The 9/11 Wars (23 page)

Eventually reinforcements from Amarah arrived and brought sufficient firepower to bear on the gunmen – now hundreds strong – to allow the British troops to be extricated. It was only then that it was realized that the paratroopers’ patrol had not been the only British military presence in Majjar al-Kabir. At 10 a.m., half an hour after the patrol had reached the town, six military policemen, or ‘Redcaps’, assigned to the rather thankless task of trying to rebuild and reform the town’s police force had also arrived to talk to the newly appointed police chief about renovating the local station – a ‘reconstruction’ mission typical of those assigned to thousands of British soldiers at the time.

The men were under the command of Sergeant Simon Hamilton-Jewell from Thames Ditton in southern England. A mechanic and judo black belt, he had first joined the army as a reservist in 1979 aged twenty-eight, before enlisting in the regular forces. Hamilton-Jewell had served with British special forces for six years before joining the Royal Military Police and still described himself as ‘sixteen stone of romping, stomping airborne fury’.
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Respected and liked by the much younger men in his detachment, ‘HJ’ was known as a competent, experienced and motivated soldier.

It had taken nearly an hour for the group to drive slowly in two open-top landrovers from the base at Amarah to Majjar al-Kabir. Forty-five minutes after the six soldiers arrived at their destination – the battered single-storey police station 100 metres or so down a turn-off from the main road out of town – they heard gunfire from the town centre. They had no idea that the Parachute Regiment patrol was there, let alone that it had come under attack. Very soon, groups of armed Iraqis started appearing in the streets around them.

Newspaper reports in Britain later spoke of a ‘last stand’, as if Hamilton-Jewell and his men were cornered imperial soldiers resisting the onslaught of natives.
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In fact, events were messier than the image suggested. The gunmen surging out of Majjar al-Kabir following the retreating paratroopers moved into buildings around the police station and started firing on the Redcaps, quickly wounding two. The soldiers abandoned their positions around their vehicles in front of the police station and moved indoors, taking up positions at windows and around the small internal courtyard, levelling their SA80 automatic rifles at the oncoming attackers.
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With their only radios on their now burning Land Rovers, Hamilton-Jewell turned to one of the policemen who had remained in the station and asked if he had any means of communication. He did not and implored the Redcaps to flee through a window at the rear of the building.
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It was, however, too late. The station was surrounded. After another brief exchange of fire, a local elder forced his way through the crowd around the station and convinced the gunmen outside to let him negotiate. Entering the station, he found one British soldier apparently dying and three others propped wounded against the walls of one of the storerooms. But the crowd had followed him in. The elder was pulled out of the way, Hamilton-Jewell shot and then the other soldiers, though they held out pictures of their children and wives and pleaded for their lives, executed.
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The violence at Majjar al-Kabir appeared to defy explanation. The men who fought the British in the town were not ‘foreign fighters’ nor ‘regime dead-enders’ but from the southern Shia populations who had suffered most under the regime and were rightly thought most likely to support the invasion and deposition of Saddam. ‘We all hated the dictator and his terrorists,’ Talal Abid Ahmed Zubaida, a local tribal chief and militia leader said the day after the killings of the Redcaps.
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The local power was Karim Mahoud aka Abu Hatem, aka ‘the Lord of the Marshes’, a charismatic, brave, effective, ruthless and unscrupulous former guerrilla leader, who had taken charge locally after the invasion until forced to bow before the new powers in the land, but he had no immediate interest in provoking a confrontation.
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The economy, the provision of jobs or the supply of electricity were not major factors as most locals understood that any economic improvements would take months to be seen. Indeed, electricity provision to Abu Ala, the village where the trouble had started, had actually improved in previous weeks as power that was once reserved for Baghdad was more equitably distributed.
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The impact of the dissolution of the army and the purging of the bureaucracy of all supposed regime loyalists had also been limited in a rural, poor, relatively remote Shia area. Even the struggle for power between militia loyal to the (very) relatively secular and moderate Abu Hatem and networks loyal to the young militant cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was at an embryonic phase, and though the local supporters of the latter had an interest in disrupting the city, later arrests of the presumed murderers revealed that they were not behind the killings of the Redcaps.

