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?