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Muslim
fundamentalist insurgents seeking to topple the
government are holed up in a conservative city with
little sympathy for secularism or pluralism. They
raise the banner of Islam, and they call on the rest
of the country to rise up and expel the oppressors.
The government reacts by massing forces around the
city. It demanded that the militants surrender or
the city give them up. If not, the city would be
destroyed. Fallujah this week? Yes, but it was also
the Syrian city of Hama in the spring of 1982.
The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood seized Hama as
the first step towards its goal of a national
uprising against the secular Baathist regime. The
Syrian President demanded their surrender. His army
shelled the city, and special forces went in to kill
or capture the militants. The Syrians employed the
same strategy that the US is using now. Its tanks
and artillery waited outside the city; they fired on
militants and civilians alike. Its elite units, like
the American Marines surrounding Falljuah today,
braced themselves for a bloody battle.
The US condemned Syria for the assault that is
believed to have cost 10,000 civilian lives. The
Syrian army destroyed the historic centre of Hama,
and it rounded up Muslim rebels for imprisonment or
execution. Syria's actions against Hama came to form
part of the American case that Syria was a terrorist
state. Partly because of Hama, Syria is on a list of
countries in the Middle East whose regimes the US
wants to change.
Iraq's American-appointed Prime Minister, Iyad
Allawi, declared a state of emergency on Sunday to
assume powers reminiscent of those wielded by Saddam
Hussein: to break up public gatherings, enter
private houses without warrants and detain people
without trial. Perhaps in waging war against the
Iraqis who want to expel the Americans and topple
America's chosen Iraqi leaders, the insurgents have
compelled the US and its Iraqi allied regime to
behave like the two Baathist regimes that they
believed were so totalitarian they had to go.
Other Iraqi cities must now fear the use of what The
New York Times correspondent Tom Friedman called "Hama
rules" against them. Unrest in the northern city of
Mosul, where relations between its Kurdish and Arab
residents have deteriorated to the point where Arabs
on the west bank of the Tigris and Kurds to the west
rarely cross the bridges to each other's
neighbourhoods. Already, because the autonomous
Kurds of northern Iraq are the only ethnic group
allied to the US in Iraq, Arabs have begun killing
Kurds. And Kurds are seeking refuge in the
Kurdish-controlled northern region.
Mosul was the social base [of the Baath], said the
deputy leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan,
Noshirwan Ali Moustafa, in Suleimania. "There were
24,000 military officers from Mosul. The city is
very poor. People went into the army and government
service."
With the army disbanded and most of the civil
service unemployed, thousands of young men in Mosul
have no work. The insurgents have made strong
appeals to them to change their conditions by
expelling the Americans. Religious appeals have
turned against the Kurds.
Residents report that graffiti in Mosul has
appeared saying: "Kill a Jew. Kill a Kurd."
Insurgent forces in Falluja are connected to those
already in Mosul, the interior minister of the
Kurdistan Democratic Party's government in the
Kurdish region, Karim Sinjari. Sinjari, said. Abu
Musab Zarqawi's representative in Mosul, a man he
called Abu Talha, was actively promoting attacks on
US forces there, he said.
"They [Islamic militants] exist in Fallujah, Baghdad
and especially Mosul. Right now, a majority of the
Kurdish Ansar al-Islam people are in Mosul. From
Mosul, they want to carry out operations in Dohuk
and Arbil. They have carried out two operations
against this ministry." Mr Sinjari referred to two
suicide bombings aimed at himself in the past year.
The Iraqi forces with the Americans outside Falluja
include Kurds, but the Kurdish leadership has been
careful to avoid sending Kurdish units into battle
against Arabs. They fear a backlash against the
estimated two million Kurds who live in Arab areas
such as Baghdad, Mosul and Samarra.
William Polk, who served President John Kennedy in
the state department, wrote recently: "Most Iraqis
regard the government as an American puppet. The
idea that America can fashion a local militia to
accomplish what its powerful army cannot do is not
policy but fantasy."
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