Friday, May 14, 2004
As in the days of Saddam Hussein, officers from the old Iraqi army administer the former Ba'ath party stronghold of Samarra, a half-hour drive downriver from the former dictator's hometown of Tikrit.
The municipal mayor is a former air force officer and he has established a military council to collect the CVs of all the officers seeking recall to Iraq's burgeoning new army.
"We want an organised united Iraqi army, not a separate militia in every town," says Saddam Hassan, the military council secretary. Though his salary is paid by the US-led coalition, he makes no effort to hide his true allegiance.
"We can't deny Saddam (Hussein) is our president," explains Ahmed, his assistant. "We want him back."
Such sentiments, heard even from US army appointees, indicate how few inroads America has made in the Sunni triangle heartland. After an outbreak of fighting in November, US forces retreated over the river Tigris, abandoning two military bases inside the town. One remaining base has a small contingent of Kurdish and US forces but the coalition has no civilian presence in the town.
The combination of US withdrawal and a partial rehabilitation of Mr Hussein's military have so far forestalled what observers predicted would be "the Falluja effect". Many had expected Samarra to be in the vanguard of a wave of copycat rebellions in other Sunni towns, after a month-long battle in Falluja resulted in a US withdrawal and the handover of security to the old order of former Iraqi army officers. In many ways, they have won the same terms without the pain.
Even so, many in the town - the US-approved mayor says 30 per cent - see the municipal councillors as American stooges. US tank patrols, which venture into the town once or twice a day, regularly come under fire. American soldiers exposed at a checkpoint on the bridge over the Tigris say attacks have doubled since Fallujans mutilated four US security guards.
"This month has been busiest," says Charlie Company commander Capt George Rodriguez. But he adds: "We win every engagement."
But many in the US military are now less confident in claiming they are winning a war. While Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, visited Iraq yesterday to shore up morale, many soldiers scoff at the notion they have come to sow democracy and freedom.
The rebel core was severely depleted in an Easter engagement when scores of insurgents fought a two-day battle with US forces, according to Capt Rodriguez. Unlike Falluja, where rebels attacked in platoon formation, Samarra's insurgents now fight in twos and threes.
Over tea and melon, a former Iraqi general with an air of elegant self-assurance says fewer than 150 insurgents remain in the town.
"The lesson of Falluja is, 'Leave the city. Don't let yourself be surrounded'," says the general, a man in his fifties who some say is the mastermind of the local insurgency. Some insurgents, says the general, have redeployed to the countryside to wage war on US supply lines. In the Falluja fighting, he says, they attacked US troops from the rear.
The highways leading out of Samarra bear the scars. Craters from landmines break up the roads and the blackened skeletons of trucks and cars litter the kerbs. Coalition convoys still ply the roads but in far fewer numbers than before the convoy war.
Soldiers aboard tanks, taking no chances, train their guns on Iraqi cars to prevent them from overtaking and frequently drive up the wrong side of the highways at oncoming traffic to avoid planted bombs.
Inside Samarra, residents say the town of 300,000 is divided. The area around the cemetery on the far side of town is the insurgents' heartland, while the streets leading to the municipality belong to the American-led paramilitary force, the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps, most of whom wear balaclavas to hide their identity.
The divisions are tearing families apart. The general's brother-in-law works for the municipal authorities. The home of an ICDC militiaman who lived on the wrong side of the divide was flattened by 50kg of TNT.
"Their houses get attacked and they still come to work," says Capt Rodriguez. A police force is nowhere to be seen. Residents' loyalties seem confused. "Resistance is legal but we have a group who just carry out destruction and robbery," says Samarra's mayor, Sheikh Adnan Maher, a lumbering former army officer and a close relative of the US-appointed governor in nearby Tikrit.
Unlike in Falluja, key members of the Muslim clergy have backed the municipality. The representative of the Muslim Scholars' Council, which in Falluja dubbed itself the political arm of the insurgency, sits on the town council.
"Escalation is not in our interest before 30 June. We have told our people to quiet the situation," says Hatim Ahmed al-Samarrai, who is imam at the town's largest Sunni mosque.
By NICOLAS PELHAM
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