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Posted Tuesday, April 6, 2004

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The Independent


London, Tuesday, April 6, 2004

 

Iraq on the brink of anarchy

By Robert Fisk
in Fallujah

NOT content with surrounding the largest Sunni city west of Baghdad with tanks, armoured personnel carriers and heavy machine guns, US forces used Apache helicopters to attack the Shia Muslim slums of Shoula yesterday, sent dozens of their main battle tanks into the hovels of Sadr City and then slapped an arrest warrant on the Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr -- who must dearly have wanted the United States to do just that.

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David Irving comments:

I HAVE been troubled by the curious references to American "civilian contractors" which have cropped up ever since four of them were killed under horrific circumstances in Fallujah last week.
   The pictures were sickening enough, although unlike the television moguls and newsroom producers we in the West have not seen the worst stuff; I am sure that DVDs of it are already on sale in the street markets of Iraq.

The scenes were probably as gruesome as any to be seen in Iraq after we, the "coalition of the willing," dropped our napalm bombs on villages, or sent cruise missiles into private family villas where Ahmad Chalabi (above) and his henchmen had wrongly told us to find Saddam Hussein and his friends.
   What however is a civilian contract? From American movies like The Godfather and The Sopranos, we are familiar with the notion of putting a contract out on somebody, and these people seem to have been not unassociated with killing in the recent past, as their curriculum vitae all seem to include an impressive period of employment by Special Forces, or Seals, or whatever other name commandos nowadays operate under.

MY problem is this: In the eyes of military and international law are they combatants, protected by the 1949 convention, or are they not?
   The four hapless victims were said by Dan Senor, (right), the Hebrew-University educated chief spokesman for Paul Bremer, to have been escorting a food convoy. That is in itself a rather curious occupation for burly, able-bodied men being paid rather more than the average US Army grunt; it is a fair guess that these four men had more than peashooters, slingshots, and B B guns in their pockets.
   Why are the press not commenting on the curious fact that the Americans are employing "civilian contractors" as soldiers in plain clothes, call them whatever else you will. Because that is a risky business. In the eyes of international law they may be seen as francs tireurs, liable to be summarily executed if caught in military engagements.
   The Germans faced precisely the same problem in 1944, when the Americans captured numbers of civilian (or at least non-military) workers for Xaver Dorsch's huge Todt Organisation, the body that constructed the autobahns in peacetime, and then the fortifications, weapons sites, etc., in the occupied countries during the war.
   Although the OT workers wore swastika armbands which carried the words Organisation Todt, the Americans considered them to be francs tireurs if caught on the battlefield and executed more than a few of them until protests were lodged through the Protecting Power, if my memory of the archive material serves me right (or did Dorsch tell me that himself when I interviewed him?)
   During the invasion of Normandy in 1944 -- oops, "liberation" is the approved word -- the Americans adopted an unusual tactic, one used by the Germans in their own occupied territories: young French women had to bare their right shoulder, and if a bruise was seen on it -- resulting from a poorly handled rifle recoil -- they were deemed to have engaged in unlawful combat, and shot on the spot.
   Nobody suggests that these four American civilians were in fact francs tireurs. But the law becomes very murky when a military government arms its own civilians and sends them into a battle zone, undistinguished by uniform or insignia.
   Why weren't four uniformed US soldiers sitting in that SUV, escorting the "food convoy" that day? Are the Americans unwilling to show their own uniform in battle zones now?


A reader has helpfully drawn my attention to this book by P W Singer Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell University Press, 2003).

 

Gun battles in Sadr City overnight had cost the lives of up to 40 Iraqis and at least eight Americans, but in the sewage-damp streets yesterday, they were handing out letters, allegedly written by the Sunni townspeople of Fallujah, newly surrounded by 1,200 marines. "We support you, our brothers, in your struggle," the letters said. If they are authentic, it should be enough to make the US proconsul, Paul Bremer, wonder if he can ever extricate Washington from Iraq. The British took three years to turn both the Sunnis and the Shias into their enemies in 1920. The Americans are achieving it in just under a year.

