Iraq, A Battleground State

By Michael Schwartz, Tomdispatch.com. Posted August 12, 2004.

The Bush administration has embarked on a desperate military adventure in hopes of creating the appearance of a pacified Iraq. The assault on the holy city of Najaf, with its attendant slaughter of combatants and civilians, its destruction of whole neighborhoods and its threat to Shia holy cites, is fraught with the possibility of another major military defeat.

But the military commanders are hoping it will instead produce a rare military victory, since they are fighting lightly armed and relatively inexperienced members of Muqtada al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army. Nevertheless, even such a victory would be short-lived at best, since the fighting itself only serves to consolidate the opposition of the Shia population. The administration is apparently hoping that a sufficiently brutal suppression of the Sadrists will postpone the now almost inevitable national uprising until after our November election.

To understand this desperate and brutal strategic maneuver, we must review the origins of the new Battle of Najaf:

A truce in May ended the first round of armed confrontation between U.S. Marines and Muqtada al-Sadr's militia, the al-Mahdi Army, but was never fully honored by either side. American troops were supposed to stay out of Najaf, and al-Sadr's militiamen were supposed to disband as an army. In the intervening months of relative peace, neither side made particularly provocative moves, but the U.S. still mounted patrols and the al-Mahdi army continued to stockpile arms, notably in the city's vast, holy cemetery. Lots of threats were proffered on both sides.

The new confrontation began after the Americans replaced Army troops with Marines in the area outside Najaf and then sent two armed patrols, including local police, to al-Sadr's home. The arrival of the second patrol led to a firefight with casualties on both sides. In the meantime, the Marines and the Iraqi police detained at least a dozen Mahdi's Army members.

The al-Mahdi soldiers retaliated by attacking a local police station. Previously, there had been a modest pattern of peaceful coexistence between the police and al-Sadr's followers, except when the Sadrists were directly attacked. They also took policemen as hostages, a new tactic that they justified by pointing to the detained Sadrists and calling for an exchange of prisoners.

On Aug. 5, the U.S. counterattacked in force – with the official blessing of Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi – using a remarkably similar military strategy to the one that had created an international crisis in Falluja back in April. After first surrounding the city, they assaulted al-Mahdi positions with long range weapons, notably helicopter gunships armed with rockets, and even jets. They then sent Marines (and Iraqi security forces) into the holy cemetery at the heart of Najaf to root out dug-in al-Mahdi soldiers and capture their weapons caches. This fierce attack produced two days of heavy fighting, heavily reported in the press, and evidently destroyed significant portions of the downtown area. A tank, for instance, was described in one report as firing directly into hotels where al-Mahdi fighters were said to be holed up.

In the three days that followed, the Marines penetrated ever further into the city (at a cost so far of 5 dead, 19 wounded, and one helicopter downed) and for a period, even took the cemetery itself, though in a description which had a Vietnam-era ring to it, "A Marine spokesman said insurgents had fled the cemetery after an assault on Friday. But when U.S. forces withdrew from the area, the insurgents moved back in." By day six, Americans tanks had moved into the cemetery and helicopters were strafing the area. The Sadrists warned that further attacks would be met by extending the fight to other cities (as had happened in the previous round of fighting in April and May) and al-Sadr himself swore he would never leave the city but would defend it to "the last drop of my blood," calling for a more general uprising. At least some Shia clerics supported this call for general insurrection.

As the fighting continued, it became ever clearer that this was anything but a small incident that had spun out of control; it was, on the American side, a concerted effort to annihilate the Sadrist forces. The development of the battle points strongly to this conclusion:

• The original patrols to Muqtada al-Sadr's house and the arrest of his followers were unprovoked, distinctly provocative acts. They occurred just after the Marines replaced Army troops on the scene and are among numerous indicators of a planned new campaign against Sadrist forces.
• Once the city was surrounded, the helicopter and jet attacks on "suspected positions" of al-Mahdi soldiers would hardly have been needed to rebuff the modestly mounted Sadrist attack on one police station, but fit perfectly with a larger strategy of "softening up" the resistance after preventing it from escaping. So do a number of other American acts, including the commandeering of Najaf's major trauma center (ostensibly for a military staging area), clearly a punitive measure of a kind previously used in Falluja, meant to maximize suffering and expected to hasten surrender.
• Instead of denying or apologizing for the initial attack on the holy cemetery, the Marine commander on the scene justified it in a public statement. ("The actions of the Moktada militia make the cemetery a legitimate military objective.") The same statement also implied that the Marines would destroy the Holy Shrine if the al-Mahdi occupied it.

Michael Schwartz is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His work on Iraq has appeared at ZNET and TomDispatch, and in Z magazine.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from War on Iraq! Sign up now »