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News :: International Relations |
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Marines Losing The Battle For Hearts And Minds |
Current rating: 0 |
by James Meek outside Nassiriya
(No verified email address) |
25 Mar 2003
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Hopes of a joyful liberation of a grateful Iraq by US and British armies are evaporating fast in the Euphrates valley as a sense of bitterness, germinated from blood spilled and humiliations endured, begins to grow in the hearts of invaded and invader alike. |
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Iraqi women with children brandish their guns as they shout anti american slogans near Yousifiya, 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of Baghdad, Tuesday March 25 2003. Thousands of U.S. Marines were rumbling north toward Baghdad on Tuesday, taking safer dirt roads to avoid cities and towns where they could face Iraqi resistance. (AP Photo/Tahar Abed Al-Adim)
Hopes of a joyful liberation of a grateful Iraq by US and British armies are evaporating fast in the Euphrates valley as a sense of bitterness, germinated from blood spilled and humiliations endured, begins to grow in the hearts of invaded and invader alike.
Attempts by US marines to take bridges over the river Euphrates, which passes through Nassiriya, have become bogged down in casualties and troops taken prisoner. The marines, in turn, have responded harshly.
Out in the plain west of the city, marines shepherding a gigantic series of convoys north towards Baghdad have reacted to ragged sniping with an aggressive series of house searches and arrests.
A surgical assistant at the Saddam hospital in Nassiriya, interviewed at a marine check point outside the city, said that on Sunday, half an hour after two dead marines were brought into the hospital, US aircraft dropped what he described as three or four cluster bombs on civilian areas, killing 10 and wounding 200.
Mustafa Mohammed Ali said he understood US forces going straight to Baghdad to get rid of Saddam Hussein, but was outraged that they had attacked his city and killed civilians. "I don't want forces to come into the city. They have an objective, they go straight to the target," he said. "There's no room in the Saddam hospital because of the wounded. It's the only hospital in town. When I saw the dead Americans I cheered in my heart.
"They started bombing Nassiriya on Friday but they didn't bomb civilian areas until yesterday, when these American dead bodies were brought in.
"We know the difference between a missile and a cluster bomb. A missile shoots to one target whereas a cluster bomb spreads after they release it."
Mr Ali said marines now controlled the center of the city, but that fighting was continuing, with members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party in the forefront.
Asked about the much-vaunted fedayeen militia, reported by some sources to be leading the battle, Mr Ali said: "They are children." Other travelers from Nassiriya said they were press-ganged youths who went into battle dressed in black with black scarves wound around their faces and who fight for fear of the execution committees waiting to shoot them if they try to run.
Watching from behind a barbed wire barrier as hundreds of the marines' ammunition trucks, armored amphibious vehicles, tankers, tanks and trucks lumbered past through clouds of dust as fine as talcum powder, Mr Ali asked why such a huge army was needed just to catch a single man. "We don't want Saddam, but we don't want them [the Americans] to stay afterwards," he said. "Like they entered into Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar and didn't leave, they will do here. They are fighting Islam. They're entering under the pretext of targeting Ba'ath, but they won't leave."
Another Iraqi squatting next to him leaned over, pointed to the convoys and said: "This is better than Saddam's government."
The marine convoys, which have been passing northward now almost non-stop for two days, are using a partly-built concrete motorway bridge over the Euphrates which US military engineers have made strong enough to take one tank at a time.
At this point the river is a narrow, slow-flowing blue current. Nassiriya is at the western end of the waterlands once occupied by 200,000 Marsh Arabs, the Ma'dan, whose culture, thousands of years old, was all but destroyed by Saddam Hussein with terrible loss of life.
A few yards from the bridge it is possible to sit by the riverbank and watch the green spring reeds which defined the marshes bending in the wind. One of the Ma'dan's high-prowed canoes drifts from side to side on its mooring rope.
