its Capital <br>
</a></b>Robert Fisk, The Independent <br>
<br>
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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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’.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
<br>
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