Iraq: Escalating guerrilla attacks feed fears of new Vietnam (UK)

This article is from the UK Independent.

As a helicopter crash pushes the American military toll over 400, Phil Reeves discovers how promises of peace, prosperity and self-rule have given way to chaos, terror and insurrection

16 November 2003


Khaled Abed Ali, a 58-year-old electricity company worker, says people "don't like the Americans or trust the governing council". He expects the resistance to grow. The same view was expressed by Mahadi Saleh al-Dulemi, an estate agent. And also by Abu Essa al-Dulemi, a money dealer. And, it seems reasonable to assume, by all those who scrawl the pro-Saddam graffiti on the walls and motorway bridges, which are regularly painted over, only to reappear again.

There was a time in the early stages of the occupation when the US sought to win the hearts and minds of such people. But these efforts seem to have evaporated in the mutual suspicion created by persistent low-level violence. That suspicion has taken concrete form in the miles of barriers and razor wire that separate the Americans from the outside world.

The same troops who once fraternised with the street children - and even briefly started eating in Baghdad restaurants - now move swiftly and uneasily through the city, praying that the next bomb won't detonate under their vehicle's wheels.

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