Who
Control's Iraq?
By Robert Fisk
In Najaf
21 July, 2004
The Independent
For
mile after mile south of Baghdad yesterday, the story was the same:
empty police posts, abandoned Iraqi army and police checkpoints and
a litter of burnt-out American fuel tankers and rocket-smashed police
vehicles down the main highway to Hillah and Najaf. It was Afghanistan
Mk2.
Iraqi government
officials and Western diplomats tell journalists to avoid driving out
of Baghdad; now I understand why. It is dangerous. But my own fearful
journey far down Highway 8 - scene of the murder of at least 15 Westerners
- proved that the US-appointed Iraqi government controls little of the
land south of the capital. Only in the Sunni Muslim town of Mahmoudiya
- where a car bomb exploded outside an Iraqi military recruiting centre
last week - did I see Iraqi policemen.
They were in a convoy
of 11 battered white pick-ups, pointing Kalashnikovs at the crowds around
them, driving on to the wrong side of the road when they became tangled
in a traffic jam, screaming at motorists to clear their path at rifle
point. This was not a frightened American column - this was Iraq's own
new blue-uniformed police force, rifles also directed at the windows
of homes and shops and at the crowd of Iraqis which surged around them.
In Iskanderia, I saw two gunmen near the road. I don't know why they
bothered to stand there. The police had already left their post a few
metres away.
Yes, it is a shameful
reflection on our invasion of Iraq - let us solemnly remember "weapons
of mass destruction" - but it is, above all, a tragedy for the
Iraqis. They endured the repulsive Saddam. They endured our shameful
UN sanctions. They endured our invasion. And now they must endure the
anarchy we call freedom.
In Baghdad, of course,
it was the usual story yesterday; a suicide bomber killing 15 Iraqis
and wounding another 62 when he blew up his fuel tanker bomb next to
a police station (pictured above), and an Iraqi defence ministry official
murdered outside his home. And true to the Alice-in-Wonderland world
of the new Iraqi government, 43 new Iraqi ambassadors were appointed
around the world. But who did they represent? Iraq? Or just Baghdad?
After the city of
Hillah, I came across the police and a scattering of new Iraqi army
soldiers. At Kufa, they insisted on escorting my car into the holy city
of Najaf. But miles from the city centre, they turned round and told
me that under the terms of the ceasefire with Muqtada Sadr's "Mehdi
Army", they could drive no further. They were right. Sadr's militia
- which the US army promised to "destroy" last April - guards
the old city, the main roads to the mosque and the entrance to the great
Shrine of the Imam Ali.
Indeed, deep inside
this wondrous and golden tiled contribution to Islamic architecture
- in an air-conditioned office heavy with Chinese pots and Iranian carpets
- I found the man who helped draw up the map for the US military to
retreat after they abandoned their siege of Sadr's forces.
"The Americans
gave us a map and asked us which roads they could patrol," Sadr's
right-hand man, the turbaned Sheikh Ali Smaisin, told me in the Najaf
shrine yesterday. "I sat with the other members of the 'Beit Shia'
(the Shia House, which combines a numberf local political groups, including
the Dawa party) and we set out the roads on which the Americans would
be permitted to make their patrols. This map was then returned to the
American side and they accepted our choices for roads they could control."
I was not surprised.
US forces are under so many daily guerrilla attacks that they cannot
move by daylight along Highway 8 or, indeed, west of Baghdad through
Falujah or Ramadi. Across Iraq, their helicopters can fly no higher
than 100 metres for fear of rocket attack. Save for a solitary A1M1
Abrams tank on a motorway bridge in the Baghdad suburbs, I saw only
one other US vehicle on the road yesterday: a solitary Humvee driving
along a patrol road in Najaf agreed by the Mehdi Army. Three faraway
Apache helicopters were hedge-hopping their way towards the Euphrates.
That the "muqawama"
- the resistance - controls so many hundreds of square miles around
Baghdad should be no great surprise. The new US-appointed government
has neither the police nor the soldiers to retake the land. They announce
martial laws and telephone tapping and bans on demonstrations and a
new intelligence service -- but have neither the manpower nor the ability
to turn these institutions into anything more than propaganda dreams
for foreign journalists and a population that desperately craves security.
Even the ceasefire
agreement set out between the Americans and the Mehdi Army is astonishing
in its breadth. According to Sheikh Smaisin, it allowed the police to
return to their checkpoints outside the city and the abandonment of
official buildings by members of the Mehdi Army. I found the police
back in control of their station at Kufa, a large American tank shell-hole
through the wall as a reminder of the recent fighting. Article Three
states that no one can be arrested or captured, Article Four that there
should be no public carrying of weapons - the Mehdi Army certainly appeared
to be abiding by this clause yesterday. Articles Five and Six say that
"occupation forces" - the Americans - must remain in their
bases except for small patrol routes which they can use to reach these
fortifications.
Astonishingly, the
final clause - still under debate when the Americans "transferred"
power on 28 June - calls for the withdrawal of all legal charges against
Muqtada Sadr for the murder of Sayed Abdul-Majid al-Khoi last year.
When revealed by the occupation authorities more than six months after
they had been secretly drawn up, the second most senior US officer in
Iraq said that as a result of the accusations, his forces would "kill
or capture" Sadr.
But it was Sadr's
men who courteously greeted me at their checkpoint in Najaf yesterday
and took me to speak to Sheikh Smaisin at the Imam Ali shrine. He complained
that US troops had several times broken the ceasefire. "Two weeks
ago, two of their Humvees turned up outside Sadr's home and the soldiers
began questioning people. We told our forces not to open fire and we
complained and then these soldiers were withdrawn."
Sadr's forces -
"a public current", Sheikh Smaisin calls them with unexpected
discretion - supposedly suffered less than a hundred casualties in the
US attack; the Americans say they killed 400 of them.
Smaisin has little
time for such statistics. "What we see in the occupation is American
force with a British brain," he says. "This is just the same
as the British occupation of Basra in 1914 and Baghdad in 1917. Our
movement cannot be overcome because we are patriotic and Islamic, just
like the forces opposing the occupation in the Sunni areas of Iraq.
The westerners want to set up a sectarian government but we don't accept
this. Now they have an insurrection from Fao in the south to Kirkuk
in the north. Shia and Sunni are together. And any government that is
not elected in free and honest elections - well, there's a problem there."
So much, then, for
the Allawi government, even if the Shia insurrection is a shadow of
the Sunni version. But the evidence of my journey yesterday - through
the southern Sunni cities which long ago rejected American rule, to
the holiest Shia city where its own militia controls the shrines and
the square miles around them - suggested that Mr Allawi controls a capital
without a country.
It took two weeks
to arrange my trip, and I travelled with a Muslim cleric in my car who
urged me to read my Arabic newspaper whenever urchins approached to
urge my driver to buy window sponges. They would run their sponges over
the windows of the car and stare inside, looking - so we believed -
for foreigners. They were spotters. And they didn't see me.
But what I saw was
infinitely more disturbing: a nation whose government rules only its
capital, a country about which we fantasise at our peril.
© 2003 Independent
Digital (UK) Ltd