Fallujah-Style
Offensive
Underway In Baqubah
By Peter Symonds
26 June, 2007
World
Socialist Web
A huge US offensive codenamed
“Operation Arrowhead Ripper” is underway in the Iraqi city
of Baqubah, as part of extensive American operations aimed at suppressing
insurgent groups in Baghdad and areas to the north and south of the
capital. US troops, backed by armoured vehicles, artillery, helicopter
gunships and warplanes, have sealed off the city of 300,000. The action
recalls the murderous November 2004 assault on Fallujah in which much
of the population fled and large sections of the town were levelled.
The number of US deaths has
risen sharply as troops have been ordered into more aggressive actions
throughout Iraq. A further 10 soldiers were killed on Saturday—seven
in three separate roadside bombings in Baghdad and Tikrit. Another soldier
was killed by small arms fire and two more died of noncombatant causes.
A total of 32 have died in the past six days and 80 so far this month.
Top US generals are warning of continuing high casualty rates.
No reports have been released
of Iraqi civilian casualties, which are certain to be far higher. In
a bid to prevent anti-occupation militia leaders fleeing Baqubah, the
US military cordoned off the city, trapping the entire population. At
least 8,000 American troops backed by 2,000 Iraqi soldiers and police
are systematically sweeping through Baqubah, arbitrarily detaining suspects,
destroying pockets of resistance and levelling any building regarded
as a potential threat.
Media reports, largely from
journalists embedded with US troops, have attempted to portray the operation
as a humanitarian mission to liberate the population from “Al
Qaeda”. While the designation of all anti-occupation fighters
as Al Qaeda extremists suits the Bush administration’s propaganda
purposes at home, it bears no relation to reality. Sunni extremists
last year proclaimed Baqubah the capital of the “Islamic State
of Iraq” but the group known as “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia”
is just one of a number of Sunni insurgent outfits involved.
Reflecting the sentiments
in the US military hierarchy, embedded reporter Michael Yon could barely
contain his glee over the Baqubah operation. “People are trying
to escape the fighting, but we made this mistake in places like Tal
Afar and Fallujah where our people attacked and left huge escape routes.
This time, the number one priority is to trap and destroy Al Qaeda,”
he wrote on his blog on Friday, adding: “At the going rate, Al
Qaeda in Baqubah will soon have two choices: Surrender, or die.”
US forces are turning Baqubah,
the capital of Diyala province to the north-east of Baghdad, into a
giant prison camp. As the operation got underway last week, leaflets
were dropped on the city ordering all residents to remain inside their
homes. The New York Times reported that the military intended to “fingerprint
and take biometric data from every resident who seems to be a potential
fighter”. Under conditions where survey after survey has revealed
that the majority of the Iraqi population is hostile to the US occupation
and supportive of armed insurgents, that means everyone is suspect.
According to Stars and Stripes
on June 22, US troops were ordered last Tuesday to detain all Iraqi
men they encountered. A US company from the First Battalion, 23rd Infantry
Regiment detained four teenage boys, cuffing their hands with plastic
flex and took them away for interrogation. The father of the two of
the boys pleaded with the troops to tell him what would happen with
them. He begged the soldiers not to hand his sons over to Iraqi soldiers
or police, fearing that Shiite militiamen who dominate the security
forces might kill them.
Embedded journalists dutifully
repeated official propaganda that the operation was about winning “hearts
and minds” and “bonding” the Iraqi forces with the
local population. But it was difficult to disguise the widely felt distrust,
fear, resentment and hostility to Iraqi and American troops alike. The
New York Times on Friday reported a conversation between a US captain
and a resident which “soon turned into a debate on the Americans’
conduct in Iraq”. While he had no sympathy for Al Qaeda, the 50-year-old
Iraqi angrily criticised US troops for gunning down a man for no reason,
a claim the captain denied. He also made clear that he regarded the
Iraqi forces as even worse—little more than Shiite militia in
uniform.
American troops went into
Baqubah in mid-March but only managed to “pacify” two eastern
neighbourhoods. The latest offensive, which began last Tuesday, is focussed
on west Baqubah. “In Khatoon, the southernmost section of the
operations area, the US military conducted earth-shaking bombing runs
and house-to-house searches for two days, punctuated by occasional gunfights,”
the Los Angeles Times explained.
Operational commander Brigadier-General
Mick Bednarek told the media on weekend: “It is house to house,
block to block, street to street, sewer to sewer—and it’s
also cars, vans—we’re searching every one of them.”
He claimed that US forces controlled about 60 percent of the city and
had killed 60 to 100 fighters. Bednarek said troops had trapped about
50 to 100 insurgents and were “closing the noose” but predicted
it could be weeks before Iraqi military and police secured the area.
Colonel Steve Townsend, commander
of the 3rd Stryker Brigade, identified three districts of the city as
a problem and said the military proposed to erect concrete barriers
and checkpoints around those areas. Speaking to Reuters, Command Sergeant
Major Jeff Huggins bluntly declared: “We are enveloping the enemy
in a kill sack.” As in Fallujah, the US military intends to use
its vastly superior firepower to level any source of armed resistance.
Early on Friday, US helicopter gunships slaughtered 17 “Al Qaeda
suspects” on the outskirts of the nearby town of Khalis.
A recent report from Fallujah
provided a glimpse of what a “pacified” Baqubah will be
like. Much of the city remains in ruins. Little compensation or assistance
has been provided to the residents, who are again under martial law,
including a curfew from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. Muhammed Aydan, a 42-year-old
father, told the IRIN news agency: “We are living like prisoners,
lacking assistance at all levels. Aid support, which last year was always
here, can’t be seen anymore. We depend solely on ourselves, drinking
dirty water even though we know our children are getting sick from it.
Power supply is less than two hours a day in some areas of Fallujah
and sometimes we have to go three days without a shower to save water.”
In Baqubah, residents are
already complaining of receiving no water or electricity since the start
of Operation Arrowhead Ripper. Insisting that Baqubah is a Sunni insurgent
stronghold, the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad has provided
little in the way of assistance and services to the city on the pretext
that it would fall into the hands of Al Qaeda.
It is already clear that
the offensive in Baqubah is not going to be the final showdown with
anti-occupation insurgents that the American military had hoped it would
be. Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno told the press last Friday that
US intelligence estimated that 80 percent of the top Al Qaeda leaders
had fled the city before fighting had even begun. Amid recriminations
as to who was responsible, Odierno declared: “Frankly, I think
they knew an operation was coming in Baqubah. They watched the news.
They understood we had a surge. They understood Baqubah was designated
as a problem area.”
Baqubah is just the most
prominent of a series of targets aimed at so-called Al Qaeda strongholds
that have been used as staging areas for attacks in Baghdad. In what
it terms “the Battle of the Baghdad belts,” the US military
is conducting operations in other areas of Diyala to the north of the
capital, the Arab Jabour area in the south, various safe havens to the
west and northwest and in the Baghdad districts of Adhamiya, Rashid
and Mansour. Odierno claimed on Friday that the new operations had been
successful in seizing more than 700 detainees, killing 160 insurgents
and uncovering hundreds of weapons caches and bombs.
What Odierno is describing
is not the suppression of isolated groups of insurgents, but a colonial-style
war of repression against a hostile population. As they rampage through
cities like Baqubah, the US troops are creating fresh reserves of hostility
and opposition to the illegitimate American occupation of the country.
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