Fury Ignites Solidarity in Iraq

BAGHDAD - April 9, 2003, was the day this city fell to
U.S. forces. One year later, it is rising up against
them.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claims that the
resistance is just a few "thugs, gangs and terrorists."
This is dangerous, wishful thinking. The war against the
occupation is now being fought out in the open, by
regular people defending their homes - an Iraqi
intifada.

"They stole our playground," an 8-year-old boy in Sadr
City told me this week, pointing at six tanks parked in
a soccer field next to a rusty jungle gym. The field is
a precious bit of green in an area of Baghdad that is
otherwise a swamp of raw sewage and uncollected garbage.

Sadr City has seen little of Iraq’s multibillion-dollar
"reconstruction," which is partly why Muqtader Sadr and
his Al Mahdi army have so much support here. Before U.S.
occupation chief L. Paul Bremer III provoked Sadr into
an armed conflict by shutting down his newspaper and
arresting and killing his deputies, the Al Mahdi army
was not fighting coalition forces; it was doing their
job for them.

After all, in the year it has controlled Baghdad, the
Coalition Provisional Authority still hasn’t managed to
get the traffic lights working or to provide the most
basic security for civilians. So in Sadr City, Sadr’s
so-called "outlaw militia" can be seen engaged in such
subversive activities as directing traffic and guarding
factories. It was Bremer who created Iraq’s security
vacuum; Sadr simply filled it.

But as the June 30 "handover" to Iraqi control
approaches, Bremer now sees Sadr and the Al Mahdi as a
threat that must be eliminated - at any cost to the the
communities that have grown to depend on them. Which is
why stolen playgrounds were only the start of what I saw
in Sadr City this week. At Al Thawra Hospital, I met
Raad Daier, an ambulance driver with a bullet in his
abdomen, one of 12 shots he says were fired at his
ambulance from a U.S. Humvee. At the time of the attack,
according to hospital officials, he was carrying six
people injured by U.S. forces, including a pregnant
woman who had been shot in the stomach and lost her
baby.

I saw charred cars, which dozens of eyewitnesses said
had been hit by U.S. missiles, and I confirmed with
hospitals that their drivers had been burned alive. I
also visited Block 37 of the Chuadir District, a row of
houses where every door was riddled with holes.
Residents said U.S. tanks drove down their street firing
into homes. Five people were killed, including Murtada
Muhammad, age 4.

And Thursday, I saw something that I feared more than
any of this: a copy of the Koran with a bullet hole
through it. It was lying in the ruins of what was Sadr’s
headquarters in Sadr City. A few hours earlier,
witnesses said, U.S. tanks broke down the walls of the
center after two guided missiles pierced its roof. The
worst damage, however, was done by hand. Clerics at the
Sadr office said soldiers entered the building and
shredded photographs of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the
top Shiite cleric in Iraq. When I arrived at the
destroyed center, the floor was covered with torn
religious texts, including copies of the Koran that had
been ripped and shot through with bullets. And it did
not escape the notice of the Shiites here that hours
earlier, U.S. soldiers had bombed a Sunni mosque in
Fallouja.

For months, the White House has been making ominous
predictions of a civil war breaking out between the
majority Shiites, who believe it’s their turn to rule
Iraq, and the minority Sunnis, who want to hold onto the
privileges they amassed under Saddam Hussein. But this
week, the opposite appeared to have taken place. Both
Sunnis and Shiites have seen their homes attacked and
their religious sites desecrated. Up against a shared
enemy, they are beginning to bury ancient rivalries and
join forces against the occupation. Instead of a civil
war, they are on the verge of building a common front.
You could see it at the mosques in Sadr City on
Thursday: Thousands of Shiites lined up to donate blood
destined for Sunnis hurt in the attacks in Fallouja. "We
should thank Paul Bremer," Salih Ali told me. "He has
finally united Iraq. Against him."

Naomi Klein is author of "Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization
Debate" (Picador, 2002).

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-klein9apr09,1,7330086.story