ATTACKERS UNITED BY PIETY IN PLOT TO STRIKE TROOPS
Artículo de Anthony Shadid
en “The Washington Post” del 21.09.2003
Con un muy breve comentario al final:
CONVIENE DAR MAS RELEVANCIA A ESTE FACTOR
EXPLICATIVO.
Luis Bouza-Brey
El formateado es mío (L. B.-B.)
KHALDIYA, Iraq -- In an
austere room with concrete floors and walls adorned with two renderings of
Islam's holiest shrine in Mecca, two brothers of Adnan
Fahdawi pulled out a creased and torn green folder
stuffed with the memorabilia of martyrdom.
There was a tag from the black body bag in which the
31-year-old Fahdawi's body had been delivered to the
police station. "Multiple GSW," read the bloodstained card, using a
shorthand label for gunshot wounds. Cause of death: "extrusion of brain
matter." Next, a picture of Fahdawi's hard,
bearded face. Smoldering eyes, hinting at
determination, stared out over a caption that declared him a martyred hero.
After that was a letter he and several others had written before they attacked
U.S. forces under a full moon on July 15 near this Euphrates River town.
"Today, we have sacrificed ourselves to defend
our honor and pride," read the typed statement,
embossed with traditional religious invocations in floral, Arabic script.
"We have sacrificed our souls for the sake of Islam, sacrificed our souls
to get rid of the monkeys, pigs, Jews and Christians. To all our brothers and
sisters, we prevail on you to be joyful with us."
In the guerrilla war that grips the provincial towns
and weary villages of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, the U.S. occupation is
meeting resistance from those President Bush has described as foreign
terrorists and "members of the old Saddam regime who fled the battlefield
and now fight in the shadows." They have a common goal, he said in an
address this month: "reclaiming Iraq for tyranny."
But in this Sunni Muslim town colored
in shades of brown and intersected by canals of open sewage, Fahdawi and the others who died are celebrated as heroes. Neighbors and relatives call them defenders of faith, not
supporters of former president Saddam Hussein. And in their words, actions and
ideas, relatives say, the men represent a homegrown
movement, grounded in a militant reading of religion, that
augurs a new enemy for the occupation.
Fahdawi
and the five others hailed from different families and tribes, their relatives
say, but were united by the resurgent piety that followed the collapse of
Hussein's government in April. They were devotees of a militant Syrian
preacher, whose once-banned bootleg tapes and videos sell for less than $1 and
intersperse calls for jihad with images of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the
United States. They congregated in a small mosque, with a tidy garden of
periwinkles and jasmine, whose chalkboard at the entrance reads, "You, the
ones who believe, do not take the Jews and Christians as guardians."
They went into the attack, relatives say, believing
that their deaths would serve as a collective example.
"When the neighbors
arrived, they said, 'We didn't come to give condolences, we came to give
congratulations,' " said one of Fahdawi's brothers, Salah, 33.
"He was a hero. We wish God would plant the faith in our hearts that He
put in Adnan's."
As the brother spoke, U.S. helicopters whirred
overhead, a familiar sound in a town where guerrillas have repeatedly attacked
U.S. forces and where the police chief, considered by many a collaborator, was
killed last week. Salah Fahdawi,
filled with pride, ignored them.
"Adnan truly believed
in God," he said.
A
Formidable Presence
For weeks, Fahdawi's picture hung at the Mashaheer Barbershop, on Khaldiya's
main drag. His portrait was bordered by roses. Written above it was the
familiar Koranic saying: "Do not consider dead
those killed for the sake of God. Rather they are living with God." Below
it was inscribed the date of his death, July 15, and a caption saying he had
been "martyred for the sake of raising the words 'there is no god but
God.' "
The men at the barbershop said Fahdawi
had been a formidable, even intimidating presence in this conservative town.
Born into a family of 14, he formed a construction
crew after his discharge from the military, and he was a familiar sight on his
battered red motorcycle in the serpentine alleys of Khaldiya.
In his leisure time, he studied Islam with the town's elder cleric, 65-year-old
Sheik Abed Saleh, and he brought religious fervor, they said, to almost every element of his life.
He never missed the obligatory five daily prayers,
often performing them at the Nur Mosque. He fired his
employees for not doing the same. He refused to eat with residents he suspected
of looting in the war's chaotic, lawless aftermath. During the lunar month of
Ramadan, when Muslims fast from sunrise to sundown, he would refuse to speak
with those he suspected of having cheated.
At 31, the equivalent of middle age in Iraq, he had
yet to start a family of his own.
"He preferred to be a martyr than to marry,"
said Salah, his brother.
Neighbors
and relatives said Fahdawi was at the center of the cell that came together for the attack.
