Home > The Plot Thickens in Iraq
Asia Times
August 22, 2003
THE ROVING EYE
The plot thickens
By Pepe Escobar
HANOI - Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon erstwhile protege,
leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), member of
the American-appointed Iraqi interim government in Iraq
and a convicted criminal in Jordan, went on record in
Baghdad saying that he had received intelligence on
Thursday, August 14, that "a large-scale act would take
place ... against a soft target, such as Iraqi political
parties or other parties, including the UN". He even
learned that the attack would be a truck bombing - by
means of a suicide bomber or a remote-controlled
detonator. Chalabi also made clear that according to
this intelligence, "neither the Coalition Provisional
Authority nor coalition troops" would be attacked.
Chalabi is usually not recognized as a reliable source.
But if this startling piece of information is true, it
means two things:
1) The Americans in Iraq knew about an
attack, and did nothing to try to prevent it.
2) The UN
itself didn’t know anything about it, according to Fred
Eckhard, spokesman for secretary general Kofi Annan: "To
my knowledge, that information was not relayed to the
United Nations."
The frightening possibility that Chalabi knew it, the
Americans knew it, the UN didn’t and the Americans did
nothing to improve security at the UN headquarters will
only benefit one player: the Pentagon, according to
which Iraq is now the central battle in the "war against
terrorism". And right on cue, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and US Central Command chief General John
Abizaid, in a joint briefing, declared Iraq now to be a
sort of terrorist Woodstock.
Whatever goes terribly wrong in Iraq is not enough to
force the Pentagon to change its script. It still
refuses to acknowledge the indigenous broad-based Iraqi
resistance against the occupation, which, as Asia Times
Online has reported, spreads out from Sunni mosques and
is guided by patriotism. The Pentagon keeps repeating
what it wants to hear - and it all comes from none other
than Chalabi, according to whom there was an important
meeting between the notorious "remnants of Saddam’s
regime" and "international terrorists" before the UN
bombing.
The Pentagon may have a point when one considers that a
substantial part of Iraqi public opinion is convinced
that true patriotic Iraqis could not have perpetrated
the attack. Some Islamic factions of the Iraqi
resistance - like the Iraqi National Islamic Resistance
Movement - have in fact condemned the UN bombing as a
"criminal act", although up to now other factions, like
the White Flags, the Muslim Youth and the Army of
Mohammed, have not said anything. But it’s crucial to
note that the Iraqi National Islamic Resistance Movement
has denied the involvement of all Iraqi resistance
factions, not only in the UN bombing but in the attacks
against the Jordanian embassy and the oil pipelines: it
says these attacks discredit the true Iraqi resistance.
Even if the Iraqi resistance was not responsible for
these attacks, this does not mean that there is no heavy
indigenous opposition to the occupation - as the
Pentagon script demands. It’s much easier to blame
everything on al-Qaeda, the Ansar al-Islam or a fuzzy
terrorist Woodstock with players coming from Saudi
Arabia, Syria and Afghanistan.
Ansar al-Islam - led by Mullah Krekar, at the moment
exiled in Norway - may have been a very convenient tool
manipulated by the Pentagon. For three years, the
organization was based in the village of Bijara, in
northeasten Iraq, almost an enclave in Iranian
territory. Last March, its hideout was bombed into
oblivion by the Americans. The Pentagon version at the
time was that Ansar was virtually extinct. But now
Ansar’s leadership has mysteriously managed to resurface
– and in heavily-patrolled Baghdad, of all places.
According to Kurdish sources, a key element of the
leadership is Abu Wayl, a former colonel in Saddam’s
security services reconverted into operational chief of
Ansar’s "Arab battalion".
