Doug Lorimer
On May 18, a briefing by top Pentagon generals conceded that the US would need to maintain the current numbers of troops in Iraq — 138,000.
According to a United Press International report published the next day, General John Abizaid, who directs all US military forces in the Middle East, described the progress in developing Iraqi forces to fight the anti-occupation resistance as "disappointing".
Just days later, on May 25, the Hong Kong-based Asia Times Online website reported that the Pentagon is considering abandoning the creation a regular Iraqi army, instead relying on irregular militias under US command. The report stated: "According to Asia Times Online contacts, these US-backed militias will comprise three main segments — former Kurdish peshmerga (paramilitaries), former members of the Badr Brigade and those former members of the Baath Party and the Iraqi army who were part of the Saddam regime but who have now thrown in their lot with the new Iraqi government...
"Military analysts believe the US military in Iraq will use the Kurd and Shiite militias to quell the resistance in central and northern Iraq, while in the south the former Baathists and old-guard Iraqi soldiers will be used against anti-US Shiite groups."
No Iraqi troops accompanied US forces in Operation Matador, the largest single US-led military operation in Iraq since last November's assault on the rebel city of Fallujah.
Involving 1000 US marines, Operation Matador was a week-long assault on alleged "foreign jihadists" in the town of Qaim, 320 kilometres west of Baghdad, and in desert villages near the Syrian border. Fourteen marines were killed in the operation, which began on May 7.
While the Pentagon publicly claims that most of the attacks on US and allied forces in Iraq are the work of non-Iraqi Islamist fighters, shortly after the Fallujah offensive in November, then-interim Iraqi interior minister Faleh Hassan al Naqib said no more than 6% of the anti-occupation fighters were non-Iraqis.
On May 14, US officials pronounced Operation Matador a great success, claiming US troops had "killed 125 insurgents". However, in May 16 dispatch from Baghdad, the Knight Ridder Newspapers news agency depicted it as a political disaster for the US.
According to the KRN report: "Operation Matador began with the marines sweeping into the Qaim area in armored vehicles, backed up by helicopter gunships. They pummeled suspected insurgent safe houses, flattening parts of the villages and killing armed men...
"When the offensive ended, however, angry residents returned to find blocks of destruction. Men who'd stayed behind to help were found dead in shot-up houses."
Fasal al Goud, a local tribal leader and former US-appointed governor of Iraq's western Anbar province, told KRN: "The Americans were bombing whole villages, and saying they were only after the foreigners."
On May 17, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs' IRIN news agency reported that 6000 terrified inhabitants of Qaim had fled the town and were camped in the desert.
Meanwhile, on May 18, Harith al Dari, head of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), accused the Badr Brigades, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) of being behind the recent assassinations of Sunni clerics.
The AMS is widely seen as the public political face of the anti-occupation resistance movement, while the SCIRI is one of two Shiite cleric-led parties that dominate the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the main political bloc in Iraq's transitional parliament and in Washington's puppet Iraqi government.
The Radio Free Europe website reported on May 23 that "while armed gangs disguised as police and National Guard forces may be behind a string of attacks on both Sunnis and Shiites across Iraq... some reports indicate that the perpetrators could in fact be members of the Badr Organisation bent on seeking revenge against its perceived enemies, including rebel Shiite leader Moqtada al Sadr, whose followers clashed with police in Kufa following Friday prayers on May 6."
Associated Press reported that on May 22 senior aides to Sadr met with AMS representatives "in a bid to soothe tensions that have flared amid violence that has killed at least 550 people, including 10 Shiite and Sunni clerics, since the new Shiite-dominated government was announced on April 28".
"There is a wound that needs to be treated and Moqtada was the first to offer his medicine", AMS spokesperson Sheik Abdul Salam al Kubaisi told reporters after the talks with Sadr's delegation.
"Iraqis need to stand side by side at this time", Sadr said in an interview aired that same day on the Al Arabiya TV station.
The following day, Sadr spokesperson Sheik Ghaith al Tamimi rejected an appeal by the UIA to participate in the drafting of a new constitution for the country. "Even if they asked Moqtada al Sadr himself to help draft the constitution, we'd still consider it incomplete and illegitimate as long as there is occupation", Tamimi said.
From Green Left Weekly, June 1, 2005.
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