But it is not long before the sound of the wildfowl and the lapping water is drowned out by a pair of ash-grey Huey helicopters, chugging low past the palm trees beside the bridge, and the whine of the next tank to cross.
Staff Sergeant Larry Simmons, a Floridian from a marine reconnaissance unit in a foxhole overlooking the bridge, was not impressed by what he saw. "You learn about the Euphrates in geography class, and you get here and you think: 'This is the Euphrates? Looks like a muddy creek to me'."
The marines are aggrieved: aggrieved that the Iraqis aren't more grateful, aggrieved that the Iraqis are shooting at them, aggrieved that the US army's spearhead 3rd Infantry Division tore through Nassiriya earlier in the invasion without making it safe.
"They didn't clear the place, and then they left, and now the marines sure have to clear it," he said. "Just like the goddamn army."
And the Iraqis are aggrieved at the marines. A 50-year-old businessman and farmer, Said Yahir, was driving up to the main body of the reconnaissance unit, stationed under the bridge. He wanted to know why the marines had come to his house and taken his son Nathen, his Kalashnikov rifle, and his 3m dinars (about £500).
"What did I do?" he said. "This is your freedom that you're talking about? This is my life savings."
In 1991, in the wake of Iraq's defeat in the first Gulf war, Mr Yahir was one of those who joined the rebellion against Saddam Hussein. His house was shelled by the dictator's artillery. The US refused to intervene and the rebellion was crushed.
"Saddam would have fallen if they had supported us," Mr Yahir said. "I've been so humiliated."
Under the bridge, Sergeant Michael Sprague was unrepentant. The money, the marines said, was probably destined for terrorist activities - buying a suicide bomber, for instance. "The same people we determined were safe yesterday were found with weapons today," he said.
Marine scouts shot two Iraqi men yesterday when they were seen carrying Kalashnikovs. Each man was found to be carrying three magazines, but they never fired at the marines before they were killed.
"They were pointing their weapons in an aggressive manner, and they were taken out," said Sgt Sprague.
Nathen had been captured the previous day, along with dozens of others, and like them, had been let go, Sgt Sprague said. Then they caught him again with a Kalashnikov in mint condition and 3m dinars.
"So the question I would like to be asked is, if this person already went through EPW [enemy prisoner of war] questioning and was found to be OK, why on earth would he come back? The problem with these people is that you can't believe anything they say."
Could he understand the locals' distrust of the US after what happened in 1991?
"If it weren't for the liberal press, we might have taken Baghdad last time," said the sergeant.
In the end the marines let father and son go on their way with gun and money, accepting that both were for personal use. But Sgt Sprague was none too happy to see them go. The convoys have, after all, come under sporadic mortar attack. "There's a mad mortarman out there," he said.
A few miles from the bridge to the south lie the ruins of the ancient city of Ur, founded 8,000 years ago, the birth place of Abraham and a flourishing metropolis at a time when the inhabitants of north-west Europe were still walking round in animal skins.
Sgt Sprague, from White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia, passed it on his way north, but he never knew it was there.
"I've been all the way through this desert from Basra to here and I ain't seen one shopping mall or fast food restaurant," he said. "These people got nothing. Even in a little town like ours of twenty five hundred people you got a McDonald's at one end and a Hardee's at the other."
A few hundred yards downstream, a group of Iraqis, some of them hiding out in the country from the fighting in Nassiriya, invited journalists to strong sweet tea in a farmhouse of whitewashed mud. They spread carpets and cushions on the floor and generously allowed the guests not to take their muddy boots off. Light shone through a triangular window.
Mohsen Ali, a devout Shia fingering amber beads as he spoke, said the Iraqi people would fight for Iraq, if not for President Saddam, although he supported the dictator. The country needed a strong leader, he said - even a brutal one.
"If in Iraq there's a leader who's fair, he'll be killed the next day," he said. "Iraqis have hot blood. If he's not tough, he dies the next day."
