Rohan Pearce
According to the September 15 English-language online edition of the Baghdad Azzaman daily, the US military's assault on the city of Tal Afar, 320 kilometres north-west of Baghdad, has displaced large numbers of Tal Afar residents and has led to large numbers of people fleeing the rebellious city of Samarra.
Azzaman reported: "Many people in Samarra, 120 kilometres north of Baghdad, are reported to be leaving, fearing an imminent US-led assault. Long queues of cars are forming at military checkpoints waiting for permission to leave the city...
"Officials in the province of Salahuddin, of which Samarra is a major district, have voiced concern over government's plans to use military force to subdue the city."
The official, Pentagon-approved version of the US military's assault on the city of Tal Afar is set out in a September 13 press release from CentCom (US Central Command). It claims that Operation Restoring Rights, as the US military operation against Tal Afar has been designated by the Pentagon, is targeting "pockets of terrorist resistance" and has "resulted in the deaths of several terrorists, capture of 79 suspected terrorists, and the discovery of nine weapon caches. Since the operation began, there have been dozens of terrorists killed, 341 detained and 22 weapons caches found."
However, according to a report filed two days earlier by the United Nations' IRIN news agency, this operation to "mop up terrorists" (as any armed resistance to foreign occupation forces is inevitably tagged by US officials) has resulted in thousands of families fleeing the city, creating a humanitarian crisis.
IRIN reported that, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, "the situation is critical and hundreds of families are moving day and night to temporary camps donated and prepared by the aid organisation". An IRCS spokesperson told IRIN that it urgently needed supplies "because we have already run out".
The US assault on Tal Afar had employed heavy artillery bombardment and use of gunship helicopters, IRIN reported. "With a population of nearly 400,000 residents, some 50,000 families, the city had received information that the operation may continue for a long period and that people should leave within 72 hours from the start of the operation."
Usual claims
Washington's propaganda machine, comprising the usual Pentagon talking heads and their private-sector partners in the corporate media, has made the usual claims about Tal Afar: "foreign fighters", "al Qaeda terrorists", a population held hostage by "anti-Iraqi forces". But it all conjures a strange sense of deja vu — hasn't this all happened before? In fact, in less than two months it will be the anniversary of the beginning of "Operation Phantom Fury", the US-led assault that began on November 8, 2004, to retake control of the rebel city of Fallujah, 55km west of Baghdad.
In a press briefing the day the Fallujah operation was launched US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "No government can allow terrorists and foreign fighters to use its soil to attack its people and to attack its government, and to intimidate the Iraqi people." General Richard Myers, the top US military officer, told journalists that Fallujah was "a major safe haven for former regime elements and foreign fighters".
In a campaign aided and abetted by a pliant corporate media, the Pentagon painted Fallujah as dominated by fighters under the control of Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of an organisation Zarqawi himself has tagged "Al Qaeda in Iraq".
The stories of Zarqawi-led foreign jihadis running Fallujah's defence turned out to be apocryphal, however. A November 24, 2004 Associated Press article, under the headline " Two locals were core of Fallujah insurgency", reported that, before the assault on Fallujah, "US officials described the city as a den of foreign terrorists, but its top commanders were an electrician and a mosque preacher — both natives of the community". The latter of the duo was imprisoned during Saddam Hussein's rule for criticising the Iraqi government.
Unfortunately for Fallujah's residents, Washington's fury was anything but phantom. For defying the occupation forces, much of the town was reduced to rubble. The April 19 Washington Post reported that during the assault on the city, "More than half of Fallujah's 39,000 homes were damaged, and about 10,000 of those were destroyed or left structurally unsound to live in".
In a war during which the Pentagon's propaganda programs have reached a new level of sophistication with the "embedding" of journalists, the truth about Fallujah came out in dribs and drabs. The same will no doubt be true of this "new Fallujah", Tal Afar.
In an article datelined September 13 the Washington Post's Jonathan Finer chose to report "In Tal Afar, A Brawl to Blow Off Some Steam": "After months of preparing for a battle with insurgents that never fully materialized and 12 days of running around this city from dawn to dusk, the soldiers of Eagle Troop did what soldiers often do with unspent aggression.
"They fought each other.
