Freedom unbound, and out of control

"Not Shi'ites! Not Sunnis! The soldiers of the Prophet Mohammed, 
peace be upon him, will destroy any American or Israeli troops 
- just wait! We will not let any government trick us! No one can 
be the governor of Iraq if he is not a good Muslim and applies 
sharia [Islamic law]!"  

 By Paul Belden. 04/22/03

BAGHDAD (Asia Times) - The imam was on fire. "None of us want an 
occupation of an Islamic country!" he seethed over the (very loud) 
loudspeakers of the Abu Hanifah mosque in the capital during Salat 
al-Juma prayers last Friday afternoon.  

"Not Shi'ites! Not Sunnis! The soldiers of the Prophet Mohammed, 
peace be upon him, will destroy any American or Israeli troops 
- just wait! We will not let any government trick us! No one can 
be the governor of Iraq if he is not a good Muslim and applies 
sharia [Islamic law]!"  

When the celebrated Sunni Doctor Ahmad al-Qubaisee got to the 
obligatory part that goes "America is the enemy of God! Israel 
is the enemy of God! Down with Israel! Down with America!" - his 
voice rose to a shrill hectoring screech that harmonized sweetly 
with the occasional staccato pop-pop-pop sound of Kalashnikovs 
going off in the distance.  

The imam was breathing fire, and the crowd was catching. It was the 
sort of stump speech that's designed to pack them in in this part of 
the world, and liberated Baghdad proved no exception. Thousands strong 
when the sermon began, the crowd had been expanding by the minute, 
overflowing the mosque and taking over every available speck of pavement 
on Omar Abduaziz Street in the northwestern Adhamiya district. By 
mid-afternoon, everything not able to walk, crawl or roll out of 
reach of the crowd - including a surrounded tanker truck complete 
with hapless driver trapped in the cab - found itself blocked in by 
prayer rugs and unable to move.  

Adding fuel to the blaze, various camera crews had climbed onto the 
very walls of the mosque itself and were filming straight down into the 
courtyard while trying to avoid kicking in the lovely blue-tile squares 
bearing the 99 names of the Islamic God adorning the wall's crest. The 
smell of smoke hung acridly in the air from several buildings still 
burning downtown. Chunks of the mosque were missing where bullets and 
shells and hit during a battle the week before. Nobody in this crowd 
other than one or two of the better-off journalists had had a hot shower 
in weeks. Many were holding signs that read "Shi'ite blood and Sunni 
blood is the same!" and "Leave our country, we want peace!"
and "Iraqis 
didn't let you here" in both English and Arabic. Emotions were running 
high.  

And now - unaccountably, incredibly, unbelievably - into this Cecil 
B DeMille epic nightmare scene wandered a lightly armed foot patrol 
of about half a dozen US Marines gawking about like farmboys come to 
see New York. God knows what they were thinking.  

The next day, I asked US Marine Staff Sergeant John Jamison, the 
public information officer in charge of the Adhamiya sector, that very 
question: "What the hell were you guys thinking?" And he had no idea 
what I was even talking about. His jaw dropped when I told him what had 
happened.  

Because it wasn't pretty. Whatever that patrol had been expecting to 
find, it was clear it was something else. The crowd surged in to enclose 
them, and they immediately went into a sort of mobile defensive crouch, 
keeping in a tight circular formation with their gunbarrels out covering 
a 360- degree horizon, and backing slowly down the street, looking tense 
and scared.  

People started shouting things at them, mostly in Arabic, until 
somebody who knew English asked them what they thought they were 
doing here. The soldier in charge gave the stock talking-points 
reply to this sort of question - they'd come to deliver food and 
medicine to the Iraqi people - and it was a miracle there wasn't 
a bloodbath.  

Even then it was a near-run thing. Both sides were angry and scared 
and trying not to show it, but they didn't succeed. It showed in their 
eyes. Their voices, too: At one point, the soldier in charge strode 
toward one of his own men, smacked the man hard on the shoulder and 
screamed: "You pay attention to me, you son of a bitch!"  

They crowd closed in, and the soldier in charge ordered a middle-aged 
man in a white dishdasha (gown) to back up. The guy shrugged and 
lifted his chin: Yeah? And what if I don't?  

"I have this weapon," the soldier informed the throng.

"You're going to shoot me?" the middle-aged man said, raising 
his voice. "You're going to shoot me?" He wasn't moving an inch.  

This was the moment of maximum danger. All it would have taken would 
have been one of those ever-present Kalashnikov bursts to have 
sounded somewhere in the near distance right then, and I seriously 
believe the death toll would have been in the dozens. And that number 
would probably have included every one of those soldiers.  

"This thing is a big mistake," said one man in the crowd,
"It is possible 
to be the beginning of a new battle in this place." Another man said, 
"We want all the Marines to leave this place now, and also all of the 
press cars, or we will destroy them."  

Later that day, I drove around to see if I could tell how near the 
closest Marine backup had been. I found a stationary armored checkpoint 
two blocks away. Not close enough. The only backup that arrived on the 
scene was a single forlorn-looking Iraqi policeman sitting in a white 
patrol car, who came rolling in slowly, with no lights flashing. I think 
he was packing a sidearm, but I'm not sure. It wouldn't have mattered.  

