Page 3 of
3 Death Street: A prelude to
madness By Michael
Schwartz
offensive action in Bush's
new strategy. Partly what they found was a
depressingly familiar scene: massive destruction,
police-state conditions, widespread suffering, and
ongoing fighting. But partly they found something
new: even as the threatened ethnic cleansing of
Shi'ites in the neighborhood finally appeared to
be completed, there was now a contrary campaign
mounted by the
mainly Shi'ite Iraqi army
with the support of the US military to expel the
Sunni majority:
A 44-year-old Haifa Street resident,
who asked to be identified only as Abu Mohammed
for security reasons, said that only three or
four [Sunni] families of an estimated 60
families remained on his block. He said no
vehicles were allowed to drive through the area
and that there was no electricity, kerosene or
running water. [US] snipers [had] taken
positions on the rooftops.
"They are
shooting randomly," he said. "Today, they shot
Raghad Marwan, a 28-year-old young woman who was
trying to get food. She got a bullet in her
shoulder, and now we don't know how to get her
to the hospital."
He said several
families were evacuating the neighborhood: "I
can see the families with their children walking
in the narrow streets of the neighborhood taking
nothing but small bags.
"The new
security plan has given militias permission to
go into our houses and apartments and kill
people," Abu Mohammed said. "This plan targets
Sunnis and forces them to leave their homes. And
they are."
The next day, Columbia
Broadcasting System reporter Lara Logan provided
horrifying visual evidence of conditions on Haifa
Street, in a report that only appeared on the CBS
website. It showed demolished buildings, deserted
neighborhoods, and the results of sectarian
torture on both sides. It concluded with a
resident who blamed the Americans for the plight
of his community:
They told us they would bring
democracy. They promised life would be better
than it was under Saddam [Hussein]. But they
brought us nothing but death and killing. They
brought mass destruction to Baghdad.
According to the McClatchy reporters,
"A US military spokesman said he had no reason to
believe Haifa Street residents' accounts." US
Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told a press
conference, "I am encouraged by what I have seen."
One week later, the battle for Haifa
Street continued. More and more residents were
fleeing the area, trying to escape US air strikes,
avoid the crossfire between the Americans and the
insurgents, or elude the death threats from either
side of the sectarian divide.
Reflecting
on the battle for a neighborhood that "the United
States has now fought to regain from a mysterious
enemy at least three times in the past two years",
Sergeant First Class Marc Biletski told New York
Times reporters Damien Cave and James Glanz, "This
place is a failure ... Every time we come here, we
have to come back."
In the meantime, the
departing Sunni population viewed the
still-unfinished battle as the latest episode in
US sponsorship of ethnic cleansing. During the
first day of fighting, Harith al-Dari, the leader
of the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), the
political arm of the Sunni resistance, called it
"a bloody sectarian massacre". Nine days later, an
AMS spokesman read the names of 12 men who had
been killed in the battle on Al-Jazeera Television
and then commented: "All of their guilt was that
they defended their neighborhood ... The American
president said in 2003, 'Mission accomplished.'
Now in 2007 he uses jet fighters a few meters from
the Green Zone."
The final word for the
present was perhaps spoken by another inhabitant
of the area, commenting on the ongoing
assassination of neighborhood residents by the
Iraqi military and police: "The Americans are
doing nothing, as if they are backing the
militias. This military siege is killing us ... If
this plan continues for one more week, I don't
think you will find one family left on Haifa
Street."
Early returns not encouraging
Even before the Americans arrived on Haifa
Street last month as the vanguard of the new Bush
strategy to pacify Baghdad, previous experience
strongly suggested that the effort was doomed to
failure. A month later, that expectation has
certainly been fulfilled.
Unfortunately,
there are some genuinely new, grim elements to the
battle for Haifa Street, elements that threaten to
make the coming Baghdad-wide "surge" dramatically
more damaging than its predecessors. To begin
with, there is the far greater application of US
air power; bombing runs and high-caliber assaults
from helicopter gunships have dramatically
increased the death and destructiveness of the
still-ongoing battle, rendering much of Haifa
Street an unlivable graveyard.
Added to
this is the systematic and largely successful
effort of the Sunni jihadists to expel the Shi'ite
minority from the area, an effort triggered by the
initial US incursions. And then, overlaid on top
of the cleansing of the Shi'ite minority, came the
contrary cleansing of the Sunni majority;
engineered by the Iraqi military that arrived in
the neighborhood with the Americans, and conducted
their own purge with the support or acquiescence
of the US military.
The Haifa Street
battle sadly shows that Bush's new strategy will
measurably increase the violence in Baghdad above
already intolerable levels. With more troops at
their disposal, American generals will try to
pacify many more neighborhoods like Haifa Street
and cities like Tal Afar that need "to be brought
back under Iraqi security control". And when they
do this, they will bring the same mix of horror
that they brought to Haifa Street, including
brutal air power, house-to-house searches and
fighting, sectarian violence, massive dislocation,
and ethnic cleansing.
Like the other
campaigns initiated by the US occupation of Iraq,
this new strategy will make things measurably
worse.
Michael Schwartz,
professor of sociology and faculty director of the
Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony
Brook University, has written extensively on
popular protest and insurgency as well as on US
business and government dynamics. His books
include Radical Protest and Social Structure
and Social Policy and the Conservative
Agenda (edited with Clarence Lo). His e-mail
address is Ms42@optonline.net.
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