The axis of deafness: America, Russia, Israel

The ending of the immediate destruction and violence of the past three weeks in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf comes as an undoubted relief to United States forces and their Baghdad regime of Iyad Allawi to whom they transferred sovereignty on 28 June 2004. But even as the dust settled around the shrine of the Shi’a martyr Imam Ali, violent incidents in other theatres of the “war on terror” – Russia, Afghanistan, Israel, and Iraq itself – emphasise how diverse are the sources of challenge to America and its allies.

The world beyond Najaf

The ending of the conflict in Najaf through the intervention of Ayatollah Ali Sistani enhanced the status of this senior Shi’a cleric and correspondingly diminished that of the younger militant leader Muqtada al–Sadr and his Mahdi army. The aftermath made evident that many of al–Sadr’s young radical followers had concealed rather than surrendered their weapons, that the city would not be subject to US military control, and that the apparent resolution of the crisis had not strengthened the Allawi regime.

The halt to the fighting in Najaf gave a welcome boost to US Republicans on the eve of their convention in New York, and allowed President Bush to reiterate that the “war on terror” would be won. Yet within days of the Najaf pause, events in four different countries suggested that the war is hydra–headed.

In Iraq itself, the captors of twelve kidnapped Nepalese construction workers apparently murdered their hostages after two weeks’ imprisonment. Nepal has not sent troops to Iraq and bans its citizens from working there, but several thousand of the 200,000 Nepalese working in Gulf states are believed to have ignored their government and have crossed the borders to take up security and construction jobs in Iraq. Alongside this brutal incident, two French hostages, journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, are held by a group demanding repeal of the French law banning the display of the Islamic headscarf in schools.

In Russia, two airliners on domestic flights were destroyed on 24 August, killing all eighty–nine people on board, an incident followed by a metro station suicide bomb in Moscow on 31 August that killed eight people and injured ten more. On 1 September, around seventeen armed militants stormed a school containing in Beslan, North Ossetia – just across the border from Chechnya – and held around 150 children, parents and teachers hostage. All three attacks are assumed to be the work of Chechen fighters, in a continuing campaign that has resisted intense and brutal efforts by Russian forces to “pacify” the rebellious territory.

In Afghanistan, the offices of a private US security contractor, Dyncorp – which provides bodyguards for President Hamid Karzai – were bombed in Kabul on 29 August, killing seven people. An insurgent attack on government offices in Kunar province, 160 kilometres east of Kabul, was followed on 31 August by an American raid using substantial firepower; the US claimed to have killed more than twenty insurgents, but one NGO, the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees, reported eight villagers killed in the attack.

In Israel, a double suicide–bombing against bus passengers in Beersheba on 31 August killed sixteen people and injured more than eighty. This was the first major incident by Palestinian militia for five months, since an attack at the port of Ashdod in March.

Learning through fighting

What conclusion can be drawn from this combination of attacks? An instant judgment is that asymmetric responses from radical militants in all four regions of conflict show no signs of diminishing; and that in each case, force is being met with even greater force from the various state authorities. A cycle of violence is in operation, even where (as in Iraq) there may be deceptive indications of political progress.

The Iraq example is particularly revealing here, as more information becomes available concerning the tactics used by United States forces in Najaf, as well as the state of the insurgency elsewhere in the country. Even if the fragile peace does hold in the city, two aspects of the recent crisis in Najaf may well have long–term implications.

The first is the strong measures being used by the US military, most recently in Najaf but in other parts of Iraq also. American forces, partly through an extreme reluctance to take casualties in close–quarter urban warfare, persistently employ tanks, rapid–fire cannon, helicopter–launched missiles, the hugely destructive AC–130 gunships and strike aircraft firing missiles and dropping free–fall bombs.

In Najaf, these tactics saw the bombardment of the Valley of Peace cemetery and parts of the old city, causing extensive militia and civilian casualties and large–scale physical damage. The long–term impact of the destruction is hard to gauge but could be considerable, given the importance of Najaf to Shi’a Muslims, and of the Valley of Peace cemetery in particular.

More generally, the US military’s employment of heavy firepower has become a typical feature of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was particularly notable in Fallujah in April, but has become a persistent feature of its campaigns; much of this is unreported in the west except in specialist media outlets. On 25 August, for example, US forces killed at least four people in a two–hour attack in Fallujah, and two days later two civilians were reported killed and eleven injured, including a 6–year–old girl, in two air attacks in the city. The US forces tend to insist that only insurgents are attacked and to deny civilian casualties, but the latter are widely and repeatedly reported by regional media.

The second aspect of the Najaf crisis is the manner in which the US forces were unable to take control of the situation – partly because of political factors, especially the fear of reaction to attacks on the main shrine, but also reflecting the difficulty of engaging in urban counter–guerrilla warfare against determined opposition.

The key point here is that the militias opposing the US forces were, for the most part, thoroughly inexperienced and untrained young men. In this, they differed from the trained paramilitaries operating in Sunni areas of Iraq, many of whom belonged to Iraqi military units during the Saddam Hussein regime. Yet the Najaf insurgents were able to resist a battle–hardened, well–trained and comprehensively–equipped force of US marines – albeit, in some cases, in receipt of aid, equipment and training from Sunni paramilitaries.

The surviving members of this Najaf militia have now disappeared into the community, often with their weapons and munitions intact, and they will have learned much in the three weeks of siege. They will also regard the settlement as something of a victory. From their perspective, the US occupiers have once again failed to take control of an Iraqi city.

Three wars, no reverse gear

In the main Sunni areas of Iraq – between Tikrit, Fallujah, Samarra and Ramadi – the area around the second and third of these towns remains under insurgent control, while Ramadi and many other towns in the region are largely “no–go” areas for all but heavily–armed American troops. The Mahdi militia retains considerable influence in the sprawling Sadr City area of Baghdad and, according to Scott Baldauf in the Christian Science Monitor (30 August 2004) “interviews suggest that Sadr is walking away from the standoff with a widening base and supporters who are more militant than before” – to which might be added “more experienced in urban warfare too”.

Perhaps equally significant is the toll of US casualties, which – despite the use of helicopters, tanks, gunships and strike aircraft – is around the highest level since the fall of the Saddam regime. In the two months since Iyad Allawi’s government was installed, 120 American soldiers have been killed and 1,500 injured, with 700 of these injuries serious. Across Iraq as a whole, US forces are facing sixty attacks a day, a 20% increase compared with the three months before the nominal handover of power.

In their different ways, Russians, Israelis and Americans are all pursuing their wars with vigour, seeing overwhelming force as the appropriate response to bitter insurgencies. A dispassionate observer might by now be questioning the strategies of any or all of these governments. For the United States at least, and especially in the run–up to the November 2004 election, it is virtually certain that such critical counsels have little or no chance of being listened to.