Samarra, Martyr City

The Coalition troops are facing now an enemy that has fought for more than a year with less combatants, training, experience, equipment and physical force. The weakest are dead. The survivors, chosen by the unforgiving war law, have got stronger.The Anglo-Saxon Coalition has buried itself in a counterinsurgent operation that cannot control. The 160 000 regular military troops on ground and the 20 000 mercenaries as support lack of a successful experience in this type of conflict. The last two comparable situations, Viet Nam and Somalia, turned out to be a fiasco.

The Coalition fights against the type of enemy it fears the most: civilians, fathers of families without history, deeply rooted in the social structure, and not against regular troops. Every member of the resistance that falls contributes to train a new generation of combatants determined to take revenge for their parents.

In order to get his soldiers or troops out of the trap (GIs), George W. Bush, as well as his rival John Kerry, consider only the solution of «Iraqisizing the war», that is, recruiting and training Iraqis and entrust them the security of the country. However, as underscored by the military analyst William Lind in the website military.com [1], the problem does not lie on the skills but on the loyalty of these troops.

Never mind the amount of money that is paid to these collaborators; their price will not replace the faith and desire for revenge that encourages the resistance. On the contrary, their temptation to collect their salaries and not doing anything intensifies. Besides, the equipment of these recruited Iraqis cannot be compared to that of the Anglo-Saxons, although they are the permanent targets of the resistance. In the current year, 700 soldiers of the Iraqi regular troops have been already killed, thus undermining the moral of their comrades and making especially slow the recruitment of reinforcements.

It has been even discussed to have double agents within the Coalition Iraqi forces. The increase of unemployment has made the Iraqi youngsters to apply as candidates to join the security forces, but still there is a long way to be motivated to become combats. Several reports suggest planning a major offensive against the enclaves controlled by the resistance such as Faluya before the elections scheduled for next January take place. The recent battle of Samarra would have been just a real life test to assess such offensive.

The entrance of 2 000 troops of the Iraqi «National Guard» to Samarra together with the American troops, after a long distance bombardment on the suspected neighborhoods for providing shelter to the resistance, was an attempt to show unity and prove that the Iraqis were determined to kill other Iraqis to serve the Coalition. However, as to whether they had actually evicted the members of the resistance during the raids in the houses, nothing is less secure.

The reports of the operations coming from the resistance indicate that it had decided to leave the center of Samarra after the air bombing to protect a greater number of civilians. The same sources ascertain that American snipers were positioned on the roofs of the buildings of the city and did not hesitate to shoot on civilians who were trying to recover the bodies of their relatives that lied on the streets.

The genocide of the population in Faluya, Iraq

Since counting the number of civilians is the only way, in the absence of journalists, to judge for the US tactics, it is better for the command to delay as much as possible the recovery of the bodies and their transfer to the hospital. According to a manager of the hospital of Samarra, when the offensive was over, and when the civilians were trying to recover the bodies under the snipers’ fire, 70 bodies had been already taken to the morgue, among which 23 were children and 18 women. On the other hand, 160 wounded had been hospitalized [2].

Hence, everything seems to indicate that the Coalition uses the massacre of civilians as a weapon against the resistance, just as we stated in these columns in last December [3], that is, 11 months ago. The Operation »Iron Hammer» goes beyond what could be expected due to the growing effectiveness of the actions of the resistance. The attack against civilians is a double-edged sword, since apart from further discouraging the resistance to use residential areas for protection, it equally allows to subdue the population through terror by saying that any involvement with the resistance would automatically cause a blind strike.

For example, if someone decides to house a member of the resistance, his own neighbor should be influenced to denounce his neighbor over the fear of paying himself for possible retaliations. It is a classic tactic that increases the war crime to a monitoring method for the people, which the Nazis used during the Second World War.

«Recently, the images confirmed the US crimes of war. At the beginning of the year, a video showed the crew members of an Apache helicopter shooting against civilians. A more recent video showed similar facts against civilians, but this time from an F-16 to “clean” a street of Faluya in April 2004 [4]. On the other hand, the Pentagon announced the beginning of an investigation after these images were broadcasted by the TV network Channel 4. There is no need to insist upon the fact that many other horrific things that have not been shown to the TV viewers will not be objects for investigation.

However, a recent testimony of a journalist from the daily British The Guardian made a report about the deliberate shooting against civilians grouped near a military vehicle that had just been destroyed by the resistance [5]. A journalist from Al Arabiya network was among the civilian casualties of the slaughter.

US soldiers killed in Faluya by the Iraqi resistance.

The resource of the Anglo-Saxon Coalition for Israeli advisors trained for the counterinsurgency in the Palestinian territories contributes to identify the operations in Palestine and Iraq that, eventually, are confusing to the eyes of the Muslim world. Some groups of the Shiite resistance have already gone to the Lebanese Hezbollah for its aura of victories against the Tsahal, for them to be as well, advised on resistance.

It is possible that in the near future, Hezbollah provides its technical support to other groups of resistance and Hamas and many others follow its example. Since necessity is the law, the different forces of the Iraqi resistance try to get together to face a common enemy, and therefore, this unity favors a regrouping of the Muslim forces that are called to overcome their differences. As such, the neoconservatives’ strategy to break up the Great Middle East could turn itself against them and encourage the awakening of the Arab nationalism, and even that of the Islam [6].

The Jordan Zarqaui, if still alive and if not an agitator, obviously is not in Faluya, but has been used to punish the people of the city through massive bombardments. As indicated by the Arab press since several months ago, the voice that claims to be that of Zarqaui has no Jordan accent [7].

On the other hand, it seems increasingly more evident that many kidnappings were carried out by criminals to fill their pockets by selling the hostages to official groups of the resistance. This phenomenon illustrates the failure of the Coalition in its efforts to have an image of security, but equally allows targeting the civilians with no fear of being reported by the journalists from the West, who most of them are locked in their hotels [8].

The few witnesses near Samarra have been able to confirm that the bombings had killed a great number of civilians, while many others ran away from the city by all means, including boats. The provisional government itself condemned these air strikes on residential areas, and described them as unacceptable «collective punishment [9] ». The US Air Force was swift to react and was overjoyed the same day when for the first time a low power bomb guided by laser, the GUB-38, considered the most accurate and with least «collateral damages», was used in Faluya to strike a building where a meeting with the obviously tireless Zarqaui had taken place [10]. Therefore, the Pentagon does not refute having among its targets the civilian population, but tries to hide from now on that the blind strikes are part of its tactics.

An editorial of the Associated Press that quoted Abu Thar, former colonel of the regular army that joined the resistance, confirmed in all cases the tactical improvements of the resistance: «We see the contradictory statements of the US administration as to Iraq as a new sign of its defeat. (...) There are increasingly more volunteers who come to us and are sick of the US outrages. They consider it a national and religious duty [11].»