- Nov 17, 2002
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Here's a long article from the Sydney Morning Herald, drawn from an interview with people inside the Iraqi resistance:
I fear we are underestimating the enemy, and a lot more Americans may die before we wise up.Inside the resistance
The United States likes to think that all it confronts in Iraq are a few die-hard Saddamists. But Paul McGeough meets a new guerilla movement with growing popular support.
There's a knock on the door. Standing in the first-floor corridor of the Al Safeer Hotel are two men - Ahmed, a weapons dealer and group commander in the Iraqi resistance, and Haqi, one of his foot soldiers. They enter and take a seat on the sofa, edgy but full of bravado after what they claim was a successful strike against a US convoy in a rural area north of Baghdad.
They had agreed, after weeks of negotiation through a go-between, to talk about the resistance. Now they are here to recount the detail of their most recent offensive against the US occupation forces in Iraq.
Ahmed begins: "Yesterday we were told about the new movement of convoys, so we used a special car to take our RPG [rocket-propelled grenades] and guns up there. We struck at sunset, in an area surrounded by farms.
"We positioned ourselves as locals, just standing around. But as the convoy came into view we picked up the weapons which we had lying on the ground. There were 19 soldiers. I could see their faces. I fired three grenades - two at a truck and one at a Humvee. Then we escaped across the fields to a car that was waiting for us. It took just a few seconds because God makes it easy for us."
[ ... ]
"US claims about al-Qaeda and Ansar al Islam are just propaganda." But then he goes on: "We don't even ask the fighters if they belong to these groups or to political parties."
Speaking through an interpreter, he continues in guttural Arabic: "Our fighters are protecting our religion. We cannot allow foreigners to occupy our country."
Then he repeats the argument in much of the anti-American graffiti around Baghdad: "We suffered under Saddam and we hate him, but we would put him in our hearts ahead of a Christian or a Jew, because he is a Muslim."
This is a culture in which revenge is honourable, and Ahmed vents his opinion freely: "The Americans do not respect us, so we cannot respect them. They are a cancer of bad things: prostitution, gambling and drugs."
Haqi: "This struggle is not about Saddam. It's about our country and our God. Our aim is not to have power or to rule the country. We just want the US out and for the word of Allah to be the power in Iraq."
[ ... ]
Because the roots of Iraqi offence at the American presence are to be found in their tribal culture as much as in the Koran, the resistance fighters confidently rely on tribal networks for information on the Americans and for help to get away in a hurry after an attack.
Ahmed says: "The people offer us hiding places when we are in danger. They support us with words and blessings and sometimes they hide our fighters in the boot of their cars to take them to safety."
Their approach is as effective as it is simple. Usually they explode a landmine to halt an US convoy and to disorient the soldiers. Then one group of resistance fighters opens fire from one side of the road, drawing the attention of the Americans, while the men with an RPG take aim from a position about 150 metres back from the other side of the road.
Many of the fighters draw on their experience in national service under Saddam and they have acquired bomb-making and other manuals from the disbanded Iraqi military. They have been having lethal success with remote-controlled devices, including one that was floated down a river on a palm log to explode under a bridge used by the US.
[ ... ]