The reconquest of Iraq (16 September 2004)

Published in Labour Left Briefing (October 2004)

Glen Rangwala reports on the scale of the current insurgency.

Within the American super-size bunkers that take up large areas of central Baghdad, all the talk over the past few weeks has been about the ‘no-go zones’ in Iraq. For months, the military commanders denied they existed, even though US troops only entered many Iraqi cities in fleeting night-time raids once every few weeks, if that. Falluja and Samarra to the west of Baghdad and Kufa and Latifiya in the south have all been places that US soldiers could not enter without provoking immediate reprisals. The nominal handover of power in June has made it increasingly clear that the appointed government of Iyad Allawi has no control over large populations within Iraq. But with the handover, the US could now claim that it had been authorised by the Iraqi government to launch assaults upon these cities. As a result, taking on the ‘no-go zones’ has become a central objective of the regime.

In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has been widely derided as no more than a mayor of the capital city, Kabul. In Iraq, ten weeks after the formal handover, Allawi cannot even claim this. When on 12th September insurgents in Baghdad ambushed a US armoured vehicle on Haifa Street, a US military spokesman said that this was a region out of their control. Haifa Street is not some far flung place of marginal significance: it is a ten-minute walk from the Green Zone, the heavily fortified headquarters of the occupation army and new government in central Baghdad. You need to cross it in order to move from the Green Zone on one bank of the river Tigris to the other half of Baghdad. Despite all their tanks and warplanes, they can't even venture out into their immediate neighbourhood.

In this situation a compromise might have been sought, in which American forces would be scaled down and their grip on the new government eased. Instead, they have attacked hostile areas more vigorously, unless they surrender outright. Thomas Metz, the US military commander in Iraq, warned local leaders on 6th September that they would face a "devastating attack" if they did not break links with insurgents: "If you're a leader in a town ... do you want to have to go rebuild it because it got destroyed, because foreign fighters came to hang out in your city?" So much for Blair's humanitarian waffle: now they're talking about destroying towns in order to save them.

In some places, this has involved ground assaults. Turkmen residents had taken control over the city of Tal Afar in the north of the country, to make a third insurgency to add to the Sunni-led and Muqtada al-Sadr campaigns. US tanks were able to roll into this city, as well as Samarra, in mid-September. But in places where the insurgency has been too strong, the idea has been to pound them with bombs. US helicopters fired missiles at Haifa Street hours after the ambush on 12th September, in what seems to have been a crude revenge attack: among the 13 people killed were a television journalist and two children. Falluja and Ramadi in western Iraq have been repeatedly bombed, with 60 people killed in one round of intense bombing raids in the early hours of 17th September alone.

The US doesn't have an effective Iraqi surrogate force that it can use to capture these no-go zones. When it has created a force under Iraqi command, its loyalties have sometimes gone in the other direction. The ‘Falluja brigade’, created in April to control the city after its inhabitants had been massacred by US forces, was disbanded in early September after its members were found to be joining in with attacks on US personnel. Other forces remain under US command, but have struggled to find suitable recruits, for example the Iraqi National Guard. One US officer, recently returned from Iraq, described the composition of the ING: "Several soldiers have had no prior experience and are extremely young, between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, having been encouraged to join by families desiring the funds." Child soldiers tend not to make up the most effective of counter-insurgency forces.

The attacks on these regions have all been authorised, sometimes retrospectively, by the appointed government of Iyad Allawi. Unsurprisingly, his endorsement of large-scale bombing hasn't won him too many friends in the areas bombed. However, the interim constitution requires there to be elections in January 2005. Allawi and US officials recently told the New York Times that elections will go ahead except in towns where the insurgents are in control: "We will not let the rejectionists in Iraq have a veto over the elections," one diplomat said. In short Allawi's men will choose where the elections can and can't be held, and exclude areas where he's particularly unpopular. The Times recently reported that members of the Iraqi electoral commission, which is meant to prepare the elections, have rarely dared to leave the Green Zone. The size of the scaling-down can be seen in the preparations being made: the United Nations estimated in June that 30,000 polling stations would be needed for the elections. Allawi's government is planning to have just 7,000.

The US strategy to defeat the insurgency indicates that they no longer care about popular opinion among broad sectors of society. Instead, they hope that the intimidation of the population will be enough to subdue restive areas. But they know that it was the impression of a brutal occupation force that led to the uprising in the first place - and that only a few months after even the most devastating assaults on a town like Falluja, the insurgents have come back with renewed anger. Much of the current strategy, less than two months before the US presidential elections, seems aimed at merely postponing the ability of the insurgents to dominate the country - intimidate the population enough to keep them quiet until November and mission accomplished.

Author: Glen Rangwala

Back to the Index of Writings
To contact, email from here