So everybody got lucky. Eventually, several cooler heads, all of them 
Iraqi - and, in particular, an old man who said his name was Fa'iz, who 
had the look of authority, with a white turban and a long flowing white 
beard and handlebar moustache - gently shooed away the gawking 
children, quietly urged the angry Iraqis to back up, and lightly 
persuaded the soldiers to consider their best interest and not linger.  

So this is what freedom looks like to Iraqis - the freedom to preach 
about kicking out the infidel invaders and running their own country. 
From an American point of view, it certainly wasn't pretty. And 
especially galling must have been the fact that, exactly a week and a 
day earlier, this very mosque had been the site of a battle that had 
provided the good Doctor al-Qubaisee the freedom to preach politics 
from his pulpit.  

One would have expected the thankful Iraqis to have erected a 
monument to their liberation at this site - not to have organized 
a million-man march against their liberators. But that's the way 
of freedom - once you unleash it, it can be hard to control, and 
dangerous to try.  

It's not as if the people didn't know about that earlier battle. The 
evidence was everywhere at hand. Smashed, burned cars, including one 
that had been flattened by a tank. A series of concentric seismic cracks 
in the grassless earth of a riverside playground surrounding a hole in 
the ground where a (presumably still unexploded) missile had penetrated. 
Burned-out buildings in every direction. Palm trees that had been shot in 
half.  

This, the rumor went, was where Saddam Hussein and his most loyal 
men had made their stand the day after American forces had helped pull 
down Saddam's statue in Paradise Park. There's a bridge to the north of 
the area, the al-Aaemmah Bridge, and it is this bridge over which the 
people of Adhamiya presume that Saddam escaped north, to his 
hometown of Tikrit.  

Even as the statue had been coming down, Abu Dhabi TV reportedly 
was shooting live video images of a smiling Saddam dressed in his 
trademark olive-green military uniform and beret while stepping out 
of an official car and wading into an ecstatic crowd in front of this 
very mosque. Amazingly, the Iraqi leader had been accompanied by his 
smiling, sharply dressed favorite son Qusay. One striking image was 
the crowd, most of them armed, and jubilantly proclaiming their loyalty 
to Saddam, some of them embracing him and kissing him on both 
cheeks in their jubilation.  

The next day, the American hammer came down. "The tanks came from 
three directions," said Khalid Adnan, who lives in the narrow alley 
behind the mosque. "There were soldiers on foot with them, and they all 
met in the traffic circle on al-Imam Alaatham Street [in front of the 
mosque]. Then they began spreading out into the side streets. There 
were Fedayeen hiding in the neighborhood, and the shooting was 
intense. The American tanks stayed in the area for six to eight hours, 
and then they left."  

Another group of loiterers - an old man named Jabbar, and three 
younger men named Bashar, Mouthanna and Nazar - told a similar tale, 
of a battle that had matched a mixture of poorly armed Iraqi soldiers 
and Arab Fedayeen with tanks and A-10 Warthog ground attack aircraft. 
It must have been deafening and terrifying, and those who live here still 
viewed the memory of the battle in apocalyptic terms. Fa'iz, the 53-year-
old manager of the mosque's northern gate, said flatly, "This was the 
battle that is one of the marks of the end of the life. You understand?" 
Another resident, Amir Shakir, a veterinarian, said he was certain that 
the Americans had used "prohibited weapons" in the battle because 
"the earth, it was shaking".  

Whatever the cause and intent, the battle had not captured Saddam, 
nor had it cleansed the residents of their fear and awe of the missing 
tyrant. Said Abdel Razzaq, a man in the crowd, "I am sad for this 
situation, and only Saddam can be the leader of Iraq. But we can only 
hope that this situation will be better day by day, and that the 
Americans will leave Iraq very soon."  

Whether it was designed to or not, the battle also failed to cow the 
people into submission. Adhamiya may be shot to pieces, but it is one 
defiant place.  

After the sermon, which the doctor concluded with a call to "walk over 
the streets saying, 'Allahu Akhbar, we trust in God'!," the people boiled 
out of the mosque and headed en masse down Omar Abduaziz Street 
chanting and carrying signs that read, "Same Iraq, Same people" and 
"We reject the occupation" and "All Muslims are
brothers". They took 
over every vehicle at hand, and even pressed the surrounded tanker 
truck into service, forcing the driver to roll slowly along through the 
horde with men packed onto the top of the tank and clinging to every 
available handhold.  

They were chanting, La Sin'iya, La Shi'iya, Wahda wahda Islamiya (No 
Sunni, No Shi'ite, Unity for all Islam.) And also, La ilaha ila Allah, 
America Aduallah (There is no God but Allah, and America is His 
enemy.) And also, La America, La Saddam, Wahda wahda Al-Islam. 
(No America, No Saddam, Only Islam.)  

So two battles took place in the Abu Hanifah mosque. The first - a pure 
clash of weaponry - was a lopsided victory for American armed might; 
the second - a more ambiguous affair that matched guns against the 
more indistinct arsenal of argument, ideal and freedom - was as 
lopsided a defeat.  

Both results should rightly be cheered, by both Americans and Iraqis 
alike, because in both cases, freedom won. But as was shown in 
Adhamiya on Friday, freedom can be a dangerous thing - and now that 
it has been unleashed in Iraq, nobody can know where it will take the  
country, or the region.

                           -==-

Source: Information Clearinghouse ...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3056.htm


Cheers, Steve..

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