There is, however, one explanation for the violence that was barely cited in the weeks that followed the fighting in Majjar al-Kabir. Two months after the killings there a senior aide to the British minister of defence told the author that, unlike the Americans, ‘the British are not intrinsically viewed as an occupying force in Iraq’.
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He was wrong. Many have spoken of the ‘antibody’ theory by which any foreign troops are inevitably attacked, particularly in Arab or Islamic lands. Such generalizations are of little use, however. As subsequent events in Iraq and elsewhere were to show, all depends on the role foreign troops are expected to play, their actions and the context. In Majjar al-Kabbir foreign troops were attacked because of a fundamental problem of legitimacy which fed a visceral emotional reaction. The fact that the people of both the town and the city of Amarah had liberated themselves during the campaign in March, pre-empting the arrival of coalition troops, made the perceived humiliation of the weapons searches, itself symbolic of the broader humiliation of occupation, even sharper.
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There was a practical issue too. With the elections postponed indefinitely, local people believed the British wanted the arms to ensure there could be no serious resistance to their long-term projects for ‘occupying Iraq and stealing its oil’. ‘During Saddam’s time, people reacted in the same way when they searched for weapons,’ said Hamid Shagambi, one of the local elders sitting on the town’s council.

Some of those who had opened fire in the marketplace had been waiting to do so. But they were few. Once the fighting had started, scores, if not hundreds, fetched their weapons. Mohammed Nasr Amari was one. In Baghdad fourteen months after the events in Majjar al-Kabir, he explained to the author: ‘Some people started fighting the soldiers when they were there in the town. Perhaps they had organized it like some kind of ambush, I don’t know, but when it started we all went and got our guns. Of course everyone joined in. Who would want to be without honour? Who would want to be the one who did not take up his gun? If they hadn’t been there we wouldn’t have shot at them.’
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Majjar al-Kabir would remain effectively outside the control of the coalition forces and successive Iraqi governments for years to come.
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Hamilton-Jewell had written a letter to his mother to be opened in the event of his death:

Dear Mum, If you receive this, then I have been killed in the conflict. Don’t be sad for me because I died doing the job I enjoy. I have had a good life and that was thanks to my upbringing. I valued right from wrong and I believe what I was doing was for the purpose of good and my life is a small price to pay for peace. Just because I didn’t always show that I cared doesn’t mean that was the case. I always cared and appreciated you and how you were always there for me. It is just that I am not always good at showing my emotions. I hope you are proud of me and realise that there is nothing to regret in my passing, because my life has been good and my ambitions fulfilled. I don’t really know what else to say other than I love you and I don’t want you to be sad because I did my duty and loved life. There are a lot of people in the world who have not been blessed with the great life I have had. Love, Simon. Army number 2447779.
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6
War in Iraq II: Losing It

THE SUNNIS AND THE FIRST BATTLE OF FALLUJA

Saddam Hussein was pulled from a small underground hiding place in the village of al-Auda on December 14, 2003 and definitively identified by the tribal tattoo of three dots on his wrist.
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‘We got him,’ a triumphant Paul Bremer announced at a hastily arranged press conference a few hours later. He and others pronounced themselves confident that any resistance to the occupation would wither away. Instead it intensified, and the year of 2004 would be one in which it all went very badly wrong in Iraq. Why did the insurgency not die when Saddam had been captured? The answers to the question lay, as so often in the 9/11 Wars, in the deep-rooted historical factors that determined the context.

