Doug Lorimer
As US and British occupation troops fought fierce street battles with rebel Shiite cleric Sayed Moqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in four cities, Iraqi resistance fighters assassinated Izz al Din Salim, the president of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), in Baghdad on May 17.
Salim was killed by a car bomb as his police-escorted convoy of five SUVs waited to enter the four-square kilometre "Green Zone", the heavily fortified headquarters of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
At the beginning of May, Salim assumed the monthly rotating presidency of the 25-member IGC, a purely advisory body set up by the CPA last July to give an Iraqi face to the US occupation regime.
A senior assistant to Baghdad's police chief said Salim's assassination was evidence of the strength of the resistance movement. "They have spies inside the Green Zone", he told the May 18 Toronto Globe and Mail. "The Governing Council will keep being attacked because nobody likes them. They haven't done anything for the people. They are only US puppets."
The 61-year-old Salim was the leader of the Basra-based Harakat
Dawa Islamiya (Islamic Call Movement), a split off from the Dawa Islamiya party founded by Najaf-based Shiite clerics during the 1958 anti-monarchist, anti-landlord revolution to combat "communism" by seeking to establish an Islamic state in Iraq, and throughout the Muslim world.
Paul Bremer, head of the CPA, condemned Salim's assassination as a "cruel blow" to Iraq's "reconstruction", describing the Islamic fundamentalist writer as "a good friend whose wisdom and quiet faith were a constant source of strength to me".
A previously unknown group, the Arab Resistance Movement, said in a website posting that two of its fighters carried out the operation against Salim, "the traitor and mercenary".
US officials in Baghdad immediately claimed Salim had been killed by foreign Arab fighters linked to Saudi Arabian millionaire Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network. Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite IGC member whose Iraqi National Congress party receives US$340,000 from the Pentagon each month for "intelligence", claimed that Salim had been killed by "terrorists" based in Fallujah.
In early February, Iraqi resistance fighters forced 900 US paratroopers out of Fallujah, a city of 250,000 residents, 45 kilometres west of Baghdad. Last month, Fallujah's armed residents beat back a three-week-long offensive by 2500 US marines.
After the deaths of at least 700 Fallujans — and nearly 100 marines in the city — US commanders ordered the marines to withdraw on May 1. They allowed a new Fallujah Protective Army (FPA), led by several former Iraqi army generals and made up of soldiers recruited from among the Iraqi army veterans who had led the resistance to the US assault, to start patrolling the city.
On May 14, Reuters reported that Mohammed Latif, the former Iraqi army general who commands the FPA, defying the demands of US commanders, said he had no plans to collect weapons from Fallujah's armed residents.
"Weapons are not the problem. What we need to do is rebuild our country", he told reporters after he held lengthy talks with Major-General James Mattis, the commander of the 1st Marines Expeditionary Force, on the outskirts of the city.
Mattis, however, said that he expected Latif to fulfill US marine commanders' demands. "We have to get done what we came to get done", Mattias told reporters. "We want it all: peace, the weapons and the foreign fighters dead or out of here."
US commanders had previously claimed that they had launched their assault on Fallujah to "kill or capture" al Qaeda fighters, who they said were responsible for killing four US mercenaries at the end of March. However, Latif and his deputy, former Iraqi army general Jassim Saleh, have denied that there are any foreign fighters in Fallujah.
According to Reuters, "US commanders are losing patience and have said they will renew their offensive if their conditions are not met".
On May 17, Agence France Presse reported that a delegation of Fallujah residents, led by Sunni clerics, had met the previous day with Moqtada al Sadr in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, 160km south-east of Baghdad.
AFP reported: "They met Sayed Moqtada and told him: 'We support you and call for the defence of Iraq, Najaf, Karbala and other holy cities', an aide to [Fallujah Sunni cleric] Hussam al Musawi said."
When asked if such support would include resistance fighters, Sheikh Fawzi Abdullah Abed, one of the Fallujah delegates, responded: "This is not the kind of information that we want to share with the press."
Earlier that day of a convoy of nine trucks from Fallujah, carrying food, blanklets and other supplies, arrived at the main Shiite mosque in the town of Kufa, another Sadr stronghold, 10km outside Najaf. AFP reported: "One of Sadr's deputies in Kufa, Sheikh Taher al Asadi, thanked the visitors for their 'brotherly feelings'. As he spoke, Sadr's fighters were moving boxes of rocket-propelled grenades inside the mosque."
From Green Left Weekly, May 26, 2004.
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