Iraq Ablaze: Inside the Insurgency
By Zaki Chehab
IB Tauris, 2005
Distributed in Australia by Palgrave MacMillan
RRP $45.
REVIEW BY ROHAN PEARCE
Much of the Western media has presented one-dimensional reporting of the armed rebellion gripping Iraq, focussing in particular on the bloody, high-profile antics of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda in Iraq, allegedly led by the Jordanion-born Abu Musab al Zarqawi, while neglecting the broad opposition to the occupation among Iraqis.
Zaki Chehab's book Iraq Ablaze: Inside the Insurgency offers a timely look at the varied motivations and political outlooks of some of the groups and individuals that make up the armed resistance in Iraq.
Chehab was the first journalist to broadcast interviews with members of the Iraqi resistance. He reveals in his book a personal connection to violence-stricken occupied Iraq in the form of a penpal from his youth when he was growing up in a refugee camp in southern Lebanon. His penpal was from Fallujah, a city some 50 kilometres west of Baghdad that is now synonymous with armed resistance to the US-led occupation of Iraq.
In June 2003, Chehab travelled to Fallujah and located his friend: "He, too, was able to recall my name and the address at my camp in Lebanon where he had sent his schoolboy news. As we caught up on the intervening years, I became aware of his support for the fledgling resistance. My gut feeling was that he was a member of one of the groups."
During a recent tour of Australia to promote his book, Chehab, who is also the political editor of the London-based Al Hayat, spoke to Green Left Weekly and explained that when people talk about "the resistance" in Iraq, they are talking about groups with wildly different political outlooks — nationalists, Islamists, Saddam Hussein loyalists. "The one thing they have in common is that they want the foreign forces leaving their country", he explained.
The majority of armed groups in Iraq have drawn their members from predominantly Sunni communities, Chehab said. The so-called Sunni triangle, an area with its points defined by Baghdad, Ramadi and Samarra, has been the site of some of the fiercest fighting between resistance groups and the occupation forces.
Chehab told GLW: "Very few Shia have made it clear they are into using military force to fight the occupation." However he added that "even the Sadr group [the militia led by anti-occupation Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr] and other Shia, they said that they want to see a scheduled timetable for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, but definitely the kind of insurgency which is very active in terms of attacks and something similar to that, is carried by Sunnis."
Sunni Iraqis provided the key social base for Saddam Hussein's regime, yet as Chehab notes in Iraq Ablaze, "With the American victory, the Sunnis felt tarred for having been Saddam supporters, even though thousands had suffered under his regime...
"Many of the Sunni intellectuals I have spoken to agree that Saddam ruled the country under the Sunni banner, but this didn't mean that Sunnis were automatically spared his wrath or torturous behaviours. The fate of many high-ranking officers from the Sunni-dominated cities of Tikrit, Ramadi, Fallujah, and even Mosul, is well known. Many of them were executed in the throes of planning to eliminate his dictatorial regime."
The popular support for the resistance groups is high in Sunni areas, he told GLW. This is because the groups are part of the population, not separate from it. "Just to give an example", he explained, the December election in Iraq "was extremely peaceful in spite of the threats made by Zarqawi. The difference between his stance and other insurgency groups is that they say we don't believe in elections but we have to respect the will of Iraqis; they didn't attack. and election day was extremely peaceful in Iraq. So this reflects that the majority of insurgency groups realise, because they are part of the people, that it was the will of the Sunnis that day to vote. That's why the election was extremely peaceful in spite of the threats. Zarqawi, that day, did not dare to carry out a single attack in spite of the statements he made."
If there is no schedule for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq developed then it is likely that there will be an influx of Shiites into armed resistance groups over the long term, Chehab told GLW. "This can be reflected in the kind of statement they made in Cairo two months ago. There was a meeting for all Iraqi political parties and groups and the one thing they agreed about is that they want to see a timetable for American forces to withdraw from Iraq."
A November 26 Los Angeles Times article reported that the Cairo conference, attended by Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish groups, had adopted a statement that recognised "Iraqis' 'legitimate right of resistance' to foreign occupation".
There is evidence that, despite White House statements to the contrary, the US plans a long-term military presence in Iraq. In Iraq Ablaze, Chehab describes plans to maintain four US military bases in the country. He writes that according to "Iraqi and American sources, four bases will be maintained: one of which is close to Baghdad International Airport; one on the outskirts of Nasiriyah at Talil Air Base in the south; a third in the western desert, toward the border with Jordan and Syria; and a final one in Bashur, in the Kurdish-controlled areas in the north".
While Chehab has no great affection for the armed anti-occupation groups in Iraq and has a liberal political outlook, he has nevertheless produced an interesting and useful study in Iraq Ablaze. However, he believes the rhetoric of the US rulers. Thus he writes that the US neoconservatives "have not given up their drive to deliver democracy to the Middle East, even if they have to resort to force, because they still believe that this is the best long-term strategy to secure the future of America".
Yet the record of US imperialism and the neocons as individuals and as an ideological trend within the US ruling class shows that the "democracy" they espoused has nothing to do with freedom or majority rule. Instead, it's just a fig leaf used to fool the general public into supporting Washington's wars of imperial conquest.
The record of the US in the Middle East makes this clear. Washington has backed brutal, despotic regimes from the Shah of Iran to the Saudi royal family. In the 1980s it backed Saddam Hussein's regime.
Chehab capably documents the human rights abuses of the invading forces in Iraq, including a chilling chapter on the regime of torture, rape and murder at Abu Ghraib. There is a long history of torture being used in the service of US "democracy"; Abu Ghraib is far from being an exceptional case. For example, the infamous torture training for Washington's Latin American allies at the School of the Americas (now somewhat amusingly renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in a pathetic attempt to distance the institution from its reputation).
What Iraq Ablaze reinforces — although Chehab himself may not explicitly recognise this as the case — is that the continuing occupation is fundamentally incompatible with Iraqis' desire for peace, democracy and freedom.
From Green Left Weekly, April 5, 2006.
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