[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: In Western Iraq, Fundamentalists Hold U.S. at Bay

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In Western Iraq, Fundamentalists Hold U.S. at Bay

August 29, 2004
 By JOHN F. BURNS and ERIK ECKHOLM 



 

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 28 - While American troops have been
battling Islamic militants to an uncertain outcome in
Najaf, the Shiite holy city, events in two Sunni Muslim
cities that stand astride the crucial western approaches to
Baghdad have moved significantly against American plans to
build a secular democracy in Iraq. 

Both of the cities, Falluja and Ramadi, and much of Anbar
Province, are now controlled by fundamentalist militias,
with American troops confined mainly to heavily protected
forts on the desert's edge. What little influence the
Americans have is asserted through wary forays in armored
vehicles, and by laser-guided bombs that obliterate enemy
safe houses identified by scouts who penetrate militant
ranks. Even bombing raids appear to strengthen the
fundamentalists, who blame the Americans for scores of
civilian deaths. 

American efforts to build a government structure around
former Baath Party stalwarts - officials of Saddam
Hussein's army, police force and bureaucracy who were
willing to work with the United States - have collapsed.
Instead, the former Hussein loyalists, under threat of
beheadings, kidnappings and humiliation, have mostly
resigned or defected to the fundamentalists, or been
killed. Enforcers for the old government, including former
Republican Guard officers, have put themselves in the
service of fundamentalist clerics they once tortured at Abu
Ghraib. 

In the past three weeks, three former Hussein loyalists
appointed to important posts in Falluja and Ramadi have
been eliminated by the militants and their Baathist allies.
The chief of a battalion of the American-trained Iraqi
National Guard in Falluja was beheaded by the militants,
prompting the disintegration of guard forces in the city.
The Anbar governor was forced to resign after his three
sons were kidnapped. The third official, the provincial
police chief in Ramadi, was lured to his arrest by American
marines after three assassination attempts led him to
secretly defect to the rebel cause. 

The national guard commander and the governor were both
forced into humiliating confessions, denouncing themselves
as "traitors" on videotapes that sell in the Falluja
marketplace for 50 cents. The tapes show masked men ending
the guard commander's halting monologue, toppling him to
the ground, and sawing off his head, to the accompaniment
of recorded Koranic chants ordaining death for those who
"make war upon Allah." The governor is shown with a
photograph of himself with an American officer, sobbing as
he repents working with the "infidel Americans," then being
rewarded with a weeping reunion with his sons. 

In another taped sequence available in the Falluja market,
a mustached man identifying himself as an Egyptian is shown
kneeling in a flowered shirt, confessing that he "worked as
a spy for the Americans," planting electronic "chips" used
for setting targets in American bombing raids. The man says
he was paid $150 for each chip laid, then he, too, is
tackled to the ground by masked guards while a third masked
man, a burly figure who proclaims himself a dispenser of
Islamic justice, pulls a 12-inch knife from a scabbard,
grabs the Egyptian by the scalp, and severs his head. 

The situation across Anbar represents the latest reversal
for the First Marine Expeditionary Force, which sought to
assert control with a spring offensive in Falluja and
Ramadi that incurred some of the heaviest American
casualties of the war, and a far heavier toll, in the
hundreds, among Falluja's resistance fighters and
civilians. The offensive ended, mortifyingly for the
marines, in a decision to pull back from both cities and
entrust American hopes to the former Baathists. 

The American rationale was that military victory would come
only by flattening the two cities, and that the better
course lay in handing important government positions to
former loyalists of the ousted government, who would work,
over time, to wrest control from the Islamic militants who
had emerged from the shadows to build strongholds there.
The culmination of that approach came with the recruitment
of the so-called Falluja Brigade, led by a former Army
general under Mr. Hussein, and composed of a motley
assembly of former Iraqi soldiers and insurgents, who
marched into the city in early May, wearing old Iraqi
military uniforms, backed with American-supplied weapons
and money. 

But the Falluja Brigade is in tatters now, reduced to
sharing tented checkpoints on roads into the city with the
militants, its headquarters in Falluja abandoned, like the
buildings assigned to the national guard. Men assigned to
the brigade, and to the two guard battalions, have mostly
fled, Iraqis in Falluja say, taking their families with
them, and handing their weapons to the militants. 

