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THE
ROVING EYE
Jihad in
Mesopotamia
By Pepe Escobar
RUWEISHED, eastern Jordan - Saddam Hussein has
called on Iraqi television for a jihad against the
Anglo-American invasion of his country. And the jihad is
already on. Saddam's complex amalgam of militantly
secular Arab leader, devout believer and bold warrior of
Islam is now total. From the depths of his
bunker-cum-television studio, Saddam is promising to
deliver hell: widespread jihad, urban guerrilla,
man-to-man fighting in each and every Iraqi city. The
Pentagon may underestimate Saddam at its own peril.
George W Bush personalized this war. Saddam
played along, taking it to the battleground of the
world, and especially Arab public opinion. Saddam has
seized on his unique chance to be seen in many parts of
the world, even though he might be detested, to be
fighting a neocolonialist war, and to be seen in the
Arab world as the only leader with enough courage to
stand up to the superpower. Carefully calibrating his
latest speech, drawing from a wealth of poetic resources
in the Arabic language, and tapping on deep Arab and
Muslim resentment against the United States, Saddam is
also increasingly sounding like Osama bin Laden - who
ironically despised the Iraqi leader as an infidel.
Saddam's guerrilla tactics have already proved
to be somewhat effective. What for the Pentagon is a
breakdown of central control is in fact the result of
Saddam dividing Iraq into four largely autonomous
military zones. The regime can count on support among
three different forces: the Republican and Special
Republican Guards; the paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam
(Saddam's Men of Sacrifice), which has a total strength
reportedly between 30,000 and 40,000 troops; and the
complex alliances with Bedouin tribes, clans and
sub-clans. The Guards, with two divisions already being
bombed to oblivion on the outskirts of Baghdad, will be
instrumental in the fierce, looming battle of Baghdad.
The very mobile Fedayeen are resisting in the southern
cities of Umm Qasr, Basra and Nasiriyah. And the tribes
will be fighting in central Mesopotamia and the north to
defend Arab honor, pride and most of all their own
privileges, fully guaranteed as they are by the Ba'ath
Party. Saddam is placing all his bets on an extremely
brutal and much protracted war that will turn him into a
Muslim hero with even wider appeal than bin Laden.
A single powerful image is haunting the Arab
world: a closeup, taken from footage shot by the
television station al-Jazeera, of a beautiful boy in
Basra with half of his head blown away. The photo has
already become a screensaver on many a computer. Mustafa
Hamarneh, from the Strategic Studies Institute at the
University of Jordan, says, "Iraq has won Round 1 big,
very big." Hamarneh estimates that opposition to war in
the Middle East is practically 100 percent. "Iraq is
seen as truthful and America is seen as a liar." He
confirms what can be easily attested to in any Jordanian
cafe - Saddam is now being regarded as the underdog Arab
brother, "a hero".
Tomahawks may have pulverized
the Ansar al-Islam enclave in the mountains of eastern
Kurdistan, near the Iranian border. But hundreds of
warriors of the Islamist sub-group that have been linked
to al-Qaeda have survived, and have vowed to engage in a
jihad against the Anglo-American invasion. Pakistani and
Afghan sources tell Asia Times Online that thousands of
Arab-Afghan mujahideen have already deployed around
Baghdad and Mosul preparing suicide commando - or
"martyrdom" - operations against the invasion, as well
as 2,500 Hezbollah from Lebanon. About 700 Algerian
volunteers who received weapons training in Iraqi camps
are also at hand. The mujahideen will fight to the death
because they are all convinced that the occupation of
Iraq is the springboard for further occupation of other
Arab and Muslim nations. But it is impossible to confirm
for the time being assertions by different sources that
key al-Qaeda operatives have also entered Iraq through
Iranian Kurdistan.
All mujahideen are given
official approval from the regime to enter Iraqi
territory. They are "unilaterals" - not linked with the
Ba'ath Party structure - and are developing their own
independent strategies. These separate commandos of
Ansar al-Islam, Hezbollah, Algerians and Afghan-Arabs
will be instrumental in boosting Saddam's master plan of
a protracted jihad-cum-guerrilla war. As the scholars of
the al-Azhar Islamic University in Cairo - the Vatican
of the Sunni Muslim world and the leading university in
the Islamic world - have already made clear, this is a
defensive jihad, and absolutely legal from the point of
view of Islamic jurisprudence. About 12,000 students at
al-Azhar have been chanting "Baghdad don't surrender"
for two days now.
Observers in the region see
increasing signs that the Pentagon war is not developing
according to script. No flowers. No applause. The latest
developments in the field have conclusively buried the
Washington-hawk idea of a "clean", aseptic, mechanized
parade fought over a green-lit video-game screen. Only
the presumption of Pentagon civilians such as Richard
Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, and Paul
Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, would see the
proud heirs of the Assyrians and the Babylonians
resigning themselves to be bombed and then patiently
wait for the invaders-liberators to cover them with
fruit, flowers and kisses. Ba'ath Party war rhetoric
aside, the message from the still intact leadership in
Baghdad is very direct: the invaders may roll and
control the desert, but they will suffer in the cities;
and they will not be received with flowers, but with
bullets.
Washington wonders why there has not
been an uprising in the Shi'ite south. It's because
Arabs, Sunni or Shi'ite, are carefully scrutinizing all
the symbolism of this war. Where the Americans see only
an open desert littered with charred Iraqi bodies and
smoldering, gutted vehicles, the Shi'ites watch in
horror a roll of invading tanks desecrating the holy
city of Najaf, 160 kilometers south of Baghdad - the
city where the revered 14th century Imam Ali is buried.
Shi'ites praise the symbolic value of Ali Obeid,
an aged peasant from the Hindiyah tribe credited with
shooting down an Apache helicopter with his bolt-action
rifle near the holy city of Karbala, 110km southwest of
Baghdad and at the site of the key 7th-century battle
where Imam Hussein was killed. Americans can't
understand the mindset of a Fedayeen in his hideout with
only a filthy blanket to protect him from the cold
desert nights and just a plastic bag of raw meat for
food, resisting like a madman and then fleeing for
another position, leaving behind a photo of his two
children.
After the Tomahawks erupting from
aircraft carriers, after tanks rolling in the desert as
if they were in the Paris-Dakar rally, after the
apocalyptic first night of Shock and Awe in Baghdad, the
next image in the Pentagon screenplay would be flowers
and applause for the liberators. But nobody can shoot
the scene because the actors refuse to act.
American military strategist Harlan Ullman is
the conceptual father of Shock and Awe. As he describes
it, "You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the
nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks
but minutes." In its carefully orchestrated ongoing
bombing lesson for a global audience, the Pentagon was
adamant to shatter Iraq "physically, emotionally and
psychologically". It hasn't. At least not yet.
The daily news conference in the US Central
Command in Doha barely disguises how the Pentagon is so
obviously desperate for Iraqi surrender. But sources
tell Asia Times Online that absolutely no American
high-level contacts have been made with the Iraqi
Revolutionary Command Council - apart from Pentagon
disinformation saying that Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister
Tarik Aziz has defected or that Vice President Taha
Yassin Ramadan has been killed. US Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld himself has admitted that defections are
being encouraged only at a lower level.
(©2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication
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