Opening the Gates of Hell

Before the Iraq war, at a meeting of the Arab League, Secretary General Amr Moussa famously said that a U.S. war on Iraq would "open the gates of hell." In Iraq, those gates are yawning wider than ever before -- at least for the United States.

"Sunni and Shi'a are now one hand, together against the Americans," says a man on the street in the mostly Shi'a slum of Shuala on the west side of Baghdad, standing in the shadow of a burnt-out American tank transporter.

These sentiments are echoed at the local headquarters of Moqtada al-Sadr's organization, which had come under assault from U.S. forces the day before. Indeed, everyone in the area agrees that Sunni and Shi'a fought together to beat back the military -- and they were unorganized local inhabitants, not al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, as the Paul Bremer-led CPA would claim.

Whether or not the resistance here grows to a scale that the United States cannot control -- and such a development depends more on the moderate Shia leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani than of Paul Bremer or George Bush -- it is already clear that the events of the last 10 days mark a critical turning point in the occupation of Iraq.

The administration is putting out a convenient and self-serving narrative to explain recent events in Iraq. According to the official story, a few barbaric "isolated extremists" from the "Saddamist stronghold" of Fallujah killed four contractors who were guarding food convoys in an act of unprovoked lawlessness. Moreover, the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is fighting the U.S. forces right now because, in the words of George Bush, he has decided that "rather than allow democracy to flourish, he's going to exercise force."

The truth is rather different on both counts.

To begin with, Fallujah, although heavily Sunni-dominated, is hardly the bastion of Saddam sympathizers. During his regime, its imams got into trouble for refusing to obey his orders to praise him personally during prayers. Furthermore, many of its inhabitants are Salafists (Wahhabism is a subset of Salafism), a group singled out for political persecution by Saddam.

In fact, during the war, Fallujah was not a hotbed of resistance. The origins of its hostility to coalition forces dates back to Apr. 28, 2003, when U.S. troops opened fire on a group of up to 200 peaceful protesters, killing 15. The soldiers claimed that they were merely returning gunfire, but Human Rights Watch investigated and found that the bullet holes examined at the location were inconsistent with that story -- moreover, Iraqi witnesses at the scene maintained that the crowd was unarmed. Two days later, another three protesters were killed.

A string of such incidents over the following months caused many people in the area to join the resistance, forming their own groups. Sporadic violence, combined with the Pentagon's policy of responing with blanket punitive measures quickly left the town seething with anger against the occupation -- more so than other places in Iraq.

The most recent incident, in which four contractors working for Blackwater Security were killed, did not arise in a vacuum. In fact, just the week before the horrific event, U.S. Marines had mounted heavy raids on Fallujah, killing at least seven civilians, including a cameraman. Residents cite these raids as the reason for the attack on the Blackwater people and the gruesome spectacle that followed.

Given the recent fighting in Fallujah, which killed 12 Marines, two other soldiers, and at least 66 Iraqis, there is no prospect of getting off this track of senseless violence in the foreseeable future.

Rather than deal with this growing threat of violent resistance in the so- called Sunni Triangle, the CPA has instead chosen to pick a fight with the Shi'a followers of Moqtada al-Sadr.