Resistance
Growing Up At School
By Ali Al-Fadhily
& Dahr Jamail
14 October, 2006
Inter
Press Service
KHALDIYA, Oct 12
(IPS) - The bomb went off just outside the school as the IPS
correspondent stood speaking to children and teachers within.
The headmaster smiled. "You
will hear many of these every day if you stay here another day or two,"
he said. "The resistance will not stop until the last American
leaves."
The children too took no
notice of the blast, which shook the doors and windows of the half-destroyed
school in this town near Fallujah, 70km west of Baghdad.
The children are growing
up in occupied Iraq -- and they are resisting it.
"Americans are bad,"
said 11-year-old Mustafa. "They killed my family." The family
were killed in Operation Phantom Fury of November 2004 as they tried
to flee the city, teachers said. That operation killed thousands and
destroyed much of Fallujah and towns around it.
"God will send all Americans
to hellfire," cried another child in the classroom. Attempts to
suggest that not everyone they thought American was bad proved fruitless.
"How can we teach them
forgiveness when they see Americans killing their family members every
day," the teacher in the classroom who gave her name as Shyamaa
told IPS. "Words cannot cover the stream of blood and these signs
of destruction, and words cannot hide the daily raids they see."
For the headmaster, the idea
of a clash of civilisations is not just an idea.
"The gap between civilisations
is widening thanks to the U.S. administration's crimes against humanity
all over the world," he said. "They seem determined to tear
the world apart, and their footprints cannot be removed for the coming
generations."
Outside the school a group
of women and some elderly men approached the IPS correspondent. One
of the men boasted that his son was a resistance fighter. "I am
proud that he is a hero fighting these Americans. And they used to talk
to us about our human rights."
Down the street everyone
is jumpy. People seemed to be watching out for unusual signs. A driver
told IPS that resistance fighters usually give residents some sort of
coded warning before they let off a bomb."
As the correspondent stood
taking notes on a roadside before leaving Khaldiya, a young man on a
bicycle shouted as he passed by: "The one and only solution for
the Americans is to leave this province or face death."
The U.S. forces are now leaving
some towns. Cities like Dhuluiya, Talafar and Fallujah west of Baghdad
have become virtually no-go areas for U.S. forces. Attacks against the
U.S.-led Multi-National Forces (MNF) continue to increase.
"They keep asking us
to hand over resistance fighters to them," a farmer at a village
in the area told IPS. "So that they can torture them in Abu Ghraib,
Falcon base, Baghdad airport and other detention centres." But
resistance fighters are gaining support, far from being handed over.
Resistance attacks often
take the shape of a small car that appears from nowhere. The men inside
attack U.S. tanks or trucks carrying soldiers, and disappear fast. Local
people never provide U.S. forces with information where the men came
from or where they went.
Three to four U.S. soldiers
are being killed every day on average in such attacks now. The U.S.
Department of Defence says at least 2,754 U.S. soldiers have been killed
in Iraq, and more than 44,000 have been wounded or have fallen ill.
U.S. troops are vacating
towns, but not the country. Top U.S. military commander Gen. Peter Schoomaker
said Wednesday the current level of U.S. troops, about 15 brigades,
would be maintained at least through 2010.
"This is not a prediction
that things are going poorly or better, it's just that I have to have
enough ammo in the magazine that I can continue to shoot as long as
they want us to shoot," he said.
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