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
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Saddam Starts To Sound More Like His Hero, Uncle Joe |
by Robert Fisk
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
25 Mar 2003
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25 March 2003
Let us now praise famous men. Saddam Hussein was keen on doing just that yesterday. And he proceeded to list the Iraqi army and navy officers who are leading the resistance against the Anglo-American army in Umm Qasr, Basra and Nasariyah.
Major-General Mustapha Mahmoud Umran, commanding officer of the 11th Division, Brigadier Bashir Ahmed Othman, commander of the Iraqi 45th Brigade, Brigadier-Colonel Ali Kalil Ibrahim, commander of the 11th Battalion of the 45th Brigade, Colonel Mohamed Khallaf al-Jabawi, commander of the 45th Brigade's 2nd Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Fathi Rani Majid of the Iraqi army's III Corps ... And so it went on.
"Be patient," President Saddam kept saying. Be patient. Fourteen times in all, he told the army and the people of Iraq to be patient. "We will win ... we will be victorious against Evil." Patient but confident in victory. Fighting evil.
Wasn't that how President Bush was encouraging his people a few hours earlier? At other times, President Saddam sounded like his hero, Joseph Stalin. "They have come to destroy our country and we must stand and destroy them and defend our people and our country ... Cut their throats ... They are coming to take our land. But when they try to enter our cities, they try to avoid a battle with our forces and to stay outside the range of our weapons."
Was this, one wondered, modelled on the Great Patriotic War, the defence of Mother Russia under Uncle Joe? And if not, how to account for let us speak frankly the courage of those hundreds of Iraqi soldiers still holding out under American air and tank attacks?
People, party, patriotism. The three P's ran like a theme through the Saddam speech along with a bitter warning: as the American and British forces made less headway on the ground, President Saddam said, they would use their air power against Iraq ever more brutally.
So what does it feel like to live these days in President Saddam's future Stalingrad? Early yesterday, the cruise missiles and the planes came back. The great explosions clapped across Baghdad in the darkness. One of the Tomahawks smashed into the grounds of the Al-Mustansiriya University 25 students wounded and one dead, so they claimed.
There were other sounds in the early hours. A blaze of automatic gunfire on the Tigris Corniche attempts to capture two escaping US airmen, the authorities insisted and then a full-scale gun battle not far from the city centre at 2.30am. There were rumours. Armed men had come from Saddam City the great Shia slums on the edge of Baghdad and had been intercepted by state security men. No "independent confirmation". A story that the railway line north of Baghdad has been cut. Denied.
But the sheer amount of military and statistical detail coming from the Iraqi authorities is beginning to make the US Centcom information boys look like chumps. On Sunday, the Iraqi Minister of Defence, General Sultan Hashim, gave a remarkable briefing on the war, naming the units involved in front-line fighting the 3rd Battalion of the Iraqi army's 27th Brigade was still holding out at Suq ash-Shuyukh south of Nasariyah, the 3rd Battalion of the Third Iraqi Army was holding Basra. And I remembered how these generals gave identical briefings during the terrible 1980-88 war against Iran. When we set off to check their stories then, they almost always turned out to be true.
Does the same apply now? General Hashem repeatedly insisted that his men were destroying US tanks and armour and helicopters.
This was easy to dismiss until videotape of two burning US armoured personnel carriers popped up on the television screen. Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan has been obliging enough to explain the Iraqi army's tactics. It was Iraqi policy to let the Anglo-American armies "roam around" in the desert as long as they want, and attack them when they tried to enter the cities. Which seems to be pretty much what they are doing.
From Baghdad, with its canopy of sinister black oil smoke and air raid sirens, the American plan appears to be rather similar: to barnstorm up the desert parallel to the Tigris and Euphrates valley and try to turn right at every available city on the way. If there's trouble at Umm Qasr, try Basra. If Basra is blocked, have a go through Nasariyah. If that's dangerous, try to turn right through Najaf.