Through construction jobs, he met Khalil Huzeimawi, a stocky, 32-year-old father of five who moved
from neighboring Fallujah a year ago. Fahdawi shared a passion for sports with Omar Shaabani, a quiet, 24-year-old father of three. And he was
a childhood friend of both Hamid and Raed Kirtani, cousins in their
twenties who worked together selling poultry from a shack built of chicken wire
and dried reeds.
Each had his own lifestyle. Fahdawi
was nicknamed "the sheik," a reflection of his religious study and
public demeanor. Shaabani
and Huzeimawi were more mature, with families to raise. Hamid, the only one not to
serve in the military, was working on obtaining a business degree in Baghdad,
commuting 50 miles from Khaldiya on most days. Raed, who was supposed to marry last month, was obsessed
with soccer, hanging pictures of Argentina's Javier Saviola,
Gabriel Batistuta and his favorite,
Diego Maradona, on his wall.
Relatives recalled that the men shared a growing piety
after the war, along with new influences made possible by Hussein's fall.
The relatives said most of them enjoyed listening to Koranic recitation and began attending with devotion the
Friday prayers at Khaldiya's Grand Mosque. At least
three listened to the sermons of Mahmoud Quul Aghassi, the militant Syrian
preacher. Relatives said two of them, upset and angry, went to the funeral in
Fallujah for Sheik Laith Khalil,
a fiery prayer leader who was killed June 30 together with six religious
students in what U.S. officials said appeared to be a mistake during a
"bomb manufacturing class" in his mosque.
While their neighbors
complained of rising prices -- cooking gas that has gone from 16 cents to $2,
cement that has gone from $20 to $90 a ton -- the men railed against the U.S. occupation,
a presence they viewed through the prism of religion, not politics.
It was a message, relatives said, pronounced often at
the Nur Mosque, a small worship hall down the street
from a vegetable stand where the men often met. Inside the mosque, along
freshly painted walls, is a picture of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa
Mosque, one of Islam's holiest sites. Across the top, lettering reads, "Jerusalem, we are coming."
"The
Americans are infidels," Sheik Aalam Sabar, a 33-year-old
cleric, said as he sat on his mosque's spotless gray carpets. "It is legitimate to fight the Americans."
On the night of July 14, Fahdawi
prepared for his death.
His brothers said he told his mother to put henna on
the palms of her hands, a sign of joy and celebration often reserved for a
wedding night. He told his family he wanted no grieving if he was killed -- not the tents set up for mourners, not the shooting in the air that
traditionally marks funerals. As a martyr, they recalled him insisting,
he believed he would be alive in heaven.
He sat down to a dinner of rice, tomatoes and
eggplant. When the last call to prayer pierced the sweltering summer night, he
got up from the table, said an abrupt goodbye and left through a yard of lotus
trees. "He didn't return," said Salah.
The muezzin's sonorous call, at 9:30 p.m., was the
signal for the others.
Raed Kirtani had taken a bath and put on cologne, then laughed
with his mother before leaving. Shaabani simply bid
his family farewell. Some of the men donned their dark tracksuits and tennis
shoes before they left. Others wore them under their dishdashas,
a traditional gown. Fahdawi, his family said, had put
his clothes in a bag and taken them to the mosque a day earlier.
'I
Had a Feeling'
They staged their attack near an ammunition depot where U.S. forces are still
stationed, between Habanniya Lake and a canal that
snakes along brown, rocky bluffs interspersed with scraggly eucalyptus trees
and electric towers.
At about 1:30 a.m., Fahdawi
and the others lay in wait as troops left the depot. U.S. officials at the time
said the men might have been expecting Humvees.
Instead, they met Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Armed with rocket-propelled
grenades and AK-47s, they opened fire, but were outgunned. Fahdawi
and four others were killed. A sixth fighter was captured. There were no U.S.
casualties.
In central Khaldiya, a mile
or so away, residents woke up and clambered onto their roofs to watch a battle
that some said lasted 90 minutes, others three hours. But even before the
fighting ended, relatives and friends said they knew what the outcome would be.
"I had a feeling," said Khaled
Kirtani, Raed's brother.
As the sun rose, relatives went to the moonscape that
was the battlefield. U.S. soldiers had taken the bodies to the hospital, a
nearby base and finally Khaldiya. Left behind were
100-yard trails of blood, marking where relatives believed the bodies had been
dragged away, along with spent rounds, soiled shoes and shreds of clothing. Muthanna, Shaabani's 19-year-old brother, found the bloodied,
bullet-holed head scarves of Shaabani, Fahdawi and Huzeimawi.
Nearby were the baseball hats, one emblazoned with the Nike logo,
that had been worn by the Kirtani cousins.
"We delivered each one to their families," Muthanna said.
