Glen Rangwala traces the events that led to the bombardment of Falluja and assesses the crisis of credibility now facing Coalition forces.

Published in Labour Left Briefing (May 2004)

Iraqis of Falluja spent the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad digging new a mass grave in the middle of their city. US forces had placed the city under siege and subjected its residents to continuous bombardment in an effort to exact some revenge for the killing of four U.S. paramilitary personnel who had been escorting a delivery of food supplies to US military forces. In the process, they had created six hundred Iraqi corpses, which could not be taken to the local cemetery as it lay outside the city. So instead residents of Falluja had to dig up the city's main football pitch, and inter the bodies en masse there.

The massacre in Falluja was on a scale greater than any known act of barbarity by Saddam Hussein's regime in its final twelve years. Jo Wilding, whose piece in February's Labour Left Briefing covered the arbitrary arrests made by the occupying army, travelled into the city during the siege with a medical team. US soldiers shot at her marked ambulance; she reported that they had already bombed the main hospital, destroyed numerous houses, and were shooting at unarmed civilians on sight. One senior British military officer in Iraq told the Telegraph on 10th April that US military personnel were "not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life", and had come to "view them [Iraqis] as untermenschen", the term Hitler popularised for those he regarded as racially inferior, as sub-humans. This view of Iraqis may not be held by all US personnel in Iraq, but the level of violence perpetrated by US troops in Falluja clearly displays a lack of regard for Iraqi life.

The bitter conflict in Falluja has a history. In the 1991 Gulf War, the RAF bombed the main market place in the city; Human Rights Watch reported that up to 200 civilians were killed by that raid. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, US soldiers shot 17 civilians in the city in two different attacks on protesting crowds, preventing any reconciliation between themselves and the residents over the forthcoming months. The killing of four US personnel on 31 March occurred against this backdrop.

The US response has been not only to ensure the entrenchment of this hostility, but also to spread it. Iraqis from much of the surrounding area, including Shi'as from southern Iraq, travelled to the city with weapons to fight against the US after the consequences of the siege became apparent. Even the cap-in-hand Iraqi Governing Council, appointed by the US, was forced to signal its displeasure with US actions. One member, Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawir, referred to US actions as genocide. The human rights minister, Abdel Basit Turki, a position whose creation was much praised by supporters of the war, also resigned in protest. With even those politicians who are dependent upon US openly critical of Coalition military actions, one can only imagine how much popular antipathy US actions in Falluja have created amongst the people they supposedly govern.

Although it arose from a different cause, the confrontation between US forces and Shi'a groups began almost simultaneously, and may end up converging with the conflict between the Coalition and the residents of Falluja. The US took on an enemy they poorly understood when they closed down Muqtada al-Sadr's weekly newspaper, al-Hawza, on 29 March. Muqtada himself may be young and holds a junior clerical position, as Coalition spokespeople have continually stressed; he also seems to have an apocalyptic world-view that fits in poorly with prospects for building a sustained political movement. However, he comes from the most eminent family in Iraq's modern history of Shi'a Islamism: the 5000 or so individuals within the militia he created, the Mahdi's Army, do not make much of their allegiance to Muqtada, but instead revere his father, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Muhammad Sadiq was one of the two highest authorities in the world Shi'a community from 1992 until his assassination by the ancien regime in 1999. His sermons in the late 1990s drew crowds of tens of thousands, and demonstrated a popularity that ensured the enmity of Saddam Hussein. Members of Muqtada's movement see themselves primarily as continuing and implementing Muhammad Sadiq's teachings, and so remain very much within the mainstream of Iraq's Shi'a community.

It was these people - the oppressed majority - that the US and UK governments portrayed themselves as "liberating" in April 2003. Muhammad Sadiq's assassination was itself brought out to show how the leaders of the Shi'a community had been persecuted. The Bush and Blair governments had imagined that the gratitude of this constituency would see them through the period of the occupation.

Muqtada's early declaration of opposition to the occupation came as a surprise to them. However they had managed to dissuade him from undertaking armed actions against the Coalition by giving members of his movement seats on local councils (the British awarded around a third of the places on Basra council to them), and allowing his newspaper to vent its criticisms, which often consisted of rather incredible stories about the misdemeanours of US personnel. They permitted his militia, like the other half-dozen major militias in Iraq, to continue recruiting in and patrolling areas of Iraq, serving to keep what passed for order in the absence of Coalition troops able to do the same job. Coalition officials have long admitted that they also had evidence of Muqtada's involvement in the murder of a rival cleric, Abdel-Majid al-Khoei, and were using this as a bargaining chip against him to ensure his non-violence.

This uneasy balance was broken with the closure of the newspaper, and the arrest of one of the Sadr movement's leaders. In response, the militia made what amounted to a declaration of war against the occupation, and seized control in a number of key Iraqi locations, including the main shrine city of Najaf and of police stations across the south of the country. Even long-standing critics of Muqtada now weigh support for him at between a third and a half of Iraq's Shi'a community. If the US commanders in Iraq see through their commitment of capturing Muqtada "dead or alive" - and the arrest warrant for the murder of al-Khoei was duly issued - they will have succeeded in perpetually alienating through their heavy-handedness a large proportion of Iraq's majority Shi'a population.

The two wars being fought by the US in Iraq demonstrate the futility of a failed strategy. Brute force has once again inflamed rather than alleviated popular animosity. They also show how the US administration conceives the people it refers to as its Iraqi partners, and who will take over the formal reins of power on 30 June. It has systematically failed to consult Iraqis - even those it appointed - in unleashing their latest disastrous actions. The assault on Falluja was started without consultation the Governing Council. They closed Muqtada al-Sadr's newspaper without consulting the Iraqi minister of communications, who subsequently voiced his disapproval of this action. They issued two warrants for Muqtada's arrest without consulting the Iraqi minister of justice, who also raised reservations. Iraqi units and personnel hired by the Coalition authority refused to fight alongside US forces in Falluja, an act of civil disobedience that speaks volumes for the lack of legitimacy the US currently holds.

The date for the handover of power may be set at 30th June, but the US will also be keeping the same mechanisms of control over the country. It has written into the interim constitution how it will retain control over the military forces, including the Iraqi army as well as the 130,000 or so Coalition troops. It will maintain control over the purse strings, since it has retained authority over much of Iraq's development funds. It has even written the laws for the media so that the regulatory body must take a lead from the new US embassy (estimated personnel: 3,000) in deciding what to censor.

By maintaining these levers of control, the US administration - backed most insistently by Mr Blair - may think that it is preserving its credibility by not giving in to its opponents. Instead, they are only preserving a situation in which the intensity of the violence seen in Falluja may be replicated many more times across the country. The reason why Mr Blair and Mr Bush have lost their credibility, why their vague claims to be defending civilisation from barbarity, sound so hollow and hypocritical, is to be found in the soil of what used to be a football pitch in Falluja.

Author: Glen Rangwala

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