The militants' principal power center is a mosque in
Falluja led by an Iraqi cleric, Abdullah al-Janabi, who has
instituted a Taliban-like rule in the city, rounding up
people suspected of theft and rape and sentencing them to
publicly administered lashes, and, in some cases,
beheading. But Mr. Janabi appears to have been working in
alliance with an Islamic militant group, Unity and Holy
War, that American intelligence has identified as the
vehicle of Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born
terrorist with links to Al Qaeda whom the Americans have
blamed for many of the suicide bombings in Baghdad, which
is just 35 miles from Falluja, and in other Iraqi cities. 

The videotapes showing the killing of the guard commander,
the humiliation of the governor, and the beheading of the
Egyptian all display the black-and-yellow flag of the
Zarqawi group as a backdrop, and the passages of the Koran
chanted as an accompaniment to the killings are drawn from
passages of the Muslim holy book that have accompanied some
of the videotaped pronouncements by Qaeda leaders,
including Osama bin Laden. Iraqis who have watched the
Falluja tapes say the Egyptian's executioner speaks in a
cultured Arabic that is foreign, possibly Jordanian or
Palestinian. 

A Severe Blow in Falluja 

Perhaps the harshest blow to the American position in
Falluja came with the Aug. 13 execution of the national
guard commander, Suleiman Mar'awi, a former officer in Mr.
Hussein's army with family roots in Falluja. In the tape of
his killing, he is seen in his camouflaged national guard
uniform, with an Iraqi flag at his shoulder, confessing to
his leadership of a plot to stage an uprising in the city
on Aug. 20 that was to have been coordinated with an
American offensive. For that purpose, he says, he recruited
defectors among the militants' ranks and met frequently
with Marine commanders outside the city to settle details
of the attack. 

American commanders in Baghdad acknowledged ruefully that
Mr. Mar'awi had been killed, but they denied that there was
any plan for an offensive. Still, Marine commanders at Camp
Falluja, a sprawling base less than five miles east of the
city, have been telling reporters for weeks that the city
has become little more than a terrorist camp, providing a
haven for Iraqi militants and for scores of non-Iraqi
Arabs, many of them with ties to Al Qaeda, who have homed
in on Falluja as the ideal base to conduct a holy war
against the United States. Eventually, the Marine officers
have said, American hopes of creating stability in Iraq
will necessitate a new attack on the city, this time one
that will not be halted before it can succeed. 

Some of those officers have also acknowledged that Iraqi
"scouts" working for the Americans, some disguised as
militants, others working for the national guard and
police, have been a source of intelligence on militant
activities in Falluja, and on the location of bombing
targets. The American command says it has carried out many
bombing raids since the Marine pullback from the city in
May, killing scores of militants. One such raid that was
reported this week in a popular Baghdad newspaper,
Al-Adala, said that 13 Yemenis had been killed in an air
raid in Falluja as they prepared to carry out suicide
bombing attacks in Baghdad, and that the Yemeni government
was negotiating to bring the bodies home. 

Among militants in Falluja, there has been one point of
agreement with the Americans - that many of the bombing
raids have hit militant safe houses, and with pinpoint
accuracy. A clue as to how this has been possible is given
in the tapes of the beheadings of Mr. Mar'awi, the national
guard commander, and of the Egyptian, a man in his mid-30's
who identifies himself on the tape as Muhammad Fawazi. Both
men confess to having planted electronic homing "chips" for
the Americans. As they speak, the tapes show a man wearing
a red-checkered kaffiyeh headdress holding a rectangular
device, colored green and encased in clear plastic, about
the size of a matchbox. 

The tape of Mr. Fawazi's execution breaks from the scene of
the Egyptian kneeling in confession to a combat-camera film
from a bombing raid on Falluja that has been posted on
numerous Internet Web sites in recent weeks. The
black-and-white tape, giving the pilot's eye view, shows a
district of Falluja on a moonlit night, with the targeting
crosshairs fixed on a large, low building across the street
from a mosque, whose minaret throws a moon shadow onto the
street. The sound of the pilot breathing into his mask can
be clearly heard, with an exchange with a controller that
speaks for the nonchalance of modern warfare. 

"I have numerous individuals on the road, do you want me to
take them out?" the pilot asks as the tape shows about 40
men coming out of the building and heading down the street
away from the mosque, toward what some Web site accounts
said was a firefight between militants and American troops.