But the open road the long highway to Baghdad lined with adoring Iraqis throwing roses at GIs and Tommys is proving to be an illusion.
By this morning, the Americans could be outside Baghdad. But in military terms they might as well be in Kuwait.
Perhaps, in American and British terms, this is too pessimistic an assessment. In Baghdad, it's easy to see not just how badly the Americans and British have miscalculated, but it's also possible to imagine just how long President Saddam and his army and Baath party militias can endure, a sobering thought for those of us sitting in the Iraqi capital and only too well aware that the Stalingrad symbolism might turn out to be real. Saddam's tactics are clearly those of Stalin. Every day that passes is a day of further pain for Washington and London.
You could observe this cockiness when Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Information Minister, spoke. Of Tony Blair, he said jovially yesterday: "I think the British nation has never been faced with a tragedy like this fellow." Mr Sahaf then presented a casualty list, which, however imaginative it might turn out to be, was credible to the average Iraqi, and perhaps to anyone. Civilian wounded and dead respectively: in Baghdad, 194 wounded (13 less than estimated); in Ninevah, eight wounded; in Karbala 32 wounded and 10 killed; in Salahuddin, 22 wounded and 2 killed. In Najaf, the figures were 36 and 2; in Qadissiyah, 13 and 4; in Basra, 122 and 14. In Babylon, the Iraqi government claims 63 wounded and 30 killed.
Sixty-two dead civilians if the statistics are correct is not a massacre. But there's nothing surprising about such a figure. It looks as if the Americans and British are bleeding to "liberate" a people who are not all that keen to be liberated by the Americans and British. A moral problem, of course. But not so big a moral problem as it would be if all this Iraqi suffering at the hands of the Americans and British turned out to be about oil.
© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
http://www.independent.co.uk/ |
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Civilian Deaths From Airstrikes On Baghdad Fuel Rising Anger |
by John Daniszewski
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
25 Mar 2003
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BAGHDAD -- Saman Atef was finishing a late breakfast Monday when he heard a long, whining whoosh. Before he had time to ponder the noise, three of his neighbors' houses exploded in a rain of bricks, glass and dust.
In the instant the bomb or missile hit, four people were killed and 23 were injured, Atef said, and the people of his working-class neighborhood of northern Baghdad counted one more reason to feel angry with the United States.
Just before the midday attack, a robust-looking President Saddam Hussein had appeared on state television in military uniform and exhorted Iraqis to attack the U.S. and British enemy.
"Cut their throats and even their fingers," Hussein urged. "Strike them and strike evil so that evil will be defeated."
The U.S. war strategy has counted in part on separating the people of Iraq from the government of Hussein.
But the deaths and injuries from misdirected or errant bombs, or from shrapnel and fragments that spray into nearby homes even when the munitions find their intended target, are making more and more people believe that the United States is heedless of the Iraqi public.
The danger to coaltion forces is that when the decisive battle comes, many will rally to Hussein and take up arms against the U.S. and British troops.
Information Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf said Monday that 62 civilians had been "martyred" in the last 24 hours across Iraq and that hundreds had been injured.
Although his figures could not be independently verified, the perception among Iraqis is that civilian as well as government and military sites are being deliberately targeted by the Americans.
Atef's Radiha Khatoun neighborhood, for instance, is a dense warren of ordinary houses. Residents all denied that there are any government or military sites around, and none were visible.
From the start of the war, Iraqi state television has played up civilian casualties, with pictures of the dead and wounded stock fare on newscasts.
The issue is fanning passions just when Hussein most needs the loyalty of the population for the upcoming battle for Baghdad.In a sign that the battle is drawing near, huge explosions erupted in the eastern and southern suburbs around midnight Monday, evidently caused by B-52 bombers dropping their payloads on the camps of Hussein's Republican Guard.