One major factor was demographic. The March 2003 war plan had been focused on decapitating Saddam’s regime. Its targets were Baghdad and the senior ranks of the Ba’ath Party or Saddam’s own clique. The areas that in many ways were much more critical – the western provinces, the fertile belt of farmland surrounding Baghdad and stretching away up the Euphrates valley towards Syria and the string of tough towns along the highways radiating out from the capital – were largely ignored. These areas, however, were the heartland of Iraq’s Sunnis, who for five centuries had been the ruling caste and received the largest share of resources. Saddam had not broken with this tradition. Travellers driving down from the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in the late 1990s knew when they had reached Tikrit, the dictator’s home town, because the road widened, and rows of brand new strip lights appeared along either side interspersed with giant, very well-watered trees. But the hard demographic logic of Iraq was clear to all. If the country was to be a democracy – as the Americans and their coalition partners repeatedly proclaimed – then the Sunnis would be the losers. The dissolution of the army, the de-Ba’athification campaign and a range of other measures made it very clear very early what being a loser looked like. If the 22 per cent of Iraqis who were Sunnis were going to keep at least some of their privileges they were going to have to fight.
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Secondly, both modern and traditional strands of Islam were much stronger than many outside the region – indeed outside the country – thought. The modernity of Iraq during the 1970s, the image projected both by the secular leadership and allies such as America during the war against the ‘fanatics’ of Iran and the difficulties involved in reporting the true sentiments of Iraqis during the 1990s had combined to embed the sense that Islam played a less important role in the culture and politics of the country than elsewhere. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though not as overtly politically religious as Iran nor as religiously political as Saudi Arabia, faith remained as deeply ingrained in the lives and worldviews of most Iraqis, particularly the poorer and rural communities, as it did in other countries across the region. Nor had Iraq been immune to the broad ideological shifts affecting other nations in the region over previous decades. In every other Arab nation, the opposition to the kind of discredited Socialist, nationalist or pan-Arab ideologies that many regimes had originally espoused had been Islamist since the mid 1980s at the very latest. In Iraq too the same conditions existed that had led to the popularization of Islamism elsewhere and also to the growth of Salafi tendencies. Throughout the 1990s, Saddam himself had tried to co-opt this tendency by launching his own ‘Islamification’ drive. Bars and clubs had been shut down, a once-thriving gay scene repressed, hundreds of mosques built and a new Islamic slogan placed on the national flag. Saddam was pictured at prayer on many of his newer portraits, readings of the Koran were introduced on state television, and the construction of a vast mosque was started which was to house a Koran supposedly written in the blood of the nation’s ‘Great Uncle’ or ‘Anointed Leader’, as he called himself.
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But Saddam’s new-found piety was far from credible. As he was broadcasting his spurious religious credentials, clandestine preachers from the Gulf were moving through his country, funded by private donors and wealthy foundations in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and elsewhere.

Local Iraqi activists of the Muslim Brotherhood were also at work. Both they and the Salafis focused on the same social and geographic terrain. Avoiding the cities where Saddam’s security services would have easily discovered their activities and the remote rural areas where there was insufficient population for their purposes, they concentrated their efforts on the proud, independent-minded Sunni communities of the agricultural or semi-urban hinterland of the capital, towns like Baqubah, Ramadi, Muhammadiya, Balad and Samarra, where they found a welcome in once-thriving farming communities for whom Ba’athist nationalism had meant war and repression and for whom the West meant support for Israel and sanctions.
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The radical, austere but coherent message spread by the travelling clerics and activists fell on fertile ground. It was not surprising that one of first bits of graffiti the author encountered on the road running south-west from the central city of Kirkuk into the Sunni-Arab-dominated zones days after the fall of Saddam was the slogan of the Brotherhood: ‘Islam is the solution’.
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Nor was it surprising that the bomber who had killed himself destroying the United Nations headquarters and mission in August 2003 had been a young man who had been both a Ba’ath Party member enrolled in Saddam’s
fedayeen
militia and a member of radical Islamic circles in his small home town just south of Baghdad.
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