"Squaring off Tuesday evening in the front yard of a home they had commandeered to be their command post for the final stage of the assault on Tall Afar, they grappled one-on-one on the grass for hours. Good-natured taunts flew. T-shirts and uniform pants were torn."
While a US-created humanitarian crisis unfolded in Tal Afar, this, apparently, was the news. (Of course sticking to the officially approved "good news" stories is probably a safe move given that the US military has been responsible for the deaths of at least 18 media workers since the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003.)
'Iraqi-led effort'
A large part of the PR operation surrounding the assault on Tal Afar has been spinning it as an "Iraqi-led" effort. "The solidarity between national, provincial, local leaders and the predominant use of Iraqi security forces show they are committed to protecting their citizens and driving al Qaeda from Iraq", CentCom's media release quoted US Colonel Brian Stephenson, chief of operations for the "Multinational Forces" (MNF), as saying.
But, reported the September 12 London Guardian, "one source close to US commanders in Nineveh province said that US firepower was decisive and that images of Iraqis searching houses were largely cosmetic". The Guardian's source added that a "senior Iraqi commander" had even been arrested for selling information to the rebels. The report also revealed that Tal Afar's mayor, Muhammad Rasheed, had resigned "at what he said was a sectarian purge" instead of the victory for democracy claimed by the US and their Iraqi puppets.
All the usual appellations were applied to the defenders of Tal Afar — terrorists, Islamic fundamentalists, foreign fighters, etc. Yet given the human rights violations in the cities where the US and its allies operate, Washington's moral authority to condemn those who resist the occupation is somewhat lacking.
A human rights report released by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) on September 8 cites "serious allegations of extra-judicial executions taking place which underline a deterioration in the situation of law and order... The bodies of 36 men, blindfolded, handcuffed, bearing signs of torture and summarily executed, were found on August 25 near Badhra. Families of the victims reported to the Human Rights Office that the men had been detained on 24 August in the Al Hurria district of Baghdad following an operation carried out by forces linked to the Ministry of Interior."
A similar example given in the report involved 11 Iraqis being detained by forces linked to the interior ministry in Baghdad in July who were later found dead. In addition, UNAMI "received consistent reports of excessive use of force with regard to persons and property as well as mass arrests carried out by Iraqi police and special forces acting alone or in association with the MNF...
"Reports of ill-treatment of detainees and inadequacies in judicial procedures have continued ... first and second hand accounts from Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Kirkuk and the Kurdish governorates, as well as corroborating information from other credible sources, consistently point to the systematic use of torture during interrogations at police stations and within other premises belonging to the Ministry of Interior."
'Sectarian strife'
As if the pain engendered by the US assault on Tal Afar wasn't enough, on September 14 about 100 unemployed Shiite Iraqis were killed in a car bomb attack in Baghdad, one of a string of bombings in the Iraqi capital that day that killed at least 150 people and injured more than 500. "Credit" for the attack was claimed by Zarqawi, whose sole purpose in life seems to be trying to derail resistance to the occupation by fomenting sectarian strife.
However, a September 15 report by the British Independent's Patrick Cockburn, while claiming "sectarian strife is increasing", added: "In the mainly Sunni but hitherto mixed districts of Daura and Amariyah in south and west Baghdad, Shia residents have been shot and others intimidated into leaving. But at the same time many of those wounded denied there would be a war between Shia and Sunni. Mohammed Abdul Karim, an injured Shia at Noman hospital, pointed out that he was in a Sunni district and the Sunni doctors were doing everything to help him."
Zarqawi and his al Qaeda-linked group have continued to serve the same purpose they did before the US-led invasion of Iraq — a justification for US atrocities and a propaganda weapon in the White House's arsenal to help smear the patriotic Iraqi resistance to the occupation. A March 2, 2004, NBC News report revealed that Washington had rejected plans to kill Zarqawi not once, but three times, because, in the words of NBC's Jim Miklaszewski, "the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in [northern] Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam".
The irony of the US-led occupation forces' assault on Tal Afar is that it is likely to be as successful as its assault on Fallujah, where, despite Washington's efforts to turn the city into a huge prison, "the insurgents are back", according to a September 1 United Press International report.
From Green Left Weekly, September 21, 2005.
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