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Main | Reports | 
Everything Changes So Quickly: Thawra Under Attack
By Andréa Schmidt for
the Iraq Solidarity Project.
April 6 2004
Occupied Baghdad
At 8 PM on
Sunday night, Thawra looks like it is under curfew. At a time when they are
normally thronging with people and filled with noise, the streets are dark,
and all the shops are closed and locked for the night. Every few blocks we see groups of
twenty or so young men in black moving restively and carrying guns –
members of Moqtada Al-Sadr's Mehdi Army, patrolling their neighborhood.
Other than that, the only people we see out are lined up in front of the
Sadr hospital gates, waiting for news of the injured and the dead.
We hear tank
fire in the distance, and drive past a burning US humvee. A few streets
later, we pass a group of five US tanks; tense looking soldiers surround
cuffed detainees.
"Everything
changes so quickly," says Khaled, one of the young men with whom I am
traveling. At noon, when he had left the area for the center of Baghdad,
things were quiet in Thawra.
Indeed, at noon
Moqtada's people were demonstrating downtown in Firdaus Square in front of
the Palestine and Sheraton hotels -– yet another demonstration in a
week-long series of protests to denounce Paul Bremer's decision to shut
down Sadr's Al-Hawza newspaper for "making the security situation
unstable" and "encouraging violence against the Coalition Forces
and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)," by claiming that US
troops were responsible for the destruction of an Iraqi police building in
February.
The exact line
of the occupiers' strategy is hard to discern. Is it to keep destabilizing
the situation enough to qualify the transition to pseudo-sovereignty
planned for June 30th as impossible and justify their continued presence
here? Or is it to force a confrontation with the segments of the Iraqi
political scene that they most want to see neutralized before the
'hand-over'? Whatever the exact nature of the strategy, shutting down the
paper was a deliberate provocation. And it has been followed by more
actions on the part of occupation authorities that are hard to interpret as
anything but inflammatory attempts to fuel a frustrated reaction from
Shiite loyal to Moqtada.
On Saturday night,
Iraqi police fired into a crowd of demonstrators in Baghdad's Tahrir
Square. According to media reports, three demonstrators were killed. So at
Sunday's demonstration, when the angry and unarmed crowd of several hundred
moved toward them, the US soldiers who guard the hotels from tanks and
towers behind blast walls shot into the crowd, injuring at least two
people.
Around the same
time on Sunday, news began to reach Baghdad that protests in Kufa,
Moqtada's base just outside of Najaf, had been shot at by Spanish and
Salvadoran occupying forces. Twenty people were killed, according to news
agencies, and over sixty injured.
So perhaps we
should have known that things would come to this. We had driven into Thawra
at 6:30 PM to meet with some people about organizing a film screening. As
we arrived at the squatters' camp, we saw tire smoke in the distance and
heard machine gun fire. We were told that there was fighting between
Moqtada's people and US troops on the other side of the neighborhood, and
that it wasn't a good evening to discuss anything.
Ahmed and
Khaled drove me back toward the center of the city, but as we approached
the blast-wall and private security protected hotel where I was supposed to
meet other friends for the evening, I got frustrated. I didn't come to Iraq to watch the
occupation from behind blast walls in upper class Jadriya where the old
regime used to play. I came out of some desire to work for justice and to
demonstrate solidarity with people struggling against the occupation –- and
I have become angered by the lack of connection the anti-war and
anti-occupation movement seems to have built here to the Shiite communities
who were most horrifically oppressed under the Ba'athist regime and
continue to be both politically and economically incredibly marginalized in
occupied Iraq. Tonight, those people are the people of Thawra…
Khaled was
convinced by my rant, but worried about my safety. I was worried about his
safety, since he was the one accompanying a foreigner at this particularly
tense time. We agreed not be worried, and Ahmed turned the car around once
again.
Still, when we
return, we are surprised by the eerie empty streets. Machine gun fire
continues in the darkness and Khaled and Ahmed both want to go to make sure
their families are OK. They are, though the younger children are scared of
the gunfire and the airplanes flying too low overhead.
At Khaled's
house the family is gathered in the living room. We ask what happened and
it seems that Moqtada's men took control of several police stations and
local government buildings in Thawra in the late afternoon. US occupation
forces responded with tank and helicopter fire. The neighborhood shut down,
except for the fighting.
The men in the
family reminisce about the uprising that took place when Saddam had
Moqtada's father, Sayyid Mohamed Sadiq Al-Sadr, and his two elder sons
assassinated in 1999. They
remember the days of fighting with Saddam's security forces that ensued,
and the blood and the death.
Khaled tells me that the streets of his neighborhood tonight remind
him of the way they looked then. This story has played itself out in Thawra
many times before.
The only silver
lining in all this: "Maku madrasa." There's no school for the
kids tomorrow.
It is 9:30 and
with erratic shooting audible in the environs, with no one on the street
but US occupation forces and a few members of the Mehdiarmy, it is too late
and too dangerous to drive back in to the center of the city. Khaled's
family graciously allows me to stay with them for the night.
We hear the
sound of missiles striking. I ask Khaled's nineteen year-old sister if she
is afraid. No. We sleep.
On Monday
morning, we go to the hospitals in the area. Conversations with hospital
managers indicate that in the range of fifty people were killed by US
occupation forces fire, and over 150 have been injured. Eight US soldiers were also killed.
In the hospital
we are taken to the emergency area where we meet some of the injured. Among
them is a fourteen year old boy, lying unconscious, breathing through a
tube in his nose and receiving blood. He was shot by US fire that
penetrated a closed door.
Outside in the
hospital courtyard, an ambulance driver tells us how US troops had shot at
him while he was trying to move the injured. A young man who has come to
donate blood tells me, "I am a follower of Al-Sistani, not Moqtada.
But if one of us is injured, all of us is injured, and if Moqtada says to
fight, I will fight." No one seems to expect that the conflict will
subside, in spite of the cool morning's apparent calm.
The streets of
Thawra are filled with people, but many shops and most of the market stalls
remain closed. A major intersection is still occupied by US tanks, and US
tanks also surround Sadr's Baghdad offices. The humvee we saw burning last
night is still smoldering, surrounded by dancing, yelling kids. Tension
seems to rise palpably in Thawra as the morning wears on.
What will the
evening bring? How will the Mehdi army respond to the occupation forces'
assault on their people, and what sort of punishment will occupation forces
seek to inflict?
I don't want to impose on Khaled's family for
another night. So Khaled and Ahmed accompany me back to Baghdad city
center, where I write this report from behind blast walls and feel sick
that this is the best our movements can do.
This report was
written by Andréa Schmidt for the Iraq Solidarity Project. The Iraq
Solidarity Project is a Montreal-based grassroots initiative to provide
direct non-violent support to Iraqis struggling against the occupation;
strengthen the mobilization against economic and military domination and
anti-war work in Quebec and Canada; and build links of solidarity between
struggles against the occupation of Iraq and struggles against oppression
in Canada and Quebec.
While in Iraq,
Andréa can be reached by email at andrea@tao.ca
orandreaschmidt2004@yahoo.ca.
To get in touch
with the Iraq Solidarity Project in Montreal, emailpsi@riseup.net or call
(514) 521-5252. To join our listserv, send an emailto
psi-news-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.
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