Iraqi anger boils over

War of liberation from U.S. occupation is about to begin

The army of "liberation" has already turned into the army of occupation. The Shiites are threatening to fight the Americans, to create their own war of liberation.

At night on every one of the Shiite Muslim barricades in Sadr City � formerly known as Saddam City � there are 14 men with automatic rifles.

Even individual U.S. Marines in Baghdad are talking of the insults being flung at them.

"Go away! Get out of my face!" an American soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push toward the wire surrounding an infantry unit in the capital.

I watched the man's face suffuse with rage.

"God is Great! God is Great!" the Iraqi retorted. "F--- you!"

The Americans have issued a "Message to the Citizens of Baghdad," a document that is as colonial in spirit as it is insensitive in tone.

"Please avoid leaving your homes during the night hours after evening prayers and before the call to morning prayers," it tells the people of the city.

"During all hours, please approach Coalition military positions with extreme caution."

So now � with neither electricity nor running water � the millions of Iraqis here are ordered to stay in their homes from dusk to dawn. Lockdown.


Written by the command of the U.S. Marines 1st Division, it's a curfew in all but name.

"If I were an Iraqi and I read that," an Arab woman shouted at me, "I would become a suicide bomber."

And all across Baghdad, you hear the same thing, from Shiite Muslim clerics to Sunni businessmen, that the Americans have come only for oil, and that soon � very soon � a guerrilla resistance must start.

No doubt the Americans will claim that these attacks are "remnants' of Saddam's regime or "criminal elements." But that will not be the case.

Marine officers in Baghdad held desperate talks with a Shiite militant cleric from Najaf to avert an outbreak of fighting around the holy city and I met the prelate just before the negotiations began.

He told me that "history is being repeated."

He was talking about the British invasion of Iraq in 1917, which ended in disaster for the British.

To gain entrance to the desert town of al-Ambar, U.S. intelligence officers had to negotiate with tribal leaders in the best restaurant in Baghdad.

Everywhere are the signs of collapse. And everywhere the signs that America's promises of "freedom" and "democracy" are not to be honoured.

Why, Iraqis are asking, did the United States allow so many of Saddam's top leaders to escape?

It's not just the Beast of Baghdad and his two sons, Qusay and Uday, who've escaped but also vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan, deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, Saddam's personal adviser Dr. Abdul Al-Hashimi, the ministers of defence and health, even Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the minister of information.

Long before journalists cozied up to him, al-Sahhaf was the official who read out the list of executed "brothers" in the purge that followed Saddam's revolution � relatives of prisoners would dose themselves on Valium before each al-Sahhaf appearance.

Consider the vast security apparatus with which Saddam surrounded himself, the torture chambers and the huge bureaucracy that was its foundation.

President George W. Bush promised that America was campaigning for human rights in Iraq, that war criminals would be tracked down and brought to trial.

Now, the 60 secret police headquarters in Baghdad are empty; even the eight-square-kilometre headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

I have been to many of these sites. But not a single British or American officer has visited them to sift through the wealth of documents lying there or talk to the ex-prisoners who are themselves visiting their former places of torment.

Is this through idleness? Or is this wilful?

Take the Qasimiyeh security station beside the Tigris River. It's a pleasant villa � once owned by an Iranian-born Iraqi who was deported to Iran in the 1980s � and there's a little lawn outside and at first you don't notice the three big hooks in the ceiling of each room or the fact that big sheets of red paper, decorated with footballers, have been pasted over the windows to conceal the rooms from outsiders. But across the floors, in the garden, on the roof, are the files on all this suffering.

They show, for example, that the head of the torture centre was Hashem al-Tikrit and his deputy was Rashid al-Nakib.

Ex-prisoner Mohamed Aish Jassem showed me how he was suspended from the ceiling by his torturer, Capt. Amar al-Isawi, who believed Jassem was a member of the religious Dawa party.

"They put my hands behind my back like this and tied them and then pulled me into the air by my tied wrists," Jassem told me. "They used a little generator to lift me up, right up to the ceiling. Then, they'd release the rope in the hope of breaking my shoulder when I fell."

The hooks in the ceiling are just in front of Capt. al-Isawi's desk. I understood what this meant: There wasn't a separate torture chamber and elsewhere an office for documentation; the torture chamber was the office.

While the man or woman shrieked in agony above him, Capt. al-Isawi would sign papers, take phone calls and � given the contents of his rubbish bin � smoke many cigarettes while he waited for the information he sought from his prisoners.

Were they monsters, these men? Yes. Do the Americans seek them? No. Are they now working for the Americans? Quite possibly.

Indeed, some of them may well be in the long line of ex-security thugs who queue every morning outside the Palestine Hotel in the hope of being re-hired by the U.S. Marines' civil affairs unit.

The names of the guards at the Qasimiyeh torture centre in Baghdad � pedestrians were forbidden to walk down the road outside lest they'd hear the screams � are all named on the documents lying on the floor.

They were Ahmed Hassan Alawi, Akil Shaheed, Noaman Abbas and Mohamed Fayad.

