Prolonged U.S. occupation turning Iraqis into fighters

By Newhouse News Service

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However, no foreign fighters were found. Instead, say Iraqi politicians and tribal leaders, the insurgents in the city of 150,000 were local citizens angered by months of what they perceived as unnecessary U.S. raids on houses, arrests of innocent people and collective punishment.

During the 17-month insurgency since the United States invaded Iraq, U.S. officials have painted a consistent picture of the enemy, pointing to religious extremists, so-called "dead-enders" with ties to the Saddam Hussein regime and foreigners who slip across the country's porous borders.

However, interviews with Iraqis of various political stripes suggest something starkly different: a growing but unknown number of ordinary Iraqi citizens have tired of the occupation and armed themselves to fight American troops.

They point to Tal Afar as an example.

U.S. forces, including the Fort Lewis-based Stryker Brigade, surrounded the city in early September and threatened to launch an attack. Then, troops said they were barraged by attacks, which they blamed on foreign fighters who infiltrated the city from Syria, about 50 miles away.

Songul Shapouk, the sole Turkman representative on the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, said she pleaded with Iraqi ministers and U.S. officials not to attack the city.

"We told [the Americans] there are not foreign fighters there," said Shapouk. "Don't attack this city. They are farmers. They are simple people."

Hakki Majdal, deputy director of Tal Afar General Hospital, said the insurgency grew primarily out of a combination of desperate economic conditions and mounting frustration with the U.S. occupation.

"There are no jobs, and if you are hungry, anyone can use you," said Majdal, a neurologist.

"The citizens are frustrated; everyone is frustrated," he said. "My house, for example, has been searched three times, and the last time they were very aggressive. They broke down my door. I was asleep in my house with my children, and suddenly [a soldier] was standing in front of me. I said, 'I am a doctor.' He said, '[Expletive] you.' "
 
Mohammad Qasoob Younis al-Jabouri, a tribal leader and a leader of the Iraq Coalition Party, joined a delegation of Iraqis who went into the city, hoping to convince people to turn over foreign extremists.

He said in a telephone interview from Mosul that power and water had been cut off, and that many of the homes were empty, their doors open. Instead of encountering foreign religious fundamentalists, he said, he found only Iraqis, about 70 fighters armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades.

Though he didn't see all the insurgents, he knew the ones he met were locals because they spoke Afriya, a Turkman dialect infused with Kurdish and Arab words unique to the people of Tal Afar.

"There were no Syrians or Jordanians or foreigners," Jabouri said.

After a days-long barrage, the U.S. forces went into Tal Afar Sept. 9. After a 13-hour ground assault, the Army's declared victory over forces that had turned Tal Afar into "a suspected haven for terrorists crossing into Iraq from Syria," according to a press release.

Although the U.S. military said 180 insurgents were killed in the entire operation against the city, almost no resistance was encountered during the ground attack. No Americans were killed.

"We thought there would be more, the indications were that there would be more, but there wasn't," said Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of U.S. forces involved in the operation.

Ham said U.S. commanders concluded that some of the insurgents had probably fled in anticipation of the attack. Others, he said, probably gave up after being pounded by U.S. airstrikes. U.S. officials conceded recently that no conclusive evidence of foreign fighters was found in Tal Afar.

Local politicians say Tal Afar was not a exception, that ordinary Iraqi citizens weary of the occupation are arming themselves to fight American troops.

"One of the basic mistakes the coalition made was misdescribing those who decided to take up arms against the coalition and now the current interim Iraqi government," says Sharif Ali bin Hussein, heir to Iraq's long-deposed king and head of the country's main monarchist party.

"The resistance is basically from groups that were marginalized and disenfranchised by the political process in Iraq when the United States decided to impose its exile friends from abroad without giving a role to ordinary Iraqis after liberation."

Added Naseer Kamel Chaderji, leader of a liberal Iraqi political party: "Many of the insurgents are not terrorists but people who feel betrayed by the process, people who've been left out of the political equation."

U.S. officials question whether a so-called wave of nationalism is leading citizens to start battling U.S. troops.

"I don't think the resistance is spreading," said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. John DeFreitas, deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Baghdad. "There are a lot of places in Iraq that have bought into the political process. And they're participating. That's a form of nationalism also.

"I don't buy the idea that the resistance is nationalistic. Someone may jump up and attack and say that this is for Iraq. That doesn't make it so."

U.S. counterinsurgency specialists, speaking to a group of reporters during a recent background briefing, said they don't distinguish between foreign radical fighters and armed citizens.

"We look at them all as forces from a simple perspective," said one general, speaking on condition of anonymity. "From my perspective, they're all threat forces. The motivation is different, the attacks are very similar."

Reported by Borzou Daragahi for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. Information on the U.S. assault on Tal Far was provided by The Washington Post.