Iraq:
Who Did The US Military Massacre Near Najaf?
By James Cogan
03 February, 2007
World
Socialist Web
Many
aspects of what transpired last Sunday on the outskirts of the southern
Iraqi city of Najaf are confused and unclear. But one thing is certain:
American and British jets and helicopters killed hundreds of men who
were resisting an assault by Iraqi government troops on the village
of Zarqa. Who the men were is still the subject of controversy. However,
an increasing number of credible reports have been published alleging
that the official version of events is a crude attempt to cover up a
terrible massacre.
Iraqi authorities have claimed
that the defenders of Zarqa were members of the “Soldiers of Heaven”,
a Shiite splinter group, which was conspiring to attack the Ashura religious
festival in Najaf on Monday and assassinate the top Shiite clergy, including
religious leader Ali al-Sistani. Government troops, acting on a tip-off,
launched a pre-emptive attack but were beaten back. Iraqi and American
ground reinforcements were called in and repeated US and British air
strikes razed much of the village.
The outcome was a slaughter.
Iraqi officials claim that 263 sect members were killed and another
400 taken prisoner—of whom 210 were wounded. A correspondent for
the Los Angeles Times who visited the scene on Tuesday described a compound
of eight farms, surrounded by a defensive berm and trench, which had
been devastated by US airpower. The newspaper wrote: “Mangled
bodies filled the trenches... contorted and burned from the bombing
campaign. A few were blown to pieces. The fighters included young boys
as well as middle-aged men. Some apparently held ordinary day jobs.”
The Los Angeles Times correspondent
reported that he saw a copy of a newspaper published by the Soldiers
of Heaven and that he was shown a book outlining the group’s beliefs,
which allegedly had been found at the scene.
The Soldiers of Heaven is
a doomsday cult that believes that the Imam Mahdi has returned—a
figure in Shiite theology who will come back to earth in a time of evil,
end the breach between Shiite and Sunni Muslims and bring peace to the
world. A Shiite cleric, Ahmad al-Hussan al-Yamami, reportedly claimed
in 1999 to have met the Mahdi and has subsequently built a congregation
of about 5,000 in the major southern city of Basra. Both Shiites and
Sunnis joined the cult.
A man named Abdul Zahra has
been identified as the person who claimed to be the returned imam. The
Iraqi government alleges that he was among those killed on Sunday. Other
articles report Ahmad al-Hussan was slain as well.
The alleged motive for seeking
to murder Sistani and other leading Shiite clerics was to eliminate
the religious opposition to their claim that Abdul Zahra was the Mahdi.
Major General Hussein Kamal, the Iraqi interior ministry undersecretary
for security, told Associated Press: “They started surfacing two
years ago as a political movement in southern Iraq and gained followers.
In the end they carried arms against the state.” The Soldiers
of Heaven, the Iraqi government insists, intended to enter Najaf posing
as Ashura pilgrims, kill the clerical hierarchy, take control of the
Imam Ali mosque and proclaim the Mahdi’s return. The apparent
aim was to trigger a wholesale uprising against the US occupation.
This entire story has been
dismissed as a fabrication by the Iraqi newspaper Azzaman, Patrick Cockburn
writing in the British Independent, and Dahr Jamail, writing for the
International Press Service (IPS). Both Cockburn and Jamail write from
Iraq and have built up a number of independent sources over the past
four years. In 2004, Jamail played a central role in exposing US military
war crimes in the city of Fallujah, such as the use of phosphorous bombs
against civilian targets, indiscriminate killings by marine snipers
and the strafing of ambulances.
All three articles have reported
that the people slaughtered at Zarqa were members of two Arab tribes,
the Hawatim or al-Hatami and the Khaza’il or al-Khazaali, who
reportedly oppose the Shiite fundamentalist parties that dominate the
Iraqi government. Fighting broke out after a soldier at an Iraqi military
checkpoint fired on a Hawatim convoy making its way toward Najaf to
participate in the Ashura celebrations. Their leader and his wife were
killed, provoking a retaliatory attack by the tribesmen. Khazaali tribesmen
en route to Najaf also came under fire and joined the battle against
the government troops, who called in reinforcements and, ultimately,
US air strikes.
Dahr Jamail reported: “The
fighting took place on the Diwaniya-Najaf road and spread into nearby
date-palm plantations after pilgrims sought refuge there. ‘American
helicopters participated in the slaughter’, Jassim Abbas, a farmer
from the area told IPS. ‘They were soon there to kill the pilgrims
without hesitation but they were never there for helping Iraqis in anything
they need. We just watched them killed group by group while trapped
in those plantations’. Much of the killing was done by US and
British warplanes, eyewitnesses said.”
Abdulimam Jabbar, a representative
of the Soldiers of Heaven in Basra, has denied that the sect was involved
at all. He told Azzaman: “This is part of a propaganda campaign
to discredit our group”. The sect, he declared, was “peaceful
and does not believe at all in violence”. This was supported by
Reider Visser, the editor of the Iraqi history website www.historiae.org,
who told Reuters there “was no record of them using violence in
the past”.
Cockburn has suggested in
the Independent that the accusation that the Soldiers of Heaven were
involved is an attempt by the Iraqi government to cover up its use of
US airpower to slaughter tribal opponents. He reported: “The messianic
group led by Ahmad al-Hassani, which was already at odds with the Iraqi
authorities in Najaf, was drawn into the fighting because it was based
in Zarqa and its presence provided a convenient excuse for what was
in effect a massacre. The Hawatim and Khaza’il tribes are opposed
to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and
the Da’wa Party, who both control Najaf and make up the core of
the Baghdad government.”
According to sources cited
by Dahr Jamail, the tribes have called for the building of a united
movement to oppose the sectarian civil war taking place between Sunni
and Shiite extremists and to end the control of the government by Shiite
fundamentalist parties.
As the controversy developed,
the Iraqi government embellished its conspiracy theory yesterday with
accusations that Ahmad al-Hassan was in fact a former intelligence operative
of Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime. Contradictory claims were made
by officials, with some asserting he had links to the Sunni extremists
of Al Qaeda, and others declaring he was financed by the Shiite regime
in Iran. The New York Times noted that the reports have “only
added to confusion about who exactly the Americans and Iraqis had fought
in a long battle beginning Sunday”.
The truth may not be known
for some time. What can be said, however, is that the massive firepower
unleashed indiscriminately at Zarqa reflects the tenuous control the
US military and the Iraqi government exert over the country, including
in the predominantly Shiite south of the country.
The battle was the bloodiest
in southern Iraq since the end of a short-lived uprising by supporters
of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in mid-2004. Last year, the southern provinces
were relatively stable. The opposition of millions of Shiites toward
the US occupation was diverted by Shiite fundamentalist parties such
as SCIRI, Da’wa and the Sadrists into participation in the December
2005 elections. They won support by promising to use the US-established
parliament to demand a timetable for the withdrawal of the foreign occupiers
and bring about rapid improvements in the catastrophic living conditions
that face the working class and rural poor.
The illusions that existed
a year ago have been dashed. Social conditions have worsened; sectarian
tensions have burgeoned into civil war; and the US military is increasing
its troop numbers. The resulting alienation and anger is aggravating
the numerous currents of opposition that exist toward the US occupation
and its puppets in Baghdad.
Whether the slaughter outside
Najaf was inflicted on a cult, anti-government tribesmen or a combination
of both, it demonstrates that the illegal American presence in Iraq
can only be continued by repression and indiscriminate killing in every
part of the country. The scale of the massacre is a warning of what
is being prepared as US operations are stepped up in Baghdad under Bush’s
planned “surge”.
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