In Sunni Bastion, They Are Ready for a Fight

The boys at the Arabian Gulf Elementary School knew what they were supposed to say when a visitor asked about the American soldiers occupying Iraq. With their teachers looking on approvingly, they waved their hands in excitement and jumped to their feet when called upon.

“Since the Americans arrived we have only had problems,” declared 12-year-old Mahmoud Ali, a rail-thin child with buckteeth. “We must resist them!”

“We must force them to leave, with bombs, with explosives. They will not listen to words,” proclaimed curly-headed Mustafa Saleh, 13.

“I am ready to fight them now!” said Jasem Faisal, 12, and barely as tall as the rifle he seemed eager to have at hand.

Saddam Hussein may be behind bars, but the anti-American sentiment that feeds a tenacious armed insurgency lives on -- unfettered and growing. In especially hostile towns like Fallouja, indoctrination at school is reinforced by the tight network of families and clans that governs rural Iraqi society.

U.S. authorities believed that Hussein’s arrest would staunch the flow of money to guerrillas, rob them of their inspiration and blunt the insurgency.

Violence escalated immediately after his capture and has continued during the Christmas holidays, with more than a dozen U.S. troops killed by hostile fire in the 17 days since Hussein was pulled from his underground hide-out. But overall, military officials say, the number of attacks on American forces have dropped significantly compared with the 50-a-day pace of mid-September.

Hundreds of people have been rounded up in the Sunni-dominated midsection of Iraq in operations with names like “Iron Grip” and “Rifles Fury.” Some of the arrests were made as a result of intelligence gleaned from documents seized along with the deposed, and now jailed, former dictator.

But it remains too early to know whether the resistance has indeed suffered a decisive blow or whether gunmen and bombers are merely lying low while the heat is on and are planning to regroup. An incursion Saturday into the southern city of Karbala was one of the most brazen and well-coordinated yet; seven U.S. allies were killed.

Many Iraqis, in contrast with U.S.-led occupation authorities, have predicted the resistance will persist and intensify, and nowhere is that sentiment stronger than in Fallouja, a Sunni bastion and center of guerrilla activity.

“The motto of everyone here, young or old, is that we will not let any occupier, criminal or thief take over this land,” said Fakhir Khalifa, a prominent Fallouja businessman. “In these times, women are telling their children to become martyrs for Islam. Even at school, children are being told that the occupiers must be kicked out.”

U.S. authorities have suggested that the arrest of Hussein might dry up the money that finances guerrilla operations. Large stashes of cash -- hundreds of thousands of dollars -- have been seized in U.S. Army raids.

Khalifa said the fighters, whom people in Fallouja refer to as moujahedeen, have numerous means of financial and logistical support -- including their tribal ties, donations collected at mosques, supplies from farmers and money from businessmen.

“People will sell their furniture to sponsor the resistance,” Khalifa said.

Local police, too, remain reluctant to challenge the insurgents, many of whom are relatives. Capt. Ahmed Suleiman, who runs a police station in suburban Fallouja, said every time U.S. forces ask his men to join in a search for guerrillas, he must politely decline.

“We tell them, no, we can’t do that,” Suleiman said. “The moujahedeen would say we are collaborators. You work with the Americans, you die.”

The insurgency, which by most accounts is organized in cells across central Iraq and in Baghdad with only a minimal centralized command structure, remains a shadowy force.

Interviews with a handful of members in the last several months have suggested that the resistance has evolved from a movement to restore Hussein to power to a broader battle with multiple motives, including hatred of the Americans, resentment over foreign occupation, disillusion with the slow pace of recovery, and fear of losing status amid the rise of other, long-oppressed Iraqi factions such as the Shiites and the Kurds.

Some of the insurgency has also taken on a heavily religious tone thanks to the influence of a fundamentalist strain of Sunni Islam that gained strength in the political vacuum following the fall of Hussein’s regime.

Hussein was irrelevant to these Islam-inspired fighters and to a small number of foreign jihadis who have infiltrated into Iraq from Syria and elsewhere. They can be expected to continue their resistance with or without the former Iraqi president’s influence.

The insurgents have accounted for the deaths of more than 200 U.S. soldiers since President Bush declared the end of major combat activities May 1.

Even in Fallouja’s more well-to-do, middle-class neighborhoods, support for the resistance is fed by resentment of the American-led military operations -- frustrating roadblocks, intrusive raids on homes and persistent buzzing of the town by fighter jets.

Hassen Fadawi, 47, a man of patrician bearing who owns an auto dealership in Fallouja, said he does not encourage any of his five sons to take up arms against the Americans because the Iraqis would always be outgunned.

Fadawi’s two-story house came under what everyone in the neighborhood described as a barrage of U.S. tank fire one day last week after insurgents attacked a train carrying supplies to a U.S. military base.

The Fadawi residence faces the main Fallouja train station, and the crippled carriage came to a stop just short of the station. As soldiers tried to recover goods from the wreckage, Iraqi gunmen opened fire with assault rifles from the street alongside the Fadawi house -- according to a witness’ account -- and the Americans retaliated.

At least four shells appeared to have slammed into the Fadawi home, punching large holes into the wall of an upstairs bedroom and a wall around the roof terrace. No one was hurt, but the attack ignited a fire that destroyed the family’s new refrigerator and deep freeze.

Fadawi’s wife, who was at home at the time of the attack with their children, was terrified. She would be happy, she said, if one of her sons decided to join the moujahedeen.

“Because of what I have witnessed, I would tell him to go!” Lamiaa Fadawi said. “At least instead of being killed [by random fire], he would die in the battlefield. That would be better.”

“We tell our children to be patient,” added her husband. “But our hatred for the Americans is getting bigger and bigger.”

One son, Hani, 20, sat quietly between his parents. “If it weren’t for the resistance, the Americans would really be out of control,” he said. “The moujahedeen are heroes.”