The Americans have already blamed Ansar al-Islam for the
attack on the Jordanian embassy. Jordan, for its part,
blames Abu Mussad al-Zarkaoui, a Jordanian national, as
one of Ansar’s top operatives. Of myriad groups
operating in Kurdistan, there have been no Ansar-related
arrests so far. On the other hand, the Americans have
arrested Ali Bapir, the leader of Jamiya Islamiya, and
Mullah Ali Abdul Aziz, the charismatic leader of the
Islamic Movement of Kurdistan - the main Kurdish Islamic
force, which even has two ministers in the local
government dominated by Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan (PUK, also a member of the interim
government).
Nobody knows where Mullah Abdul Aziz is being held. The
Americans are accusing both Jamiya Islamiya and the
Kurdistan Islamic Movement of having links with Ansar.
The complicating factor is that all these groups come
from the same source: the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan,
created in 1988 and fragmented in three factions in
1990. Ansar al-Islam decided to launch a jihad against
the kaffirs (infidels) of the PUK. The other two
remained legal. But they also consider themselves jihadi
groups: the difference is they don’t think a jihad
against the PUK - as well as a jihad against the
Americans - is justified at this stage.
A crucial fact is that both Islamist groups enjoy huge
popular support in Kurdistan: many Kurds are in fact fed
up with Jalal Talabani’s barely-disguised dictatorship.
But as the Americans have branded these groups as
"terrorists", the only one to benefit is Talabani, an
American ally. And why are these Kurds fed up? We come
back to the same point: because in a real democratic set
up in Iraq, it is Islamist parties that inevitably touch
popular sentiment, with their central message that
Muslims cannot accept to be pawns of a foreign and non-
Muslim occupation force.
The Pentagon line of "remnants of Saddam’s regime", now
composed with "international terrorists", is supposed to
explain the actions of all those anti-American "evil
doers" on the loose in Iraq. It’s much more complex than
that. During the Saddam era all sort of crypto-Wahhabi
groups were more or less tolerated - as long as they did
not meddle in politics. Obviously, these groups were all
of them anti-Saddam. Post-Saddam Iraq finally offered
them the perfect cause: resistance against foreign
occupation. This has absolutely nothing to do with al-
Qaeda or Ansar al-Islam. Al-Qaeda - which was never
tolerated inside Iraq - or the enclaved Ansar al-Islam
could never have organized such a disciplined resistance
in two or three months.
As the Iraqi resistance is so multi-faceted, there’s
every possibility that the UN bombing was perpetrated by
elements of this Wahhabi network, already in existence
in the Saddam era. And as unfortunate as it may seem,
the UN for them is a pretty legitimate target. Human
rights groups have extensively documented how UN
Resolutions 661 and 687 may have been responsible for
the deaths of at least 500,000 Iraqi children in the
1990s, due to entirely preventable diseases. For many
strands of the Iraqi resistance, the UN is just a tool
of the occupying power.
On top of it, the Baghdad office of the World Bank was
also in the UN building . Many Iraqi patriots in fact
welcomed the fact that the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) "suspended" their
activities in Iraq after the bombing. Educated Iraqis
are very much aware of the dreaded IMF-imposed
"structural adjustments" and the ghastly record of the
World Bank in terms of alleviating poverty in the
developing world. The rationale of the Iraqi resistance
is that there are no holds barred to prevent an
occupation designed to steal Iraq’s fabulous oil
resources and also plunder its already devastated
economy.
So not only soldiers are legitimate targets. Corporate
employees of Kellogg Brown and Co (a subsidiary of
Halliburton) or any other corporation likely to make a
killing out of Iraq’s resources are legitimate targets.
UN employees are legitimate targets. The IMF and the
World Bank are legitimate targets. The Pentagon’s
response is predictable. It will send more troops. Not
regular troops, but most of its 29,000 specialists in
repression of urban guerrilla and terrorist groups with
military training. They may kill thousands more Iraqis,
but they won’t kill a national liberation movement,
operated by people who lived for years in a militarized
society awash with weapons. And the message of this
national liberation movement to those who concocted and
want to profit from the invasion of their country is
stark: welcome to hell.
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