Tikrit
- Iraq's Own West Bank
By Phil Reeves
The
Independent, UK
19 November 2003
It
is the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but transported to Iraq. A town is
imprisoned by razor wire. The entrance is guarded by soldiers, protected
by sand bags, concrete barricades and a machine-gun nest.
Only those people
with an identification card issued by the occupation authorities are
allowed in or, more importantly, out.
"Hey, this
is just like Gaza, isn't it?" a fiery-eyed young Iraqi policeman
shouted at us from behind the chest-high, three-layer wire coils which
separate his home from the rest of the surrounding dead-flat Iraqi landscape,
Sunni Triangle heartland. "We're not happy. Not happy!"
This is Awja, the
wealthy enclave outside Tikrit where Saddam Hussein grew up. It has
long been a centre of pro-Saddam, anti-American sentiments, home to
the ousted dictator's closest tribesmen, his cronies and his relatives.
The United States military says it is also the source of persistent
violent insurgency.
The Americans, accompanied
by selected journalists and cameramen, have been conducting dozens of
operations in the past few days, mounting house-to-house raids, and
firing off several 500lb satellite-guided missiles in an effort to show
the world and the guerrillas that they are now getting tough.
Early yesterday
in Tikrit, American forces attacked what they said were "enemy"
positions with tank and mortar fire, saying they killed six insurgents.
Some 2,000 troops also took part in a raid on a 20-block residential
area in Baghdad, emerging with only with a few dozen guns. In Awja,
the crackdown is less photogenic, but as significant. On 30 October,
two rifle companies from the US army's 4th Infantry Division turned
up at night and sealed off the town.
"We were asleep,"
recalled Mohammed Shakr al-Nassiri, 33, a shopkeeper. "We did hear
some work going on during the night. When we got up, we found all this
barbed wire around us. We don't understand the point of it. Why us?
There's been resistance all over Iraq." In the case of Awja, the
Americans appear to have resorted to this strategy after concluding
they have no hope of winning over the people.
Similar tactics
against the Palestinian intifada by Israel, which has sealed off towns
and villages in the occupied territories for many months, have been
widely criticised within the international community and human rights
organisations as counter-productive.
The Americans have
decided they have little to lose by sealing the town off in the hope
that it will stifle guerrilla activity. Residents seem to think the
approach is doomed to fail. A young policeman said over the wire barricade:
"It will make the resistance stronger. Even those who did not fight
when the Americans came to Iraq are being pushed to join the resistance."
The American military
yesterday proved unable to provide The Independent with any comment
on the enclosing of Awja. But Lieutenant-Colonel Steve Russell of the
4th Infantry Division, who came up with the scheme, told The Washington
Post in an interview last week: "The insurgents should not be allowed
to swim among the population as a whole. What we elected to do was make
Awja a fish bowl so we could see who was swimming inside."
An American
patrol opened fire yesterday on people in Baghdad's gun market, killing
three, including an 11-year-old boy, after the soldiers mistook the
gunfire of customers testing weapons for an attack, a witness and an
Iraqi police officer said.
© 2003 Independent
Digital (UK) Ltd