Ghaith, from Najaf

Juan Cole’s had a couple of link recently to pieces from Iraq in the Guardian by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. Somehow, I believe that’s Salam/Pax’s friend ‘G’, but I may be wrong. Anyway, he’s a fine reporter and a pretty fearless one too.
This is the piece he had in today’s (Monday’s) paper. It’s a great piece of reporting from a couple of days spent covering the (recent? ongoing? who knows?) fighting in Najaf…
After describing nine corpses of pro-Moqtada “martyrs” he saw stacked up in “one of Najaf’s oldest religious schools … a few yards away from the main Imam Ali mosque”, he comments:

    The injuries to the dead said a lot about the precision of American snipers, but there was more argument over the precision of their counting.
    While the Americans claimed 300 of the Mahdi army had been killed, no more than a dozen wounded and the nine dead were to be seen.
    “If they had killed 300 that means we have at least another 1,000 injured,” said Ahmad al-Shaibani, the militia’s leading commander. “How many fighters do they think we have?”

The kind of tactics he describes seemed like the classic hit-and-run members of a small mobile force would use:

    In the streets and the alleyways around the holy shrine of Imam Ali, hundreds of armed gunmen carrying all sorts of weapons, rocket launchers, AK-47s and even old rusted daggers, roamed.
    The sky was obscured by a thick layer of smoke, the air filled with the sounds of explosions and the crackle of machine guns, only interrupted by the occasional blasts of missiles. Every few hours the frontlines shifted.
    The militiamen would go to the outskirts of the old town, fire a couple of mortars and RPG rounds, cheer for a few seconds and withdraw before the US forces could single them out…

Here’s who Mr. Shaibani and some of his fighters were:

    Mr Shaibani [is] a cleric in his early 30s, originally from the impoverished southern town of Nassiriya… On a normal day he would be in charge of Mr Sadr’s sharia court.
    On this day he was more like a guerrilla fighter with oversized brown shades and a small mobile phone in which he was getting reports from the frontlines. He was surrounded by his platoon, a dozen or so men, of different ages and from different towns and cities. Some from Basra; others from the Shia slums around Baghdad. All were here to fight the Americans.

Here’s how Shaibani assessed their situation:

    “They are trying to besiege us. The mayor has cut the water supplies and electricity,” Mr Shaibani said.
    But his men had more reason to celebrate as they showed off a machine gun a young fighter had brought from an American Humvee he claimed had been destroyed by an RPG.
    “We are more organised this time than we were in May,” said Mr Shaibani, referring to the first major Shia uprising against the Americans this year.

The local Najafis whom Ghaith encountered seemed less enthused by the fighting… He described how the city’s central market had been all burned out during the fighting, and quoted a Sadrist militiamen saying the Americans had done it. But,

    For the local Najafis, whether they were merchants or workers, the blame was directed in a more coded way.
    “We don’t know who did this, the Americans or the Mahdi army,” said Abbas Fadl, 29, the owner of a juice shop.
    “Saddam took my father and now the Americans took my job away,” said his brother Firas. “The Mahdi army and the Americans want to fight and we, the poor people, are caught in the middle.”
    Later, around the shrine, the Mahdi army militia were celebrating, chanting and spitting on the corpse of an Iraqi national guardsman.
    “This is the fate of the American agents,” one shouted.
    Later the body was taken away and put on public display by the gate of the militia headquarters.
    A man approached and asked: “Is this an Iraqi?” Yes, I told him. He shook his head and walked away.

30 thoughts on “Ghaith, from Najaf”

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