Doug Lorimer
"There have been 98 [US troop] deaths [in Iraq] by hostile fire so far this month, more than in the opening two weeks of the invasion, when 82 Americans were killed in action", the April 17 San Jose Mercury News reported, adding that the "last time US troops experienced a two-week loss such as this one in Iraq was October 1971, two years before US ground involvement ended in Vietnam".
The Pentagon claims that its troops in Iraq have killed at least 700 Iraqi "insurgents" over the same two-week period. However, at least 600 of the Iraqis killed by US troops during the first two weeks of April died during the US assault on Fallujah. Doctors in the city said that most of the dead were women, children and old men.
According to the April 21 British Independent newspaper, "the Americans refuse to keep count of Iraqi civilian casualties. Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of US forces in Iraq, deals with the question of civilian loss of life by assuming that all dead are rebels."
The mass rebellion of Iraqis sparked by US troops' assaults on the liberated city of Fallujah, 45km west of Baghdad, has dramatically broadened the Iraqi resistance to the US-led occupation.
Most of Baghdad was shut down over the weekend of April 10-11, as residents heeded a joint call by Sunni and Shiite clerics for a general strike to protest the occupiers' brutal attempt to retake Fallujah and to crush Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr's Madhi Army, which had taken control of the centre of Najaf.
"The public adherence to a cleric's call for a general strike demonstrates just how much the relationship between Americans and Iraqis has deteriorated over the past few weeks", the April 12 Wall Street Journal observed.
The mass protests in Baghdad forced the Pentagon to proclaim a temporary halt to the US marines' brutal assault on Fallujah from April 11 and to delay plans to invade Najaf to "kill or capture" Sadr.
Nevertheless, on April 13, Aljazeera's correspondent in the city reported that a column of US tanks and armoured personnel carriers had entered Fallujah's Nizal neighbourhood, firing on residents' houses. Resistance fighters rushed from other parts of the city to the neighbourhood and, after a five-hour battle, forced the marines to retreat, leaving two armoured vehicles abandoned and burning.
Since then, repeated marine forays into Fallujah have been repulsed by the city's estimated 2000 armed defenders.
Under a deal negotiated over the April 17-18 weekend, US marines' attacks on Fallujah were supposed to be permanently halted if resistance fighters in the city surrendered all their weapons other than their AK-47 assault rifles.
"Guerrillas and residents of Fallujah handed over only a paltry assortment of old and rusty weapons", the US Fox News TV channel reported on April 22. Describing the truckload of weapons that was turned over as "junk", US Marine General Jim Conway said: "It's our estimate the people of Fallujah have not responded well to the agreements."
The April 17 Washington Post reported that the "fierce insurgency in Iraq has isolated the US-appointed civilian government and stopped the American-financed reconstruction effort, as contractors hunker down against waves of ambushes and kidnappings, according to US and Iraqi officials".
According to the Post, thousands of non-Iraqi employees of foreign companies awarded "reconstruction" contracts — including Bechtel and Halliburton — have been confined to the highly fortified Green Zone in Baghdad. It also reported that many Iraqis have stopped turning up to work in the Green Zone, despite the lack of other work.
As well as reporting that increasing numbers of young men in Baghdad — both Sunnis and Shiites — are volunteering to join the armed resistance, the Post noted that the upsurge of armed resistance across Iraq has "pressured US forces to vastly expand their area of operations within Iraq, while triggering a partial collapse of the new Iraqi security services designed to gradually replace them".
On April 21, General Martin Dempsey, commander of the US Army's 1st Armored Division, told Associated Press that about 10% of the US-recruited Iraqi security forces "actually worked against" US troops during the recent upsurge of resistance attacks, and an additional 40% had deserted their posts.
The only unit of the puppet Iraqi "security forces" that the Pentagon has claimed fought alongside US troops against the insurgency is the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps' 340-member 36th Security Brigade. This is from the militias run by various members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the puppet advisory body appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority.
However, Reuters reported on April 18 that a soldier from the brigade had said: "They told us to attack the city and we were astonished. How could an Iraqi fight an Iraqi like this? This meant that nothing had changed from the Saddam Hussein days. We refused en masse', said Ali al-Shamari...
"After the brigade refused to fight, he said, soldiers were stripped of their badges and confined to tents in a US base on the outskirts of Fallujah."
At a Baghdad press briefing on April 20, US General Mark Kimmitt, deputy commander for coalition operations in Iraq, praised the brigade's role in the Fallujah siege and declared that it "will serve as a benchmark for ICDC performance in the future".
From Green Left Weekly, April 29, 2004.
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