After a pause, the controller replies, saying, "Take them
out." 

The pilot, having fired his weapon, begins the countdown.
"Ten seconds," he says. 

"Roger," the controller replies. The combat camera swings
suddenly, picturing the scene from behind the men below. A
huge blast of smoke and flame erupts on the road,
enveloping the men, as the pilot cries "Impact!" 

The controller then closes the exchange. "Oh dude!" he
says, with what appears to be a chuckle. 

The execution tape then shifts to scenes of devastation
after an air attack on Falluja. It shows a crater, rubble,
people piling up belongings, injured being carried into a
hospital, and distraught-looking groups of civilians,
including children. Shifting back to Mr. Fawazi, it shows
him with his hands tied behind his back, looking downcast
at the ground, then nervously toward the camera, as the
heavyset man towering over him quotes passages from the
Koran ordaining death. "He who will abide by the Koran will
prosper, he who offends against it will get the sword," he
says, his right forefinger pumping in the air, pointing
first to heaven, then down to Mr. Fawazi. 

"The only reward for those who make war on Allah and on
Muhammad, his messenger, and plunge into corruption, will
be to be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet
severed on alternate sides, or be expelled from the land,"
the man says. With that, the two gunmen flanking the
executioner shout "Allahu akbar!" God is great, drop their
Kalashnikovs and tumble Mr. Fawazi face down on the ground.
The killer pulls his knife from behind a magazine belt on
his chest, grabs Mr. Fawazi by the hair, severs his head,
holds it up briefly to the camera, then places it between
his rope-tied hands on his back. 

Police Chief Presumed Corrupt 

On Aug. 21, the Marine
headquarters issued a brief news release. The police chief
of Anbar, Ja'adan Muhammad Alwan, had been arrested that
day in Ramadi on suspicion of "corruption and involvement
in criminal activities to include accepting bribes,
extortion, embezzling funds, as well as possible
connections with kidnapping and murder." A Marine
spokesman, Lt. Eric Knapp, declined to offer more details
of Mr. Alwan's charges, beyond saying, "everyone knew he
was corrupt." 

In the Hussein years, Mr. Alwan was a senior police officer
and also a high-ranking Baathist, people who knew him at
the time say. But unlike many Iraqis who prospered under
Mr. Hussein, those Ramadi residents said, he had never been
known as a thug. When the Americans arrived, leaders of a
local clan that had secretly cooperated with the invaders
vouched for him. But soon, one Ramadi resident said,
"People started to hate him because he was too cooperative
with the Americans." Repeated death threats followed, and
the three assassination attempts. The third, in May,
especially shook him, acquaintances said, because he
survived a rocket attack on his car, but his eldest son
lost a leg. 

Soon after, the verdict on the streets of Ramadi about the
police chief began to change. Although he may have raked in
illegal profits, Ramadi people say, he also began
cooperating with Islamic militants, even passing American
military plans to them. Although such claims are
unverifiable, the assassination attempts stopped. But so
too, last week, did Mr. Alwan's tenure as police chief. The
Marines say that his arrest followed a three-to-five month
investigation, that "countless government officials were
afraid of him" and that the provincial chief "contributed
to crime and instability." 

Asked whether Mr. Anbar was also charged with aiding the
insurrection, Lt. Knapp, the spokesman, said tersely by
e-mail, "We are investigating suspected ties to the
insurgency." Lt. Knapp described how the police chief was
lured to captivity. "To avoid bloodshed and to make the
arrest as clean as possible," he wrote, a Marine officer
who had been working with the police invited him to a
meeting in an American camp. On his arrival at the gate he
climbed into a car where he was advised of his arrest. The
e-mail message concluded, "He was then removed from the
vehicle, handcuffed, and blackout goggles were put on him
for security reasons." 

Sabotage by Humiliation 

In the case of the provincial governor, Abdulkarim Berjes,
Mr. Zarqawi's group, Unity and Holy War, appears to have
decided that it could achieve its ends, nullifying American
efforts to build governing institutions in the province, by
humiliating him - a punishment many Iraqi men regard as
worse than death. They then passed the videotape to the
Arab satellite news channel Al Jazeera, the most-watched
channel in Iraq. "He cried like a woman," one of the Iraqis
who watched the tape said, after viewing the governor's
reunion with his kidnapped sons in a militant safe house. 

