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THE ROVING EYE
The battle for
Shi'ite hearts and minds
By Pepe
Escobar
AMMAN - Najaf and Karbala are the
holiest sites of Shi'ite Islam. Najaf - where Ayatollah
Khomeini lived before returning to lead the Islamic
Revolution in Iran in 1979 - is the site of Imam Ali's
tomb, the Prophet Mohammed's cousin and revered 14th
century founder of the Shi'ite branch of Islam. Karbala
is the site of the famous 7th century battle where Imam
Hussein was killed and subsequently buried.
To
the utmost horror of Shi'ites everywhere - Arabs,
Persians, South Asians - American tanks are now rumbling
around Najaf and Karbala. If the conquest of Baghdad -
the iconic seat of the Caliphate for 700 years - is
bound to ignite fury in the Sunni Arab world, one
shudders to imagine what would happen in the Shi'ite
world if Najaf and Karbala are desecrated during the war
or under American occupation. Sheikh Mohamed al-Khakani,
a top imam in Najaf, has in fact already called for a
jihad: "Iraqis should defend their country, honor and
religion by expelling the unbelievers from the land of
Islam." This de facto defensive jihad goes a long way to
explain why Shi'ites in southern Iraq are not welcoming
the Anglo-American tanks with wine and roses, as had
been widely expected.
Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr
al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) - the most important Iraqi
Shi'ite opposition group, based in Tehran - has been no
less explicit. He promised that his Badr Brigades - an
army of 15,000 deployed partly in Iran and partly in
Iraqi Kurdistan - will wage war against the Americans if
they reveal themselves to be occupiers.
A
Lebanese source confirms that about 700 Hezbollah
warriors are already in Iraq. They are familiar with
Najaf and Karbala, are in tune with the parallels being
drawn across the Arab world between the Anglo-American
invasion of Iraq and the 1982 Israeli invasion of
Lebanon. The Lebanese Shi'ites at the time received the
Israelis as liberators. But when the Israelis revealed
themselves as an occupying force, the Shi'ites turned on
them.
Instinctively, the majority of Arabs,
Sunni or Shi'ite, view the whole American policy in the
Middle East as anti-Arab. They are quick to point out
how after the 1991 Gulf War, for example, the Kurds in
northern Iraq got their autonomous zone, unlike the
Shi'ites in the south. In operation "Iraqi Freedom", the
Pentagon has been forced to face the hard reality of the
Iraqis' fighting spirit as the Saddam Hussein regime
resists. Now this is a real war - in the full scope of
its tragedy. More (at least 120,000) American troops in
the war theater. More bombings. More targets. More
civilian victims. And the main victims of the renewed
war in southern Iraq - essential to secure humanitarian
operations - will remain Shi'ite civilians.
The
proof of the Pentagon's strategic failure is one
Lieutenant-General William Wallace's statement from the
field: "This enemy is different from the one we
war-gamed." American military strategist Harlan Ullman's
Shock and Awe, as a concept, is dead. Before they
encircle Baghdad - even Iraqi generals recognize it
could happen by the end of next week - Americans will
have to battle the Medina Division of the Republican
Guards, which moved from south Baghdad to the Karbala
Gap, a narrow bit of land between a lake and the
Euphrates river. Pentagon generals might think that once
the Medina and Baghdad divisions are vanquished the game
is over. But then there will be the siege of Baghdad -
and Washington simply cannot afford to turn Baghdad into
a Grozny or Jenin. By that time the British would have
attacked and occupied Basra and the Americans defeated
the stiff resistance of the paramilitary Fedayeen
militias in the Shi'ite south. But the Sunni Fedayeen
are not alone: they are getting help from Shi'ites who
refuse to bow to a foreign occupying force.
In
Basra, Shi'ite women in black were and are still putting
the Iraqi flag in bombed buildings and chanting slogans
praising Saddam. They were supposed to be happy with
their "liberation". But the fact is the invasion
strengthened Saddam both inside Iraq and around the Arab
world. The invasion simply smashed Saddam's political
opposition. Saddam's well-documented and reprehensible
Stalinist practices are not the issue any more. The US
hawks haven't been doing their homework: Palestine and
now Iraq are vivid demonstrations that no Arab will ever
tolerate an occupying force on Arab land. It will take
divine intervention for America to capture the Shi'ite
hearts and minds. For Shi'ites, Arab nationalism - and
especially the Ba'ath Party version adapted by Saddam
for his own purposes - is nothing but undisguised Sunni
domination. "Arab nationalism" has been a kind of byword
for a social contract lasting many decades in Iraq. The
Shi'ites will have no more of it. But they cannot trust
the Americans to free them. They view Washington as
hostile to Shi'ite Iran, to the Shi'ites in Syria and
Lebanon, and only interested in oil in Shi'ite southern
Iraq and oil in the Shi'ite eastern province of Saudi
Arabia. Moreover, Shi'ites - who consider themselves
Iraqis first and foremost - still remember how they were
betrayed by Bush senior in March 1991. The British are
now forced to conquer Basra. There are at least three
good reasons for it: to smash the active guerrilla
campaign by the Fedayeen; to prevent a humanitarian
disaster that would definitely consolidate the already
monolithic international revulsion towards the war; and
to produce those mythical images of "liberation" on
Anglo-American TV that simply refuse to materialize.
While Western eyes focus on Basra, Shi'ite eyes are
predominantly fixed on what is happening in Najaf, 140
kilometers south of Baghdad. The city is in fact
surrounded and cut off from the rest of the country.
Najaf is a key communications center. That's where the
main supply route running along the Euphrates river from
Nasiriyah and the port of Umm Qasr (to the east of the
Euphrates river) meets another road (to the west). Najaf
has an airport. And from Najaf, there are roads on both
sides of the Euphrates getting to within 50 kilometers
of Baghdad. The Iraqi army's desperate plan is to cut
the Americans' serpent line of communication along and
across the Euphrates, and then isolate the extended
American 5th Marine Corps. They don't stand much of a
chance, though.
Inside Najaf, the resistance is
organized by Saddam's Fedayeen, the ragtag al-Quds
Liberation Army and Ba'ath Party officials. They all
know there's no way out: they will die fighting. Nobody
actually knows what's happening inside the city of
100,000, built around the fabulous golden mosque where
Imam Ali is buried. Nobody knows how many civilians -
all of them Shi'ite - have already died in Najaf,
Nasiriyah and Basra. There are no images to do justice
to them - but their sacrifice will be vivid in Shi'ite
hearts and minds. Shi'ites never forget their sorrow:
for them, the 7th century battle of Karbala and the
martyrdom of Imam Ali are as vivid as the American
forces ripping today through Karbala and Najaf.
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