Occupation and resistance in Iraq

Posted by Eddie Truman on November 25, 2005. Filed under International,Iraq. Posted with the tags:Iraq
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Khalid Hamdan Al Salmani lives in the Al-Qaem area of Iraq near the Syrian border.

On 2 September, he took his family to visit his brother’s family, and the two men went out to work the following morning.

They returned to find that American tanks had fired shells into the house, killing five of the children and wounding nine others.

Khalid told the Scottish Socialist Voice’s Iraq Correspondent Isam Rasheed:
“We will remember the Americans every day in the future when I see my wife and other two daughters.
“I will remember how they destroyed my family and how they killed my two sons and also how they destroyed my brother’s family.”
“They did that in Al-Qaem, and the same with my country, Iraq.”

Khalid said that Al-Qaem was hit repeatedly by warplanes, helicopters and tanks.

The Saggar family were killed when the car they were in was destroyed by a US warplane. All seven of them were buried in one grave because all that was left was their bones.

The Qwan family were killed in their house, hit by a missile from a plane – mother, father and sons, 13 in all. Khalid continued:
“Now we cannot move in Al-Qaem because of the many check points, and we suffer from lack of medicines and not having enough food.
“There is no electricity. Everyday, they bombard houses and arrest innocent people. We live in hell.
“This is life now in Iraq under occupation.”

The day after we received Isam’s report, five members of an Iraqi family were shot dead by US troops as they returned from a funeral.

Along with mass arrests and targeted killings, often directed by hooded informers, the occupation of Iraq is becoming increasingly bloody and brutal.

While the occupation’s spin-doctors ensure that troops are filmed handing out sweets on street corners, every Iraqi kid knows that they are rounding up their fathers and elder brothers and using deadly force against civilian targets on an almost casual basis.

There can only be one result: thousands of Iraqis are rallying to the call for armed resistance against the occupiers, others are involved in political and trade union opposition.

While the Western media plays up the activities of the Jihadists – many of them from Jordan and Saudi Arabia, some from the former Soviet states with large Muslim populations – they make up a small proportion of those involved in the Iraq war.

It is young Iraqis, many of whom initially welcomed the overthrow of Saddam, who are carrying out increasingly effective attacks on the occupying troops, frequently organised and trained by a layer of former Iraq Army soldiers.

Major Dean Wollan, intelligence officer for the US Army’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team, gave an honest account of the difference between the Jihadist terrorists and the indigenous insurgents fighting the occupation troops in a documentary shown on Channel 4:
“To the terrorists, regardless of where they target us, it doesn’t matter if there are civilians around or not.
“The insurgents, though, target us with the same weapons but they do it in places and in ways that will minimise the potential for civilian casualties because they understand like any insurgency that their legitimacy is through popular support.”

A secret UK Ministry of Defence poll in October found that 45 per cent of Iraqis believed that attacks against British and US troops were justified – rising to 65 per cent in the British-controlled Maysan province, with 82 per cent “strongly opposed” to the presence of coalition troops.

In July 2005 the mounting strength of the Iraqi resistance was reflected in a meeting organised in Lebanon by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies of 108 Iraqi representatives of political parties, religious societies and independents.

What has become known as the Beruit Symposium issued a call for the formation of an Iraqi National Front for Liberation and Democratic reconstruction (INFLD) and co-ordinated political and military resistance to defeat the occupation.

In cities and towns, and particularly in the villages surrounding them, previously separate groups began to work together.

In her book Insurgent Iraq, Loretta Napoleoni describes how the process of Shia and Sunni insurgent groups working together to strike at the occupation forces inevitably results in a secular resistance, given the religious animosity between the two groups.

The demand for a free Iraq and the moves towards a unified national liberation struggle are a direct threat to those forces that wish to see Iraq broken up into separate regions.

The atrocities being carried out by religious extremists such as the horrific car and suicide bombings of Shia mosques and shrines are absolutely condemned by Iraqis opposed to the coalition troops; they can only serve the ends of the imperialists who use them to justify the continued occupation.

Some of the most remarkable actions in Iraq today are those of groups of Iraqis, some formally organised, others not, who are documenting the suffering of the people and attempting to bring relief to those under the heel of the US and British troops. A group of women in an NGO named ‘International Peace Angels’ drive ambulances into areas in which the occupation forces are launching attacks on insurgents.

They negotiate with the assaulting troops and with the insurgents to allow them to bring out women and children, often coming under fire from the occupation troops themselves.

It is that bravery and commitment to human solidarity which brings hope in Iraq today, along with the struggle for a genuinely free country and the possibility of ending the occupation.