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Iraqi resistance only against the occupation

Haifa Zangana

The escalating attacks are a direct response to the brutal actions of U.S.-led troops.

IN MUQDADIYAH, 80 km from Baghdad, a woman wearing a traditional Iraqi abaya blew herself up this week in the midst of Iraqi police recruits. This was the seventh suicide attack by a woman since the Anglo-American invasion in 2003, and an act unheard of before that. Iraqi women are driven to despair and self-destruction by grief. Their expectations are reduced to pleas for help to clear the bodies of the dead from the streets, according to a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, released on Wednesday. It's the same frustration that drew hundreds of thousands to demonstrate against foreign forces in Najaf on Monday.

In the fifth year of occupation, the sectarian and ethnic divide between politicians, parties, and their warring militias has become monstrous, turning on its creators in the Green Zone and beyond, and not sparing ordinary people. One of the consequences is a major change in the public role of women.

During the first three years of occupation women were mostly confined to their homes, protected by male relatives. But now that the savagery of their circumstances has propelled many of them to the head of their households, they are risking their lives outdoors. Black-cloaked women are seen queuing at prisons, government offices or morgues, in search of disappeared, or detained, male relatives. It is women who bury the dead. Baghdad has become a city of bereaved women. But contrary to what we are told by the occupation and its puppet regime, this is not the only city that is subject to the brutality that forces thousands of Iraqis to flee their country every month.

Bodies are found across the country from Mosul to Kirkuk to Basra. They are handcuffed, blindfolded, and bullet-ridden, bearing signs of torture. They are dumped at roadsides or found floating in the Tigris or the Euphrates.

It is important to recognise that the resistance was born not only of ideological, religious, and patriotic convictions, but also as a response to the reality of the brutal actions of the occupation and its administration. According to the Red Cross, "the number of people arrested or interned by the multinational forces has increased by 40 per cent since early 2006. The number of people held by the Iraqi authorities has also increased significantly."

There is only one solution to this disaster, and that is for the U.S. and Britain to accept that the Iraqi resistance is fighting to end the occupation. And to acknowledge that it consists of ordinary Iraqis, not only Al-Qaeda, not just Sunnis or Shias, not those terrorists — as Tony Blair called them — inspired by neighbouring countries such as Iran. To recognise that Iraqis are proud, peace-loving people, and that they hate occupation, not each other. And to understand that the main targets of the resistance are not Iraqi civilians. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

(Haifa Zangana, an Iraqi exile who was imprisoned by Saddam Hussein, is the author of Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London.)

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