The Making of an Iraqi Guerrilla: One Man's Tale

[NNN0LHI]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/oneworld/20030815/wl_oneworld/4536661091060976965&cid=655&ncid=1480

BAGHDAD One night at the end of June, a young Iraqi man goes out to ambush an American convoy near the central Iraqi town of Fallujah.

He is wearing his favorite blue tracksuit. He is a small guy, solid and compact, with cropped dark hair and a chin that juts out slightly. He likes tough sports, especially handball. He can stub out a cigarette on the calluses of his left palm. It will be his first time in combat.

Although he has trained only fleetingly for what he is about to do, he is not afraid. "If I die for a reason, that's a nice thing," he says later. snip

The man's motivations for attacking the convoy are simple: to resist the American "insult to Iraqi and Arab tradition." snip

Beyond individual accounts, the origins of the anti-American guerrilla war are obscure. US officials and officers have long blamed the remnants of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s Baathist regime. They have also begun speculating about the possibility that "foreign fighters" or even Al Qaeda are participating in the Iraqi resistance.

But the man in the blue tracksuit is no Baathist; he complains about the old regime's corruption and other failings. He cites his two years as an Army conscript. For enlisted men, he says, military service was like living in a jungle full of lions - the rapacious, bribe-soliciting senior officers. His career as a handball player stalled because he wouldn't or couldn't pay a bribe to get on the national team.

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[David__77]

1. Broad pool of potential resistance recruits...

This is no ideological thing... it's not Ba'athist or anything like that. It's a simple question of America and Israel on the one hand, and the Muslim and Arab people on the other. There may be disagreements here on the nature of the solution, but I think we can agree that Bush's neocon controllers are leading us to a "clash of civilizations," out of which no good can come.