Fallouja’s Fighters Trade Weapons, Not Allegiances

As Yassir Harhoush sees it, the work he’ll be doing for the new U.S.-sanctioned Fallouja Brigade isn’t all that different from what he was doing last week -- only then, he says, he was part of the insurgency.

“I was fighting the Americans,” Harhoush, a 28-year-old former soldier in Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, said Friday afternoon. “I have not stopped. This is just a temporary truce. If the Americans attack, we will defend ourselves again.”

Although it was announced only last week, the brigade already has more than 1,000 members, and men in Fallouja are flocking to sign up. Many, it seems, have merely put down their rocket-propelled grenades and picked up the spanking new black Kalashnikovs distributed by the Americans.

The Americans are also giving uniforms to the brigade members. But that hardly seemed necessary, because most of them appeared to have kept their old Iraqi army uniforms in mint condition -- clean, pressed and ready to wear.

The deal struck unexpectedly April 29 by U.S. Marine commanders, Iraqi interlocutors and local sheiks brought nearly total calm to Fallouja, which for more than three weeks had been a violent battleground.

But the price of peace and its implications will be playing out for months, if not years, to come.

The compromise relies entirely on former generals in the Iraqi military to form a security force of former soldiers from the heavily Sunni Muslim Fallouja area.

“Fallouja has been given to the very people the Americans were fighting,” said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of the Iraqi Governing Council, who opposes the deal. “This sends a bad signal to Iraqis. This is very bad because it encourages the pro-Saddam people and Baathists to carry out more [insurgent] actions in other parts of the country.”

There was also criticism from several prominent Shiite Muslims, including members of the U.S.-backed Governing Council and high-ranking clerics.

“The Americans said that the Republican Guard participated in the fighting in Fallouja, but today they are cooperating with them,” Sadruddin Qubanchi, an influential cleric, said at Friday prayers at the Imam Ali shrine in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.

On Friday afternoon, brigade members gathered in a makeshift shelter out of the midday glare to sort the latest application forms for joining the force.

Like several of those interviewed Friday, Harhoush lost a close relative -- his father -- to Marine marksmen during last month’s fighting and picked up his gun as soon as he buried him.

Another man, Jamal Dulaimi, gestured to the new gun issued by the Americans and made a face. “We don’t deal with this stuff -- it’s for hunting,” he said. “We are used to heavier weapons, rockets.”

The brigade members were gathered on the edge of the Jolan neighborhood, where some of the heaviest fighting took place in April. The area, according to a hand-lettered sign hung over the front of a pockmarked shop, has been renamed “the heroes neighborhood.”

The members of the new force -- most of whom retain the rank they had when they left the Iraqi military -- seemed poised to take up arms again against the Americans if there was any sign that the U.S. forces were reneging on the deal, which calls for U.S. troops to withdraw completely by the end of Sunday.

“Now the Americans are on the outskirts, but in two days they should be completely gone,” said Col. Nafaa Kurdi Hais, who stopped by to see how his new troops were doing.

“If they betray us, the battle will be renewed,” he said, noting matter-of-factly that just a week ago he too had been fighting the Americans. “We were all defending our city.... If the resistance was limited, the Americans could have easily overcome us.”

The intensity of what Falloujans went through, especially those in Jolan, could be seen on every street Friday. Two-story houses were reduced to rubble. Those buildings still standing were gouged by shrapnel, every window shattered, often with the entire front wall torn off. Stray wires hung across alleys, and running water and electricity remained in short supply.

A few people picked their way through piles of brick, concrete chunks and twisted wires, taking stock of the remains of what had been a largely middle-class area.

Hais, like others, discounted the U.S. military’s assertion that many foreign fighters were involved in the Fallouja confrontations, nodding as his second lieutenant, Omar Mohammed Ubaidi, said: “There were no foreign fighters. Maybe there were some Arab citizens living in Iraq for a long time, some have even taken Iraqi wives, and maybe they chose to participate.”

In any case, the force has no obligation to hunt down foreign fighters, Ubaidi said -- a view that appears to differ from that of the Marines.

A week ago, Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, suggested otherwise.

The Fallouja Brigade “understands our view [on foreign fighters],” the general said. “These people must be killed or captured.”

U.S. officials are also demanding the arrest of those responsible for the March 31 killing of four U.S. contractors, whose bodies were mutilated.

Fallouja Brigade members said none of them had any interest in joining the U.S.-backed Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, and even the newly reconstituted Iraqi army received only a lukewarm endorsement. Both are thought of as U.S. stooges.

“The ICDC is not independent -- it acts on the instructions of the United States,” said Abdul Kareem Jassim, a career officer in the former Iraqi army.

For the Falloujans, the American pullout is seen as a miracle and already is being recast as a sort of Muslim desert myth.

The brigade members exchanged stories Friday of supernatural events that they said had led the Falloujans to victory.

Similar tales were being told at the Friday prayers at one of the city’s main mosques and over lunches of rice and stew in the homes of tribal sheiks.

Dulaimi, 50, a warrant officer in the new force, told of how the Americans had planned to drop a bomb that “emits a kind of smoke that would paralyze the people of Fallouja for six hours.”

But when the pilots began their flights over the city to drop the substance, “they looked down and all they could see was water. There was no city. It was like a mirage in summer,” he said.

Other brigade members nodded vigorously.

Another miracle they reported was the appearance of spiders that had come out of the desert and killed the Americans by biting them.

These were no ordinary spiders, said one of the other men, but killer arachnids that could run 15 miles an hour and whose bite felled some of the Marines.

The spider’s power in Islamic legend dates back to the Koran when, in the early days of Islam, the prophet Muhammad fled angry infidels and took shelter in a cave. A spider came and wove a thick web over the cave’s mouth so that when the infidels came looking for him, they did not think anyone was inside, because he would have had to tear the web to enter.

Sheik Dhafir Subhi Alubaidi told the thousands gathered for Friday prayers at one Fallouja mosque a similar story about spiders fighting the Americans.

The sheik spoke too about “the knights dressed in white who fought on the Iraqi side.” Those, he said, “were the soldiers of God, who made the Iraqis victorious and enabled them to defeat their enemies.”

Brigade member Abu Omar retold the story slightly differently, saying that when final negotiations were underway, the Americans told the Falloujans that they did not care about having them turn over the weapons. All they wanted, he said, was for them to hand over the knights on horses dressed in white.

“These white-dressed horsemen are the angels of God who were sent to fight the infidel at the side of the prophet Muhammad,” he said.

Whether it was angels or realpolitik that resulted in the deal, there was little question in the minds of locals that the deal with the U.S., if it holds, represents a profound shift in the occupation force’s military strategy.

“This is a turning point because I’m sure the Americans have come to the conclusion that using force against the resistance is not a good solution,” said Sheik Ali Salih Badrani, 54, who lives in a middle-class neighborhood near Jolan and was receiving a steady stream of visitors Friday afternoon.

“They have realized that this resistance is not minor or limited to a few people -- it is a widespread, popular resistance,” he said, “and it is not only in Fallouja but all over Iraq.”

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Special correspondent Saif Rasheed in Fallouja contributed to this report.