The resistance of Muqtada al-Sadrs angry young men to United States forces in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf reveals the failures of post-Saddam reconstruction.
The current epicentre of the war on terror is the Shia holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq. As the forces of the militant young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr continue to resist United States military pressure, the pattern of uneasy truce and intermittent combat that has developed over the last two weeks continues. A visiting delegation from the national conference in Baghdad charged with selecting an interim assembly was unable to secure an agreement to halt the violence, and the leader of the Mahdi army seems determined to maximise his advantage before agreeing to any evacuation of his forces from the centre of Najaf.
One year after the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad on 19 August 2003, openDemocracy columnist Gil Loescher remembers the event, pays tribute to colleague Arthur Helton and the others who lost their lives, and considers the future of the UNs humanitarian work
In other parts of Iraq, the insurgency has continued. The Baghdad gathering met at a conference centre in the green zone under conditions of very high security but was still subject to a near-miss from a mortar attack. There were further mortar attacks elsewhere in the city, and three people were killed and nine wounded in a bomb attack on 17 August. An upsurge in militia activity in the southern city of Basra has caused the deaths of three British soldiers within eight days.
In a pattern that has become more clearly established over the past six months, American forces have persisted in an early recourse to air strikes in urban areas. On 14 August, eight people were killed and ten injured in a strike on two houses in Fallujah. The US authorities reported that they were attacking a centre of insurgency, but a doctor at the general hospital in the city said that those killed included two women and two children.
On the same day there was extensive fighting in another insurgent stronghold, the city of Samarra. According to US army captain Bill Coppernoll, one bombing raid was part of an operation termed Cajun Mousetrap III, which was conducted to assist in the freedom of movement for Iraqi citizens and deny the enemy sanctuary in the surrounding area initial reports indicate that approximately fifty anti-Iraqi forces were killed.
In other fighting in Samarra, thirteen Iraqis were killed and eighty-four wounded; three women and two children were among the dead, and many of the wounded were also women and children, according to a hospital source. Police officials said that forty homes, the offices of government officials and of a local political party were destroyed in the fighting.
Meanwhile, fighting between Shia militia and Iraqi and coalition forces in Hilla, south of Baghdad, resulted in eight deaths and thirty-three people injured, and two Polish troops were killed there in a further incident on 18 August. The same day, six people were killed and twenty-three injured in a mortar attack on a market in Mosul, northern Iraq. These major incidents are occurring in the context of a wider pattern that includes many smaller-scale attacks and exchanges of fire, few of which are covered in any way in western media.
The cost of exclusion
At the same time, a more detailed profile of the Shia militia active in southern Iraq, and some of the underlying reasons for its rising significance in the insurgency, are becoming more apparent. What is repeatedly evident in descriptions of members of Muqtada al-Sadrs militia is the presence of large numbers of mostly young unemployed or underemployed men. They come largely from the marginalised sectors of Iraqi society, and their personal circumstances have not improved since the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime indeed, they have almost certainly got worse.
The sources of this deterioration are clear. The pace of reconstruction has been far slower than expected; much of its organisation has been on free-market lines and has had highly negative consequences for many sectors of Iraqi society. Paul Bremers Coalition Provisional Authority saw Iraq as a test bed for neo-conservative free-market ideology, but it was also a warped version in that it was seen and presented as an opportunity for the heavy involvement of already powerful foreign investors and companies, especially from the United States.
Time after time, foreign contractors and overseas labour arrived to initiate projects that could have been readily done by Iraqi companies and former Iraqi government agencies and departments. The latter were frequently discounted on the grounds of their links with the old regime, an argument that also worked to benefit US contractors. This exclusion of Iraqis from the reconstruction of their own country has been particularly dominant in the many instances of large-scale financial investment in building facilities (both temporary and permanent) for the US military. There, this time on grounds of security, workers from south and south-east Asia have been employed rather than Iraqis themselves.
The impact of these decisions on the labour market is severe. It is hard to reach reliable, overall assessments of unemployment in Iraq, but it is probable that about 50% of the adult male population are either unemployed or seriously underemployed; some estimates are even higher. The Shia community, historically excluded from power and business influence in Iraq, is particularly affected. This community, comprising around 60% of the Iraqi population, was already the poorest sector of Iraqi society under the Saddam regime; the crushingly poor Shia district of Sadr City (formerly Saddam City), the 2-million strong slum quarter of Baghdad, is the most visible sign of this.
The persistent marginalisation of the Shia majority fuelled expectations that United States troops would be welcomed in the Shia heartland of southern and south-eastern Iraq. The long-term repression of many Shia under Saddam which included the murder of Muqtada al-Sadrs own father reinforced this assessment. Against it were memories of the refusal by the US to aid the Shia community in its 1991 rebellion after the first Gulf war.
In the event, the fact that any such Shia support for American forces has largely evaporated may be one of the most remarkable reversals of the past sixteen months. The famous remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime that Paul Bremer described a year ago may already have coalesced into a more substantial Sunni insurgency that now controls Fallujah and several other towns, but much more significant is the turning of substantial sectors of the majority Shia population, including the emergence of militias in Najaf, Basra, and Kut.
Will Sunni and Shia combine?
To understand the current volatile situation in Iraq, two other elements must be considered. First, and cited in last weeks column in this series, is the developing collaboration between insurgents in largely Sunni cities like Fallujah with those in Najaf and other Shia cities. One example is of a group of around forty officers and troops, led by a former colonel with the old regimes Special Republican Guard, who had actually travelled from Fallujah to Najaf to help train al-Sadrs inexperienced young militia.
Second, and equally significant, is the impact of the insurgency on economic reconstruction. The major part of the insurgency across Iraq has until recently been focused on the central region, the so-called Sunni triangle between Baghdad, Fallujah and Tikrit. It has involved many kinds of action - roadside bombs, mortar attacks, rocket-propelled grenade and light-arms attacks, kidnappings and assassinations.
Many of these operations have had an indirect economic impact, especially through the repeated closure of major transport routes and the withdrawal of foreign contractors. A more recent variation in tactics has been the direct economic targeting of oil and gas pipelines and power supplies; the firing of an oil well near the southern town of al-Amara on 17 August is the latest example of the trend.
The cumulative effect of these attacks has been to create a massive obstacle to the regeneration of the Iraqi economy; this in turn helps to ensure the continuing high levels of unemployment and the widespread grievances that fuel recruitment to al-Sadrs Mahdi army. The resulting coalescence is extraordinary: the largely Sunni-based insurgency is both directly helping to maintain the economic and social conditions that fuel support for Muqtada al-Sadr, and providing elements of training that aid al-Sadrs forces in their current struggle.
These insurgencies are not yet combining into a more general uprising, but the evidence is beginning to mount that such a phenomenon is in its early stages. If it does indeed develop, then a crucial if largely unrecognised causal factor may prove to have been the economic policies pursued so relentlessly by Paul Bremer and his associates in the early months of the occupation.