Sheathed in body bags and transported for hours in Humvees under a scorching sun, the bodies arrived at the
police station in the afternoon. Khaled Kirtani said his brother's face was so mangled he could
recognize him only by his hair. The belly of his cousin, he said, was ripped
open. He thought Shaabani's body had been run over by
a tank. Fahdawi's relatives said half his face was
blown away.
Within hours, the relatives recalled, the men crossed
the threshold from death to martyrdom in the eyes of the town.
Khaled
said his brother's body seemed to retain a lifelike quality, as befitting a
sacred death. "There was no odor," he
recalled, surprised even now. "They had gone to meet God."
In the funerals held the same day, hundreds of
relatives and neighbors paid their respects.
Shaabani's
father, Ahmed, 45, displayed a yellow and black notebook with the names of 40
relatives and 318 friends. Carefully recorded in handwritten script, it noted
their names and the sums they gave -- from $1 to $14 -- to mark his death.
In Fahdawi's house, the
family heeded his wishes and refused to cry as they received mourners who
numbered -- in Salah's words -- "200, 300,
perhaps 1,000." Sheik Abed, his former teacher, told the family not to
wash the body, but, as is customary for martyrs, to bury it as was. He bestowed
on Fahdawi an honorific reserved for fathers, a
symbol of the marriage that awaited him in heaven.
As they placed his body in a white shroud, then inside
a wood coffin, the sheik declined to utter the funeral prayers.
"A martyr doesn't need the prayers," Salah recalled the sheik saying. "He's guaranteed to
be in heaven. He's already there."
Sheik Abed, a pacific man with a gray and black beard,
was long the most influential cleric in Khaldiya. In
an interview, he acknowledged knowing Fahdawi and
said they had sometimes studied together, but he declined to call him a martyr.
That's God's judgment, the sheik said. While
he said he understood their reasons for fighting -- as Muslims, they should not
be ruled by infidels -- he described the men as reckless and impetuous.
The occupation is too young, he said, and it is too early to take up arms.
"It's not time for jihad," he said.
But relatives of the men said Sheik Abed
is no longer an unquestioned voice in Khaldiya. With
Hussein's fall, they said, the city has opened to influences that were once
underground, currents that have swept the Arab world for a generation.
For Fahdawi and the others, Aghassi, the preacher also known as Abu Qaqaa,
was their cleric of choice. Based in Syria, the tall, lanky Aghassi
refrains from criticizing his own government but delivers a stern message of
jihad that views the United States and Israel as allies in a campaign against
the Muslim world. As it does for other Islamic preachers, the Palestinian cause
sits at the heart of Aghassi's rhetoric, which is
framed as a struggle between religions. In a booming voice, he punctuates his
speeches with talk of traitors and mercenaries.
His cassettes and videos are available in religious
bookstores in Jordan, but were circulated only by hand in Iraq before the
occupation. Now they are freely sold in neighboring
Fallujah for less than $1 each. Relatives said the young men around Fahdawi rented them for 15 cents, sometimes watching them
together and trading them among themselves.
A
Love for Death
A gifted orator, Aghassi favors
a style that builds to a crescendo, then softens, only
to build again.
"We want manhood and heroism," he declared
in one taped sermon, delivered to a crowd that broke into tears. "We want
people to love death and yearn for heaven. We want the words 'no god but God'
to shake the world."
Muslims, he said, should look to martyrdom "as a
thirsty man looks to water."
In another video, he delivers his sermon as images are
shown of planes flying into the World Trade Center,
followed by pictures of the White House, Congress and Kremlin and sounds of
loud explosions. In the background, the cleric stands clad in camouflage, with
an M-16 rifle in one hand, a pistol in the other.
"America has tyrannized the Muslim nation," Aghassi said in a sermon titled "The Cadence of
Justice in the Time of Defeat" and recorded last year. "Pour on it
your anger and change its strength to weakness, its wealth to poverty, its
unity into disunity."
On a cassette taped after Baghdad's fall, he railed
against Arab leaders allied with the United States "who know nothing but
palaces" and drew on Islamic history to make his points. While forgiving
of Hussein and Syria's president, he suggested the conflict would unfold in a
clearly religious context -- of infidels against believers, of Muslims against
others.
"Show these mercenaries a black day," he
intoned. "Like a dark night, drown them in the Euphrates and the
Tigris."
Capt. Michael Calvert, a military spokesman in neighboring Ramadi, said U.S.
troops along the Euphrates have yet to determine the motives for the guerrilla
attacks that seem to be on the rise.
"If you can build us a profile," he said,
"we'll hire you."
Little
Doubt on Motives
But Khaled Kirtani, whose
brother was buried with his cousin in a cemetery overlooking the green-domed
Sheik Masoud shrine, has little doubt about the men's
motives. Their tombstones called them "martyred heroes." Ribbons colored the green of Islam are tied at the base.