But the Americans haven't bothered to find this out. So Messrs Alawair, Shaheed, Abbas and Fayad are welcome to apply for work from the Americans.

There are prisoner identification papers on the desks and in the cupboards. What happened to Wahid Mohamed, Majid Taha, Saddam Ali or Lazim Hamoud? We shall not know.

Ex-prisoners told me there is a mass grave in the Al-Khedeer desert, but no one � least of all Baghdad's new occupiers � are interested in finding it.

"We committed no sin," said a 40-year-old ex-inmate whose prison duties included the cleaning of the hangman's trap of blood and feces after each execution.

"We are not guilty of anything. Why did they do this to us? America, yes, it got rid of Saddam. But Iraq belongs to us. Our oil belongs to us. We will keep our nationality. It will stay Iraq. The Americans must go."

If the Americans and the British want to understand the nature of the religious opposition here, they need only consult the files of Saddam's secret service archives.

I found one, Report No. 7481, dated Feb. 24 � when the Iraqi muhabarrat security men were still working hard on their Shiite enemies less than a month before the U.S.-led invasion.

But of course, no one has bothered to read this material or even look for it.

There's an even more terrible place for the Americans to visit in Baghdad � the headquarters of the whole intelligence apparatus, a massive gray-painted block that was bombed by the Americans and a series of villas and office buildings that are stashed with files, papers and card indexes.

It was here that Saddam's special political prisoners were brought for vicious interrogation � electricity being an essential part of this � and it was here that Farzad Bazoft, the Observer correspondent, was brought for questioning before his dispatch to the hangman.

It's also graced with delicately shaded laneways, a children's area for the families of the torturers and a school in which one pupil had written an essay in English on (suitably perhaps) Beckett's Waiting For Godot.

There's also a miniature hospital, flowerbeds and a road named "Freedom St."

It's the creepiest place in all of Iraq. I met, extraordinarily, an Iraqi nuclear scientist walking in fear around the compound, a colleague of the former head of Iraqi nuclear physics. "This is the last place I ever wanted to see and I will never return to it," the scientist said.

"This was the place of greatest evil in all the world."

But the Americans should pay a visit. The top security men in Saddam's regime were busy in the last hours of their rule, shredding millions of documents. I found a great pile of black plastic rubbish bags at the back of one villa, each stuffed with the shreds of thousands of papers.

Shouldn't they be taken to Washington or London and re-constituted to learn their secrets? That's what the Iranians did with shredded U.S. embassy files in Tehran in 1980.

Files that were left unshredded contain a wealth of information about this place.

There's a substantial pile of papers, for example, recording the existence of a new super-drug for cancer that a number of Arab doctors wanted to manufacture in Iraq and � according to one file � "test on Iraqis."

But again, the Americans have not bothered � or do not want � to search through these papers.

If they did, they would also find the names of dozens of senior Iraqi intelligence men, many of them identified by the files of congratulatory letters that Saddam's secret policemen insisted on sending each other every time they were promoted.

Where now, for example, is Col. Abdulaziz Saadi, Capt. Abdulsalam Salawi, Capt. Saad Ahmed al-Ayash, Col. Saad Mohamed, Capt. Majid Ahmed and scores of others?

We may never know. Or perhaps we are not supposed to know.

Iraqis are right to ask why the Americans don't search for this information, just as they are right to demand to know why so many of Saddam's top lieutenants got away.

Here's another question the Iraqis are asking.

On the last weekend of the invasion, the Americans dropped four 900-kilogram bombs on the Baghdad residential area of Mansour.

They claimed they thought Saddam was hiding there. They knew they would kill civilians because it was not, as one of the Centcom mandarins said, a "risk-free venture."

So, they dropped their bombs and killed 14 civilians in Mansour, most of them members of a Christian family.

The Americans announced that they couldn't be sure they had killed Saddam until they could carry out forensic tests at the site.

But this turns out to have been a lie. I went to the site on Tuesday. Not a single American or British official � forensic or military � had bothered to visit the bomb craters. No Western forensic experts have examined the mass of debris.

When I arrived, there was a putrefying smell and families pulled the remains of a tiny baby from the rubble. No American officers have apologized for this appalling killing.

It's easy for a reporter to predict doom, especially after a brutal war that lacked all international legitimacy.

But catastrophe usually waits for optimists in the Middle East, especially for those who are false optimists and invade oil-rich nations with ideological excuses and high-flown moral claims and accusations like weapons of mass destruction that are still unproved.

So, I'll make an awful prediction. That America's war of "liberation" is over. Iraq's war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin.

In other words, the real and frightening story starts now...

call for extreme measures...

There's a big mix here...Iraqis who want to embrace us, and those who want to kill us as much as they wanted to kill Saddam... For our safety, and theirs, there will be some strict rules during the transition period.... What else would you expect?

