New loyalties give Baghdad reprieve

The US and UK governments have recently announced they will be reducing troop numbers in Iraq. But even after this withdrawal, thousands will remain in the country, and for some Iraqis the new alliances which are springing up are proving controversial.

 

A scene from a bright sunny Baghdad day - just after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 - remains in my mind as vivid as a film.

A heavily armed US tank commander and his crew stand warily behind a roll of razor wire in the centre of Baghdad, while the crowd on the other side of the wire violently attack a lone Iraqi soldier who is trying to walk through the throng with his hands held high, holding two small pieces of white cloth.

Men in the crowd jump on him, knock off his helmet, and beat him to the ground, kicking and punching.

One of the American soldiers pulls the razor wire aside to create a small gap, grabs the surrendering Iraqi soldier by the collar of his jacket and pulls him to safety. And clearest of all in that scene is the frozen expression of fear and confusion on the face of the American tank commander.

Troop 'surge'

Many months before the Iraq war had even begun, an American general, the Army Chief of Staff, Eric Shinseki, testified to a Senate committee in Washington.

He was asked how many troops would be required to secure Iraq after victory. His reply: "Something in the order of several hundred thousand."

 

The Deputy Secretary of State for Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, retorted that the general's estimate was "wildly off the mark".

"It's hard to conceive," he went on, "that it would take more troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself."

General Shinseki lost his job.

Since then, nearly 4,000 American troops have been killed, more than 10,000 have been severely wounded and at least 80,000 Iraqis have died.

President George W Bush, in his TV address last month, claimed that the extra 30,000 troops brought specially to Iraq for the so-called "surge" against car bombers and sectarian killers in Baghdad were beginning to achieve some success.

"Our troops are performing brilliantly," he said. "Ordinary life is beginning to return [to Baghdad]."

'Oppressive atmosphere'

It is true, but only to a very limited extent.

The president referred, for example, to markets that were shuttered a year ago, but which were now re-opening.

 

I went to one of those places, the so-called Thieves' Market, in part of the city centre where dozens of people have been killed by car and roadside bombs.

It is called the Thieves' Market because Baghdad citizens who have had their homes robbed would go there to see if their belongings were on sale.

And the section I visited was not shuttered.

Shops and stalls selling satellite dishes and decoders, watches, and pirate DVD films were open.

There was a friendly welcome. I was given a glass of steaming hot sugary tea.

But there was an oppressive atmosphere, and along the entire length of the street there was a high concrete blast wall between the pavement and the road.

 

There were more blast walls along most of the main street that we drove down to get to the Thieves' Market.

Many parts of Baghdad have become concrete mazes.

New alliance

Car and truck bomb attacks on civilians have not stopped but the number has fallen significantly since the start of the surge and of the Baghdad security plan earlier this year.

Those explosions were nearly always the work of an unholy alliance of al-Qaeda in Iraq and former Saddam Hussein Baath Party loyalists who had lost their jobs and their entire livelihoods in the indiscriminate de-Baathification process that took place after the invasion.

 

 

But many of those Saddam loyalists who used to shoot and bomb Americans are now fighting alongside US troops against al Qaeda.

 

One of the sheikhs co-operating with the Americans, Abu Risha, was assassinated in an al-Qaeda bomb attack in September.

President Bush paid tribute to him as a brave man.

American troops helped the Iraqi armed forces guard mourners at his funeral in Ramadi in Anbar province, the district west of Baghdad that was once routinely described as "the heartland of the insurgency".

This new alliance of Americans and Sunni Muslim sheikhs against al-Qaeda is trumpeted by the United States as a considerable success. But many Shia Muslims are wary of it.

To them, this looks like the Americans taking sides with their enemy, with the minority that ruled over them and oppressed them through the dark years of Saddam Hussein.

And they will need to be convinced that this does not pave the way for another act of betrayal like 1991, after the Gulf War, when the first President George Bush urged Shia Muslims in Iraq to rise up against Saddam Hussein.

And when they did, America did nothing to protect them from the slaughter that followed.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday 6 October, 2007 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.