Kirtani,
like other relatives whose conversations are peppered with the phrases of Aghassi, said they died for God, not Hussein. "Saddam Hussein put a tent over the Iraqi people," said Kirtani, 27. "He cheated the Iraqi people."
Slender and stern like his brother,
Kirtani listed the former Iraqi leader's sins. He started the Iran-Iraq war, in
which Muslim killed Muslim. He invaded Kuwait. He gave the Americans a pretext
for occupying Iraq. And his army, he said, "dissolved in minutes."
"Saddam Hussein is behind all our
problems," he said, wearing a black shirt inherited from his brother.
"My expectation is that Saddam Hussein is in the United States on an
island. They'll build a monument for him because he made their mission
easy."
Some residents of this Sunni Muslim town express
nostalgia for the days when their region was favored
at the expense of the Kurdish north and the Shiite-dominated south. To many of
them, Hussein stands as the embodiment of a recognized past as opposed to an
uncertain future. But Kirtani angrily dismissed those
sentiments, voiced most often by his parents' generation.
"The
young people are waking up. I saw it with my brother and cousin," he said.
"They're not Baathists, they're not party
members. They did it for God. When they saw the Americans come, raid the
houses, steal from the people, they didn't accept it."
He invoked the Koran. He quoted the prophet
Muhammad's sayings. And he talked with the fervor of
the converted.
"The American people should realize they're going
to start receiving coffins," Kirtani said.
"We're not their slaves." He stopped to catch his breath, shaking his
head as if uttering a self-evident truth. "We accept death as easily as we
drink water."
MUY BREVE COMENTARIO:CONVIENE
DAR MAS RELEVANCIA A ESTE FACTOR EXPLICATIVO (L. B.-B.)
El número de factores explicativos del crecimiento de la
resistencia frente al proceso de cambio en Irak es amplio y variado. Nos
encontramos a los baazistas y militares procedentes
del régimen anterior, que no han sido derrotados del todo; a Saddam Hussein
como fantasma ominoso aullando desde no se sabe dónde; a los terroristas
islámicos vinculados a Al Quaeda y procedentes de
diversos países musulmanes, y a los intereses de muchos de estos países en
frenar la evolución iraquí por los medios que sean. Pero el factor del
fundamentalismo autóctono que dibuja este artículo aún no había sido apuntado
por nadie, y puede estar adquiriendo relevancia. Lo que Oz llama el "islamismo paranoico"
tiene diversas manifestaciones , y ésta es una de
ellas. Frente a él, hay que estimular a los moderados resueltos, como el mismo Oz sostiene, pero también hay que acelerar la
transición, a fin de evitar el crecimiento del fundamentalismo autóctono, que
es posible que no provenga principalmente del chiismo, sino del sunnismo.
Pero sería un error gravísimo que las tropas y los gobernantes de la
coalición abandonaran el país demasiado rápidamente, sin haber creado las
estructuras estatales e instituciones que posibiliten la estabilización, porque
permitiría a Hussein recuperar el control, volviendo a reconstruir las unidades
de su ejército ahora camufladas.
E igualmente constituiría un error gravísimo dejar en manos de la
ONU la situación: una institución dividida, movida por impulsos cínicos de
algunos países, de tal inoperancia que puede tardar tres meses o más en ponerse
de acuerdo en emitir una resolución para resolver una situación urgente, no
puede gobernar una situación tan delicada como la actual. En mi opinión, la ONU
puede colaborar muy eficazmente de varias maneras: legitimando el proceso de
liberación de Irak e impulsando la participación de países islámicos en una
fuerza multinacional más amplia que la actual; fijando flexiblemente el
objetivo de transición y democratización en unas medidas y calendario similares
a los expuestos por Bremer días
atrás, y colaborando con las instituciones provisionales de gobierno iraquíes y
la dirección política de la coalición en la reconstrucción de Irak. No hay otro
camino; es necesario orientar el proceso de liberación y estabilización
apoyándose en las tres palancas mencionadas: NNUU como fuente de legitimación,
de fijación de los objetivos del proceso global e instancia importante y
operativa de la administración y gestión de la reconstrucción en el día a día;
las tropas de la coalición, ampliadas con la participación de países islámicos,
junto con la policía o milicias iraquíes, manteniendo el orden y la
seguridad; y las nuevas instituciones de gobierno iraquíes asumiendo un papel
cada vez más importante hasta que exista una Constitución refrendada y un
gobierno electivo.
Como medida complementaria, para evitar el crecimiento del
fundamentalismo autóctono, ¿ no sería posible añadir
diplomáticos y jefes militares procedentes de países islámicos a los órganos de
dirección del proceso?