An Iraq intifada

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1190300,00.html

Now the war is being fought in the open, by people defending their homes

Naomi Klein in Baghdad
Monday April 12, 2004
The Guardian

April 9, 2003 was the day Baghdad fell to US forces. One year later, it is rising up against them.
Donald Rumsfeld claims that the resistance is just a few "thugs, gangs and terrorists". This is dangerous wishful thinking. The war against the occupation is now being fought out in the open, by regular people defending their homes and neighbourhoods - an Iraqi intifada.

"They stole our playground," an eight-year-old boy in Sadr City told me this week, pointing at six tanks parked in a soccer field, next to a rusty jungle gym. The field is a precious bit of green in an area of Baghdad that is otherwise a swamp of raw sewage and uncollected rubbish.

Sadr City has seen little of Iraq's multibillion-dollar "reconstruction", which is partly why Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army have so much support here. Before the US occupation chief, Paul Bremer, provoked Sadr into an armed conflict by shutting down his newspaper and arresting and killing his deputies, the Mahdi army was not fighting coalition forces, it was doing their job for them.
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Telling words.

Don

Whatever it is becoming, it is not "as advertised". Wish America would wake up to the fact that they've been had but the most corrupt, crooked corporate run misadministration in the history of this nation.

And I saw something that I feared more than any of this: a copy of the Koran with a bullet hole through it. It was lying in the ruins of what was Sadr's headquarters in Sadr City. On April 8, according to witnesses, two US tanks broke down the walls of the centre while two guided missiles pierced its roof, leaving giant craters in the floor and missile debris behind.

The worst damage, however, was done by hand. The clerics at the Sadr office say that US soldiers entered the building and crudely shredded photographs of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shia cleric in Iraq. When I arrived at the destroyed centre, the floor was covered in torn religious texts, including several copies of the Koran that been ripped and shot through with bullets. And it did not escape the notice of the Shias here that hours earlier, US soldiers had bombed a Sunni mosque in Falluja.

now. Destroying pictures of Sistani? Destroying copies of the Koran and other religious texts? Shooting bullets thru the Koran?
All this done in the office of Sadr.

Do you expect any Iraqi to believe that attack on the mosque was simply a miltary defensive move against terrorists and not a religiously motivated hate crime against Islam when followed by the above?

>>"We should thank Paul Bremer," Salih Ali told me. "He has finally united Iraq. Against him."<<

double up on his mercenary protectors.

silencing the newspaper was a stupid move.

snip>
Sadr City has seen little of Iraq's multibillion-dollar "reconstruction", which is partly why Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army have so much support here. Before the US occupation chief, Paul Bremer, provoked Sadr into an armed conflict by shutting down his newspaper and arresting and killing his deputies, the Mahdi army was not fighting coalition forces, it was doing their job for them.

But, they are probably gleeful since they may very well end up getting their additional world war. Too bad their *sses aren't placed directly in harms way, both in treausure and in blood.