A sandstorm howled and black clouds from oil fires swirled over the city, giving it an ominous, apocalyptic air. Gigantic flashes of orange could be seen on the horizon -- followed by deep thuds of the massive blasts.
U.S.-led forces have already encountered unexpectedly fierce resistance from irregular fighters and volunteers who have taken to sniping at the rear lines of their advance.
So far, the invading forces have been met more with clenched fists than open arms. This has been true even in cities and towns with large Shiite populations that rose up against Hussein after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The question is whether the same will happen in Baghdad.
In Radiha Khatoun, residents suggested it would. They discounted U.S. claims that it seeks to avoid civilian targets and that the bombing must have been in error.
"This is not the first time that they have targeted civilian buildings," Atef insisted. "They would like to destroy the civilian population."
In response to the destruction, he said, "we will sacrifice ourselves. We are not frightened by the bombing -- we are motivated to be stronger."
He spoke as scores of people from the neighborhood gathered to watch grimly as an earthmover cleared bricks from the destroyed homes that were blocking the narrow lane in front.
Blue-suited firefighters with red-and-white helmets used hoes and their bare hands to sift through the debris, looking for the corpse of a 70-year-old woman presumed to have been crushed in her home. On the ground, a plastic slipper lay in a puddle of water and a black shawl spilled out from the bulldozer's scoop.
Standing in front of his destroyed home, Thamur Sheikel, a 53-year-old Oil Ministry employee, said he had returned from work to find his house no longer standing and his older sister and two young nephews killed.
"Bush is cursed," he said, biting off the words. "They want to destroy the people. Maybe God will destroy them. Revenge on Bush for this aggression. We are peaceful people; we do no harm to anybody."
The mood was similarly dark at nearby Al Nouman Hospital, where doctors treated survivors. Aqeel Khalil, 27, the husband of one of the dead, sat on the floor outside the locked door of the morgue, sobbing and asking why his wife and his mother had to die.
"There is no military site in my house, and there is no gun in my house," he managed to say through his tears.
"We do the best to save the lives of our people," Dr. Labib Salman said. "This does not make us hesitate to defend our country."
Besides appealing to Iraqis to fight, Hussein's speech was apparently designed to debunk suggestions that he had been killed or seriously injured during an attack by U.S. cruise missiles early Thursday, the opening day of the war.
Rather than being defeated, Hussein said Iraqi fighters were "causing the enemy to suffer and to lose every day.... As time goes by, they will lose more and they will not be able to escape lightly from their predicament," he said, in what was touted as a live appearance.
The speech got good reviews from Hussein loyalists in Baghdad who watched it.
"Today is like a wedding for me. Or it is like being born again. It is so good to hear our president speak," said Kamil Obedish, who said he felt encouraged enough to reopen the cafe that he had closed a few days earlier.
Obedish spoke in the presence of government representatives.
"After hearing his speech, I can say that I am convinced we have already won," he said. "They can't do anything to our president. They will never get him with their clever bombs. Because he is smarter than any of their bombs. He is smarter than all of them."
Iz Den, a member of Hussein's Baath Party and a retiree, was manning a sandbag fortification on Sadoun Street, one of the city's many shopping areas.
"There was this propaganda and rumors that he could be dead after they bombed all his palaces," Den said. "But here he is, alive and healthy! It is a big jubilation for us."
Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz, at a news conference Monday, said that Hussein was well and firmly in control of the government.
He said he wasn't worried about the thousands of U.S. troops coming to Baghdad in convoys that stretch to the horizon, their vehicles brimming with advanced weaponry.
"They will be welcomed in the same way as they were welcomed in Umm al Qasr, Al Faw and Nasariyah, and as they were welcomed by that Iraqi peasant who brought that Apache helicopter down," Aziz said, referring to the battles in the south of the country where the U.S.-led troops have suffered setbacks in recent days.
"We will be receiving them with the best music they have ever heard."
Special correspondent Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report.
Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com |
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