As for "The Shiites are threatening to fight the Americans"...uhmm....yeah, we're shaking alright, but seriously, we're trying to forge them into a country that isn't going to end up on our sh*t list again...with better opportunities than they had under Saddam's regime. We don't want to kill them, but if they make that choice, then it might as well be suicide....

There is another choice : UN in US out.

Since the US makes the choice not to leave, the victims and casualties of that occupation are to be accounted on them ...

The Un is a better solution to the US govornment? Get real! The UN and US are both #ing institutions of NWO. Niether are clean.

Cold anger your article sounds very much like there are those in Iraq who are really scared and to be honest I do not blame them. They are afraid that what was done to them in the past will happen again.

They do not seem to much about computers, or the fact that much of the information that is in those papers could very well have already been found in hard drives.

One very important fact is that much of those sites where torture and murder occurred are in fact crime scene's. That the US places attention to those sites would invite others to do the same and probably taint the sites further for the investigations that are to follow.

As far as the UN and US they are not on the same page with respect to what has occurred. What by the way is apparent is that the UN by its actions, seems to have made an effort to make Saddam Hussein's regime seem legitimate despite what was happening their.

Originally posted by Toltec
Cold anger your article sounds very much like there are those in Iraq who are really scared and to be honest I do not blame them. They are afraid that what was done to them in the past will happen again.

They do not seem to much about computers, or the fact that much of the information that is in those papers could very well have already been found in hard drives.

One very important fact is that much of those sites where torture and murder occurred are in fact crime scene's. That the US places attention to those sites would invite others to do the same and probably taint the sites further for the investigations that are to follow.

As far as the UN and US they are not on the same page with respect to what has occurred. What by the way is apparent is that the UN by its actions, seems to have made an effort to make Saddam Hussein's regime seem legitimate despite what was happening their.

Yes, but i think they won�t accept any of them, for US and UN in the top they are the same...
The iraqi ppl got the worst part from US and UN not from only from saddam..., having a dictator wasn�t enough, then embargo by the UN, and bombs soldiers war etc 2 times in the last 10 years from US...
Obviously they won�t be happy or satisfied with what is going on, but the worst part is that they have suffered so much that now they are so afraid of everything...

Originally posted by Skadi_the_Evil_Elf
The Un is a better solution to the US govornment? Get real! The UN and US are both #ing institutions of NWO. Niether are clean.

Right!!! NONE ARE CLEAN!!! NONE!!!

Originally posted by Skadi_the_Evil_Elf
The Un is a better solution to the US govornment? Get real! The UN and US are both #ing institutions of NWO. Niether are clean.

u are Right!!!
NONE OF THEM!! NONE!!!

This just shows how #ing stupid some of them are!! I mean come on! Should we just leave their country and allow Syria and Iran to storm in and rape the countryside? There is no military left for Iraq to defend itself with. What #ing morons.

I think the point is that you should hand the country over to the UN, who can then hand the country back to the Iraqi people.

the UN does such a wonderful bang up job everywhere else...*cough*...

Seriously, the UN is in need of some serious revamping before it assumes such tasks. Seriously, were talking about an organisation that is woefully out of date....

No matter what happens in Iraq, it's a mess. It's a mess we made, and it's one we'll clean up ourselves...even as we get egg on our face while we're doing it....*sigh*

don�t blame yourself or an entire country like america for what happend in iraq, america is just another tool, don�t forget, could have been NATO, UN, or whoever under their control...
They do always what is planned, and we can just or talk or complaint about it.. But we never know the final reason for that act...
Mainly iraqis will hate american citizens or the country itself, but if u are smart enough, and think, u really can�t blame all of them for what happend, what u can blame them for is for support massacres and call it justice, but when it comes to their land they play the game of the Talion Law.....
Hipocrisy plagues this planet, those poor iraqis, they had nothing before the war started, they suffered the worse, UN UK AUSTRALIAN USA, NATO, EUROPE Almost the most powerful "tools" in this world have put a hand in the iraqi conflict, and then called that liberation....
If i was one iraqi citizen i�d say,
Bombard America, and liberate them from the insane dictator of Bush (we all know bush is just a puppet but anyway...)
And i�d be treated like an insane guy or something for say this kind of stuff, when it is against me, then it will be for my good, i�ll have to thank all those americans felling proud of their army massacring my country people resources and life, AND I HAVE TO THANK THEM???????

Gazrok u are right, UN is the same as US, UK or whatever u want, just make it look with a different ideals and people will think that those are enemies,
but anyway we can let them anyway treat the people of this earth like this...
I just don�t understand people that agrees with the US goverment, how much brainwash are they gonna stand?

Gazrok - the US may not be able to clean this one up on it's own. If the anti-US sentiment gets a good grip in Iraq then things are going to get very messy.

The UN have plenty of practice at peacekeeping, The Balkans, Afghanistan, etc.. Perhaps at times things don't go properly (like Rwanda, Nigeria, etc.) but I don't think that the fact that the UN needs some reinforcing is sufficient justification for the US to destroy it.

In the eyes of the Iraqi people the UN is not the US. And that could prove to be very important...