ARISE

IRAQI MOQAWAMA

Was the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq the result of an agreement reached with the puppet regime in Baghdad, or was it a consequence of the resistance regrouping?

 

By Ali Al Najafi

Once again, Washington is at it again, and I am referring to the air strikes that Israeli and US aircraft had already been carrying out over western Iraq, apparently with the aim of weakening the border with a decimated Syria, through which they are almost certainly attempting to infiltrate special forces. They were also intended to cover up the alleged involvement of the Kurds from the Barzani clan, an idea that was rejected by the Iranian Kurds. All this began long before the Iraqi resistance forced US troops and the remaining NATO forces still in the country to withdraw from Baghdad.

On 25 March, the US air force launched several attacks against western Iraq, targeting positions of the Iraqi resistance groups which, since 2011, have been the only real military force truly independent of the tentacles of the collaborationist monstrosity in Baghdad. Just a few months ago, the regime of Mohammed Shia Al Sudani —who is the successor to the chain of collaborators hand-picked by the occupation and its administrative monstrosity dating back to 2005—was attempting to dismantle the Islamic resistance groups in accordance with Washington’s directives. That is why Al Sudani’s apparent eagerness to cooperate with the resistance is not to be trusted.

To put the significance of Iraq’s Islamic resistance groups into historical context, we must recall when, why and how they emerged. When the US and its allies invaded the country in 2003, they soon realised they had fallen into a deadly trap. Resistance to their presence – by which I mean the military – began just a few months later and displayed a worrying degree of organisation and effectiveness. This was hardly surprising, given that, in addition to Saddam’s supporters, groups of volunteers from all provinces had been organising for years in anticipation of what was to come. It was therefore that the CIA, Britain’s MI6 and military intelligence units set in motion a counter-insurgency programme based on deception and terror, staging attacks on civilian targets such as markets and mosques aimed at fomenting chaos, particularly against Shia communities. Thus, they planted Arab agents and cells (in the service of the CIA) to organise and direct hoaxes such as ‘Al-Qaeda’, which was commanded by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (a CIA asset) and who, sometime later, would be conveniently eliminated, only to be replaced in 2006 by the farce of the ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ (another farce in which the Turkish MIT played a significant role), led by another shadowy figure named ‘Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi’, who had been invented by US intelligence.

The Shia community soon took matters into its own hands; refusing to be deceived or to make deals with the mafia-like elements of the Shia DAWA sect, it set up its own armed organisations to protect its people. The most prominent leader in those circumstances was undoubtedly the Shia cleric Moqtadar Al Sadr, who mobilised the Mahdi Army as a modest but inspiring contribution to what would become the Shia wing of the resistance.

Unlike the corrupt Shia politicians of the time—such as Ibrahim Al Jaafari, Yalad Alawi and Nouri Al Maliki—who willingly sided with the invaders and in turn received benefits and political directives from Tehran, did not lend himself to advancing Iranian geopolitical interests, which at that time were very convenient for the Anglo-American occupation as a counterweight, with the sole aim of fragmenting the predominantly Sunni Iraqi resistance.

Precisely because of his refusal to side with the occupation—which meant cooperating with US plans—he was the target of several assassination attempts, which failed in part due to the large mass of supporters he was able to mobilise. It was his “Jaysh Al Mahdi” forces that fought the Americans in the historic Battle of Najaf in 2004 and subsequently in the repeated but failed attempts to penetrate the Al Sadr district in Baghdad.

Thus, the invaders trained and armed the forces of the collaborationist regime, which included criminal gangs such as the Badr Brigade, who played a sinister role in the ‘cleansing’ operations led by the CIA using its own death squads, with the cooperation of Israeli elements. At the same time, the Shia who did not share in this criminal collusion, and inspired by the Lebanese Shia resistance, took the decision to join the side of righteousness; thus were born the ‘Kataib Hezbollah of Iraq’ and the ‘Asaib Ahl al-Haq’, who made life impossible for the Anglo-American occupiers until their official withdrawal in 2011.

Surrounded by a well-earned epic, they became the inspiration for a new generation of the Iraqi resistance, which would take shape with the Popular Mobilisation Forces (Quwwāt al-Ḥashd ash-Shaaʿbī), created in June 2014 against a backdrop of the government forces’ inefficiency, lack of equipment and abysmal morale. They played a central role in repelling the sudden invasion by the Islamic State (Daesh) and, following an agreement with Washington (under the Democratic administration of Barack Obama), answered to the Iranian high command and Commander Sayed Qassem Soleimani, who would later, in January 2020, be assassinated in an attack ordered by Donald Trump and carried out by a joint operation between the CIA and Mossad.

It is thanks to the persistence and resolve of all these groups that form part of the Arab-Islamic resistance that the Americans and their allies were forced to withdraw from the Green Zone in Baghdad and from the camps they were still jointly administering. Although Washington had signed some documents with the Baghdad government in January for a ‘phased withdrawal’, the departure two weeks ago was due to pressure from the resistance.

However, they try to portray the situation in Iraq, one thing is very clear. If the US and its Israeli partners are seeking a ground confrontation in the region, they already have an opponent eagerly awaiting them.