At the end of June, Mr. Berjes, a former Anbar police chief
under Mr. Hussein, complained in a discussion at Camp
Falluja, the Marine base, that his government was riddled
with agents of the resistance. "I can no longer trust
anybody," Mr. Berjes said in a farewell meeting with L.
Paul Bremer III, the departing leader of the American
occupation authority. "I don't know if people are working
for me, or for the resistance." 

Mr. Berjes was visibly shaken, having survived an insurgent
ambush on his motorcade as he drove in his old American
limousine to the Marine base from Ramadi. 

In fact, Iraqis in Anbar say, the governor had become a
despised figure, for the same reason as Mr. Alwan, the
Anbar police chief - because he too enthusiastically
embraced the Americans and took to calling the resistance
fighters "terrorists." Following a common ritual among the
resistance, militants sent him a note of formal warning,
paraphrased by those who say they had been told about it as
saying: "We are watching you. Remember that we consider
anybody who cooperates with the Americans a traitor, to be
killed under Islamic law." 

On July 28, assailants entered the governor's residence in
Ramadi, snatching his three grown sons and setting fire to
the house. The governor got his final warning: repent and
resign, or your sons die. His capitulation was broadcast on
Aug. 6, in the video now circulating in Anbar markets.
Standing under the Zarqawi group's flag, he glumly recites:
"I announce my repentance before God and you for any deeds
I have committed against the holy warriors or in aid of the
infidel Americans. I announce my resignation at this
moment. All governors and employees who work with infidel
Americans should quit because these jobs are against Islam
and Iraqis." 

As the governor is reunited with his sons, a voice on the
tape recites the Zarqawi group's attacks on public
officials in the past three months. "We killed the
president of the Iraqi Governing Council, and then the
deputy minister of the interior," the voice says. "The
minister of justice survived our attack, but we killed the
governor of Mosul. And now we have captured the governor of
Anbar. The list is just beginning, and is far from
finished.'' More than three weeks after Mr. Berjes
resigned, the government of Ayad Allawi, seemingly hard put
to find anyone to take the job, has yet to appoint a
successor. 

American commanders confess they have no answers in Anbar,
and say their strategy is to curb the militants' ability to
project their violence farther afield, especially in
Baghdad. A recent meeting between Iraq's interim prime
minister, Dr. Allawi, and a delegation of tribal sheiks
from Falluja who have pledged fealty to Mr. Janabi is said
to have reached a standstill accord, with Dr. Allawi
promising not to sanction large-scale American attacks on
the Anbar cities, and the sheiks conveying Mr. Janabi's
pledge to halt militant attacks on the Americans. 

But leaving the militants in control could pose a disabling
threat to American political plans, which may already have
been shaken more than American officials will admit by
events in Najaf. Top American officials say that events
there, with Moktada al-Sadr's militiamen finally driven
from the Imam Ali Shrine, have set the stage for a turn in
American fortunes across the Shiite heartland of Iraq. But
even there the prospects seem deeply clouded by the failure
to effectively disarm Mr. Sadr's surviving fighters as they
left the shrine with shouldered rifles and donkey carts
loaded with rockets. 

Mr. Sadr has signed a new pledge to join the democratic
political process that will be the final measure of
American success here. But he has abrogated similar
undertakings, and many of his fighters vowed to take up
arms again. Coupled with the militants' control in Anbar,
that could unsettle plans for elections scheduled across
Iraq by the end of January - the next crucial step toward a
fully elected government by January 2006, an event American
officials see as a way station on the path to a draw down
or withdrawal of the 140,000 American troops here. 

Those Americans say a rapid buildup of the new Iraqi Army,
the national guard and the police, coupled with gathering
momentum in "turning dirt" on the thousands of
reconstruction projects financed by $18-billion in American
money, should eventually improve security across Iraq. But
the Americans acknowledge that a full, nationwide election
in January may not be possible. For now, they have
identified 15 cities across the Arab parts of Iraq that
they contend can be stabilized to make voting in January
possible. For the moment, they say, Falluja and Ramadi are
not among them. 

Iraqi staff members of The New York Timesin Baghdad
contributed reporting for this article. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/international/middleeast/29province.html?ex=1094792764&ei=1&en=c9b7e70d959bf9a5


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