Return to Fallujah - Parable of America's "Success"

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick01282008.html


January 28, 2008

Parable of America's "Success"

Return to Fallujah

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Fallujah.

A crucial Iraqi ally of the United States in its recent successes in the country is threatening to withdraw his support and allow al-Qa'ida to return if his fighters are not incorporated into the Iraqi army and police.

"If there is no change in three months there will be war again," said Abu Marouf, the commander of 13,000 fighters who formerly fought the Americans. He and his men switched sides last year to battle al-Qa'ida and defeated it in its main stronghold in and around Fallujah.

"If the Americans think they can use us to crush al-Qa'ida and then push us to one side, they are mistaken," Abu Marouf told me in an interview in a scantily furnished villa beside an abandoned cemetery near the village of Khandari outside Fallujah. He said that all he and his tribal following had to do was stand aside and al-Qa'ida's fighters would automatically come back. If they did so he might have to ally himself to a resurgent al-Qa'ida in order to "protect myself and my men".

Abu Marouf said he was confident that his forces controlled a swath of territory stretching east from Fallujah into Baghdad and includes what Americans called "the triangle of death" south-west of the capital. Even so his bodyguards, armed with AK-47 assault rifles, nervously watched the abandoned canals and reed beds around his temporary headquarters. Others craned over light machine guns in newly built watch towers. Several anti-Qa'ida tribal leaders have been killed by suicide bombers in recent weeks.

His threat is highly dangerous for the US and Iraqi government, neither of which made any headway in ending the Sunni insurgency against the US occupation for four years until the tribes of Anbar, the province in which Fallujah lies, turned against al-Qa'ida. They formed the Awakening movement, known in Arabic as al-Sahwah, of which Abu Marouf, whose full name is Karim Ismail Hassan al-Zubai, is a leading member.

[acmavm]

1. Between the white phosphorus and the depleted uranium used

on that city I wouldn't want to be anywhere near it. Iraqi or American.

[gratuitous]

2. A curious thing

All those guns and ammunition we gave our Iraqi friends will still work when they decide they don't want to be our friends anymore.