 | GREENLEFT WEEKLY, 15 DEC 2004
www.greenleft.org.au
Patrick Cockburn: When you have an occupation, you have
resistance
Patrick Cockburn has been an invaluable source of information for
anyone wanting to know what is going on in Iraq. As a correspondent
for Britain's Independent newspaper, he has written regular reports
from Iraq throughout the occupation. In November, he spoke to
Socialist Worker's Alan Maass about what really happened in Fallujah
and why Washington's victory in this battle won't help it win the war.
Q:The US claimed that it was targeting a small force of hard-core
insurgents in Fallujah, including foreign terrorists. What's the
reality?
A:There should be no mystery about the nature of the resistance in
Iraq. The situation is very simple, as it would be in most countries
of the world when you have an occupation by a foreign power, you have
resistance. And that's exactly what's happened in Iraq.
It's absurd to think that there are tiny groups either of foreign
fighters or remnants of the former regime who are holding the rest of
the population to ransom.
You can see this in Fallujah, in Mosul. You could see this from the
very beginning from the summer of 2003. Whenever I went to a place
where there had been an attack on a US patrol, and US soldiers had
been killed, always, the local kids were jumping up and down for
joy. This was always an unpopular occupation with most of the
population, and that majority has gone up.
Having said that, the resistance has always been fragmented. It's
different in different areas. In places like Fallujah, there was a
very strong tribal element. In fact, in a place as tribal as that, it
would be very difficult to have any movement, military or political,
that wasn't tribal.
In the villages, often the resistance was really just the local young
men. I remember in April, I was caught up in an ambush on the road
west of Baghdad, between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. The US army hadn't
realized that the road had fallen to the resistance, and I was caught
up in an ambush of trucks carrying gasoline to US forces.
We got out of the car and lay on the ground. And when we were
escaping, it was very noticeable that all the young men were running
with their guns from villages nearby, shouting to us and other cars,
Where's the fighting, where's the fighting? This was very much a local
militia in action.
What happened in Fallujah has been exaggerated in the newspapers and
on television. You see these great satellite maps showing Fallujah, as
if this was Stalingrad or the Battle of Berlin in 1945.
Fallujah is kind of a one-horse town it's not that big. You could walk
across it in about half an hour.
And just at the moment that the US troops were moving into Fallujah,
suddenly, most of Mosul a city in the north, which is at least five or
six times the size of Fallujah fell to the insurgents. Most of the
police went home or changed sides.
This is far more important in some ways than what's happened in
Fallujah. But Fallujah was drummed up as a media spectacular, and
therefore, what's happened in the rest of the country got much less
publicity.
Q:When the US moved to retake Mosul after the rebellion, it appeared to
be using Kurdish troops. That will only increase the threat of ethnic
conflicts between Arabs and Kurds, won't it?
A:The problem for the US army in Iraq is that if they're going to use
local forces, the only ones that they can really rely on are Kurdish
forces commonly called peshmerga. Elsewhere, they clearly don't really
trust the Iraqi National Guard forces that have been raised.
It turns out that the National Guard have no weapons outside their
camps. Everybody in Iraq carries a gun, but not these guys. And the
reason appears to be that the US Army was nervous about giving them
weapons when they went home in case they didn't come back.
Mosul is mostly an Arab city. The Arabs are on the west bank of the
Tigris about 700,000 or 800,000. There are more than 250,000 Kurds,
mostly on the east bank. And sectarian feelings have been growing
since the city fell during the war last year. The Arabs blamed the
Kurds for being behind the looting, and there was an element of truth
in this.
I went in there on the day Mosul fell, and I picked up a peshmerga
bodyguard with a submachine. It turned out to be a really bad idea,
because they weren't after me, but they certainly were after anybody
wearing a Kurdish uniform. So I had to get the guy to lie down in the
back of my car, with his gun underneath him, and put a blanket over
him. I spent half the day trying to protect our Kurdish bodyguard.
Q:Before the invasion, the US justified every missile strike on Fallujah
as an attack on Abu Musab al Zarqawi. What kind of power does Zarqawi
and his supporters have?
A:There's no question that the Zarqawi group exists. But to think that
it's the main element or even among the main elements of the
resistance is exaggerated, I think.
Obviously, it's done a number of bloody and heavily publicised things
by issuing videos of Zarqawi cutting people's throats. But otherwise,
I think that its public prominence really started from January of this
year. At the press briefings in Baghdad, every time the military and
civilian spokesmen appeared, they would say Zarqawi did this, Zarqawi
did that.
Remember, this came a couple of weeks after Saddam Hussein had been
picked up the main Iraqi figure who could be demonised. With no
Saddam, you needed someone to demonise.
There was a story that a special letter from Zarqawi to al Qaeda had
been found, but this is pretty dubious. Many specialists on Iraq think
that it's a hoax.
I think that the Zarqawi group is really quite limited. I should also
say, however, that because of all the publicity about Zarqawi's group,
this has enabled it to expand.
You suddenly have groups some political, some criminal claiming that
they're part of Zarqawi's group. But that's just what they've heard
about, and it gives them an identity.
Q:The US claimed that the attack on Fallujah had to go forward to
prepare the way for elections in January. What do you make of this?