Anarchy has been a condition of our occupation from the very first days when we let the looters and arsonists destroy Iraq's infrastructure and history. But that lawlessness is now coming back to haunt us. Anarchy is what we are now being plunged into in Iraq, among a people with whom we share no common language, no common religion and no common culture.

Officially, Mr Bremer and his president are standing tall, claiming they will not "tolerate" violence and those who oppose democracy, but occupation officials -- in anticipation of a far more violent insurrection -- have been privately discussing the legalities of martial law. And although Mr Bremer and President George Bush are publicly insisting that the notional "handover" of Iraq's "sovereignty" will still take place on 30 June, legal experts attached to the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council have also been considering a delay of further months. Many Iraqis are now asking if the Americans want disaster in Iraq. Surely not, but yesterday's violence told its own story of blundering military operations and political provocations that will undoubtedly add to the support for the charmless and provocative Shia cleric whom Mr Bremer now wants to lock up -- allegedly for plotting the murder of a pro-Western Shia cleric, Abdul-Majid el-Khoi. Sadr was surrounded by his militiamen yesterday, in a mosque in Kufa from where he issues regular denunciations of the occupation.

Dan Senor, a spokesman for the occupying power, would not tell anyone exactly what the evidence against Sadr was -- even though it has supposedly existed since an Iraqi judge issued the warrant some months ago.

The US military response to the atrocities committed against four American mercenaries in Fallujah last week has been to surround the entire city and to announce the cutting off of the neighbouring international highway link between Baghdad, Amman and Damascus -- thus bringing to a halt almost all economic trade between Iraq and its two western neighbours.

What good this will do "new" Iraq is anyone's guess. Vast concrete walls have been lowered across the road and military vehicles have been used to chase away civilians trying to bypass them. A prolonged series of Israeli-style house raids are now apparently planned for the people of Fallujah to seek out the gunmen who first attacked the four Americans. The corpses were stripped, mutilated and hanged.

The helicopter attacks in Shoula -- by ghastly coincidence the very same Shoula suburb in which civilians were slaughtered by an American aircraft during last year's invasion -- looked like a copy of every Israeli raid on the West Bank and Gaza. Indeed, Iraqis are well aware that the US military asked for -- and received -- Israel's "rules of engagement" from Ariel Sharon's government.

America's losses over the past 48 hours -- at least 12 soldiers killed and many wounded -- come nowhere near the number of Iraqi victims over the same period.

US forces in Sadr City believe they were fighting up to 500 militia men from Sadr's black-uniformed Army of Mehdi early yesterday. Even so, using Apache helicopters in a heavily populated district to hunt for gunmen raises new questions about the rules to which occupation troops are supposed to adhere.

 

THE British fared less badly in Basra, Iraq's second city, where they avoided violence with militiamen who had taken over the town hall and wounded no one in a brief gun battle. Spanish troops were again involved in shooting with militiamen in Najaf. The grim truth, however, is that the occupying powers are now facing insurrection of various strengths in almost every big city in Iraq.

Yet they are still not confronting that truth. For the past nine nights, for example, the main US base close to Baghdad airport -- and the area around the terminals -- has come under mortar fire.

But the occupying powers have kept this secret. "Things are getting very bad and they're going to get worse," a special forces officer said close to the airport yesterday. "But no one is saying that -- either because they don't know or because they don't want you to know."

As for Sadr, he will, no doubt, try to surround himself with squads of gunmen and supporters in the hope that the Americans will not dare to shoot their way in to him.

Or he will go underground and we'll have another "enemy of democracy" to bestialise in the approach to the American elections. Or -- much more serious perhaps -- his capture may unleash far more violence from his supporters.

And all this because Mr Bremer decided to ban Sadr's trashy 10,000-circulation weekly newspaper for "inciting violence."

 

Ancient artefacts looted by US soldiers in Iraq go on sale on Internet
Six Mossad agents killed in north Iraqi town of Kirkuk
US troops kill journalist of independent al-'Arabiyah Satellite TV in Baghdad | Arab journalists walk out of Colin Powell news conference in protest

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