The fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad to U.S. forces was marked by a massive demonstration of Iraqis opposed to imperialist occupation. Up to one million men, women and children marched through the streets of the city of Najaf on April 9.
In a forceful expression of national unity, the crowds carried Iraqi flags, alongside banners reading “Down with Bush,
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Ahmed al-Mayahie, a 39-year-old man from the southern city of Basra, expressed the mood of the demonstration: “In four years of occupation, our sons have been killed and women made widows. The occupier raised slogans saying Iraq is free, Iraq is liberated. What freedom? What liberation? There is nothing but destruction. We do not want their liberation and their presence. We tell them to get out of our land.”
The demonstration was called by Muqtada al-Sadr, cleric and leader of the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia. Al-Sadr’s whereabouts are currently unknown, apparently in response to an intensifying U.S. military crackdown in Baghdad and the imperialist threats against him.
Al-Sadr’s role in Iraq
Al-Sadr’s forces have played a contradictory role vis-?-vis the occupation of Iraq.
In 2004, al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia forced the U.S. occupation forces into a tactical retreat when it resisted their attempts to gain control of Najaf, Karbala and Sadr City. The uprising coincided with fierce resistance to U.S. attempts to dominate the predominantly Sunni city of Fallujah, which was only pacified in a brutal siege launched later that year. Unlike the other Shiite political forces in the government, al-Sadr continued to denounce the U.S. occupiers and their attempts to divide Sunni and Shiite communities.
His forces then entered the Iraqi coalition government in 2006. Now, al-Sadr forces constitute the largest parliamentary voting bloc and control the Ministries of Education, Trade and Health. They have provided key support for the U.S.-client government of Nuri al-Maliki. As such, the Mahdi Army is collaborating with U.S. occupation forces.
But on Sunday, April 8, al-Sadr released a statement urging Iraqi soldiers and police to stop cooperating with the United States. “You, the Iraqi army and police forces, don’t walk alongside the occupiers, because they are your archenemy,” the statement said. At the same time, al-Sadr ordered the Mahdi Army to concentrate their attacks on U.S. troops; not other Iraqis. (AP, April 8)
Al-Sadr’s April 8 statement and his call for the April 9 demonstration were widely seen as responses to the growing anger of his supporters and the Iraqi people as a whole against the occupation and the 30,000-troop escalation ordered by Bush earlier this year. There was swelling disquiet over al-Sadr’s previous position of not resisting the U.S. military’s entry into the sprawling slums of Sadr City to carry out attacks and arrests. The U.S. and Iraqi puppet forces have been carrying out a campaign of assassination that has claimed the lives of hundreds of al-Sadr supporters.
On April 11, just two days after the Najaf protest, al-Sadr’s parliamentary bloc threatened to pull out of the government helmed by puppet Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki because Maliki has rejected setting a timetable for U.S. withdrawal.
If al-Sadr’s forces withdraw, it would not be the first time. Cabinet ministers and 30 legislators loyal to al-Sadr boycotted the government and parliament for nearly two months to protest a November 2006 meeting between al-Maliki and President Bush in Jordan.
‘We refuse to become slaves’
Although he was not visible at the April 9 protest, al-Sadr sent a powerful statement that was read aloud. “So far 48 months of anxiety, oppression and occupational tyranny have passed, four years which have only brought us more death, destruction and humiliation,” the statement read. “Every day tens are martyred, tens are crippled, and every day we see and hear U.S. interference in every aspect of our lives, which means that we are not sovereign, not independent and therefore not free.
“This is what Iraq has harvested from the U.S. invasion.”
Al-Sadr stated that the victory of the Iraq people was just a matter of time. He credited his Al Mahdi militia with the decision of British forces to hand over most of the southern city of Basra to Iraqi security units, and noted the opposition to the Iraq war among some U.S. lawmakers.
“It is in this historical moment that we direct our speech toward the American and European people: We are a people who love peace and independence and refuse to become slaves,” Sadr’s statement continued. “We call upon the free people of the world to pressure their governments in order to put an end to the plight of the Iraqi people.”
The demonstration took place amidst an increasingly dire Iraqi reality.
For ordinary Iraqi civilians, violence has become a ceaseless ritual of daily life. The “surge” in U.S. forces has only served to shift temporarily the endemic bloodshed from Baghdad to outlying areas, although Baghdad is still a flashpoint for U.S. and Iraqi Army repression.
On April 10, intense fighting broke out in the Baghdad neighborhood of Fadhil after an Iraqi Army raid killed two in a
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The resistance fighters and neighborhood residents successfully took out five Iraqi Army humvees, killed at least four Iraqi soldiers and wounded 16 U.S. troops. Dozens of Fadhil residents, including women and children, were killed by the U.S. occupiers and their Iraqi puppets.
Deaths continue to be reported on the level of approximately 100 a day throughout the country.
The chief spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq, Rear Admiral Mark Fox, recently gave a more frank assessment of the crisis confronting the occupation, tempering claims of “accomplishments” with the admission that “the past four years have also been disappointing, frustrating and increasingly dangerous in many parts of Iraq.”
Iraqi unity
The April 9 demonstration showed the world the mass outrage and indignation of ordinary Iraqis at the ongoing U.S. occupation and repression.
Faraj Atwani drove to the April 9 demonstration in Najaf from Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood.
“For their own interests, they besieged our cities and killed our children,” he said. “I consider them looters because they only know the language of killing. We are the people of civilization and we only want stability for our country and not to see our houses’ walls covered with black funeral banners.”
“Today is the day of Iraqis’ unity,” Atwani continued. “We came to say the occupation must leave. Their lies can no longer fool anybody.”
