http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5376.htm
Saddam's Capture Will Not Stop The Relentless Killings
From Insurgents
Robert Fisk in Baghdad
15 December 2003: (The Independent) "Peace" and
"reconciliation" were the patois of Downing Street and the White
House yesterday. But all those hopes of a collapse of resistance are doomed.
Saddam was neither the spiritual nor the political guide to the insurgency
that is now claiming so many lives in Iraq - far more Iraqi than Western
lives, one might add - and, however happy Messrs Bush and Blair may be at the
capture of Saddam, the war goes on.
In Fallujah, in Ramadi, in other centres of Sunni power in Iraq, the
anti-occupation rising will continue. The system of attacks and the
frighteningly fast-growing sophistication of the insurgents is bound up with
the Committee of the Faith, a group of Wahabi-based Sunni Muslims who now
plan their attacks on American occupation troops between Mosul and the city of
Hilla, 50 miles south of Baghdad. Even before the overthrow of the Baathist
regime, these groups, permitted by Saddam in the hope that they could drain
off Sunni Islamic militancy, were planning the mukawama - the resistance
against foreign occupation.
The slaughter of 17 more Iraqis yesterday in a bomb attack on a police station
- hours after the capture of Saddam, though the bombers could not have known
that - is going to remain Iraq's bloody agenda. The
Anglo-American narrative will then be more difficult to sustain. Saddam
"remnants" or Saddam "loyalists" are far more difficult to
sustain as enemies when they can no longer be loyal to Saddam. Their Iraqi
identity will become more obvious and the need to blame "foreign"
al-Qa'ida members all the greater.
Yet the repeated assertions of US infantry commanders, especially those based
around Mosul and Tikrit, that most of their attackers are Iraqi rather than
foreign, show that the American military command in Iraq - at least at the
divisional level - knows the truth. The 82nd Airborne captain in Fallujah who
told me that his men were attacked by "Syrian-backed terrorists and Iraqi
freedom-fighters" was probably closer to the truth than Major Ricardo
Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, would like to believe. The war is not about
Saddam but about foreign occupation.
Indeed, professional soldiers have been pointing this out for a long time.
Yesterday, for example, a sergeant in the 1st Armoured Division on checkpoint
duty in Baghdad explained the situation to The Independent in remarkably blunt
words. "We're not going to go home any sooner because of
Saddam's getting caught," he said. "We all came to search for
weapons of mass destruction and attention has now been diverted from that. The
arrest of Saddam is meaningless. We still don't know why we came here."
There are groups aplenty with enthusiasm to attack the Americans but who never
had any love for Saddam. One example is the Unification Front for the
Liberation of Iraq, which was anti-Saddam but has now called on its supporters
to fight the American occupation. In all, The Independent has
identified 12 separate guerrilla groups, all loosely in touch with each other
through tribal connections, but only one could be identified as comprising
Saddam loyalists or Baathists.
When the first roadside bomb exploded in the centre of a motorway median at
Khan Dari in the summer, killing one soldier, it was followed by identically
manufactured mines - three mortars wired together - in both Kirkuk and Mosul.
Within a week, another copy-cat mine exploded near US troops outside Nasiriyah.
Clearly, groups of insurgents were touring the country with
explosive ordnance capabilities, organised, possibly, on a national level.
In many areas, men identifying themselves as resistors have openly boasted
that they are joining the new American-paid police forces in order to earn
money, gain experience with weapons and gather intelligence on their American
military "allies". Exactly the same fate that befell the Israelis in
Lebanon, where their proxy Lebanese South Lebanon Army militia started
collaborating with their Hizbollah enemies, is now likely to encompass the
Americans.
The same men who are going to carry on attacking the Americans will, of
course, be making a secret holiday in their heart over the capture of Saddam.
Why, they will argue, should they not rejoice at the end of their greatest
oppressor while planning the humiliation of the occupying army which seized
him?