A:This whole connection between the attack on Fallujah and the elections
is one of the weirdest things I've heard. You go and smash up a city,
you turn all of its population into refugees, you kill quite a number
of them and somehow they're going to come out and vote? I think that
was always kind of an absurdity.
And in fact, you can see that most of the Sunni areas of Iraq are even
more out of control after Fallujah than they were before.
I think the elections are going to take place primarily because
Ayatollah Ali Sistani wants them to take place. He wants there to be
an election in which the Shiite Iraqis can demonstrate that they're a
majority. And the Kurds want the elections because they think they'll
do quite well.
But it's doubtful that Sunni Muslims who are about 20% of the
population will vote.
Q:Perhaps more important is that you can have these elections, but will
it effect anything? Is there any reason that the resistance should go
down?
A:The US had a particular imperative before the US presidential election
to show the Iraqi elections as the prime policy objective in
Iraq. That isn't there anymore. But I think that it would be very
difficult to postpone the elections now because the Shiites are
expecting it, have demanded it for a long time, and would see a
postponement as one more attempt to deny them power.
Q:How much influence does Sistani as the main Shiite religious leader in
Iraq have compared to the more militant cleric Moqtada al Sadr?
A:I don't think it's necessarily accurate to say that Sistani is on
board with the US.
From the beginning, Sistani and the people around him have argued that
the Iraqi Shia made a mistake when Iraq was occupied by the British
during World War I when the Shia took the front line in the armed
opposition.
But that doesn't mean Sistani is in favour of the occupation. Sistani
has refused to meet any US or foreign official representing the
occupation since the invasion. Paul Bremer, when he was the US viceroy
of Iraq, never got to see him.
I think they're walking a tightrope. On Fallujah, they may have felt
that at least part of the resistance in Fallujah was sectarian and
anti-Shiite. And consequently, that may be one of the reasons why they
didn't say anything.
There's no doubt that Sadr has quite a large constituency. But his
power stems partly from the religious reputation of his father, who
was murdered by Saddam Hussein in 1999. It's difficult for him to go
100% against the Shiite religious establishment.
Sadr's people are a mixture of religious and nationalist. Their main
poster is of Moqtada and his family as martyrs who were killed by
Saddam but in the background, there's an Iraqi flag. So it's not just
religion there's a very strong nationalist element in Sadr's
group. There were those who wanted to go on fighting in Najaf, and
there were the political leaders who didn't want to.
One of the most important things to watch over the next year or two is
the relationship in general, obviously, between the Shia and the
Sunni, but also between the nationalist groups on both sides. The
Sunnis will have seen that Moqtada denounced the attack on Falluja,
and Sistani didn't at least not until the last moment.
Q:Is there any developing national leadership or direction to the Iraqi
resistance?
A:There isn't a national leadership, although there seems to be more
contact between different groups.
The lack of a national leadership hasn't necessarily been to their
disadvantage. One of the difficulties that the US has had in pinning
them down is that there was no leadership to identify and
target. Often, these are guys who come from a certain village or a
certain area, but they don't necessarily have many contacts elsewhere.
Q:How much sectarian cooperation is there? A: I think it probably depends
on each individual neighborhood or town. In some areas, there's
traditional hostility between Shia and Sunni; in some areas, there's
cooperation. It's a complex relationship. Iraq is not like Northern
Ireland, where Protestants and Catholics practically never marry.
Q:One of the outcomes that the US media have raised is of civil war and
even of partition of Iraq along ethnic lines. Do you think this is in
the cards?
A:Partition solves a few problems or doesn't quite even solve them but
it would create a whole series of new problems.
It's difficult to divide Iraq up. What happens, for instance, to
Kirkuk? This is a matter of deep dispute between the Kurds and the
Arabs of Iraq what happens to the oilfields around Kirkuk? Secondly,
at least a quarter of the population of Iraq lives in the greater
Baghdad area. There are some Sunni areas, some Shia neighbourhoods,
and there are a lot of mixed neighbourhoods.
It's very difficult to just physically divide up the country.
There is the division between the Kurds and the Arabs, both Shia and
Sunni, which is very deep and getting deeper, because Iraqi Kurdistan
the three provinces in the north has effectively been independent for
over a decade. Most young Kurds don't speak Arabic, so those divisions
are pretty deep.
But even here, partition creates other questions. Once you have an
independent Kurdistan, what is Turkey going to do? Is it going to sit
by? What's going to happen?
What would happen to the Shia part of Iraq is that going to fall under
the influence of Iran?
Sectarianism is growing, but nationalism is also strong. So students
at one university have taken the decision not to ever refer to Shia
and Sunni. Particularly among educated youth, there's a strong feeling
that they should refer to themselves only as Iraqis.
Everything is taking place in a country that's deeply impoverished. At
the time of the invasion, one of the reasons that a majority of Iraqis
not just Kurds and Shia, but a lot of Sunnis were glad to see the end
of Saddam was that they expected their material lives to get
better. And they really haven't, with some exceptions. In many cases,
they've gotten worse.
So all these struggles and divisions are taking place in a country
where more than half the population is unemployed, where people are
living in poverty. And this has contributed to making Iraq such a
violent place.
From Green Left Weekly, December 15, 2004. Visit the Green Left
Weekly home page.
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