Inside the Resistance -- A Book Review

Inside the Resistance
(The Iraqi Insurgency and the Future of the Middle East)
By Zaki Chehab

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The author, Zaki Chehab, offered the reason for his interest in Iraq in the Introduction in these words:

“My interest in Iraq began thirty-nine years ago, when I was eight years old and living in a refugee camp in south Lebanon that was administered by the United Nations Relief Works Agency. In a local shop within Bourj Al Shamali camp, where I grew up with my three brothers and four sisters, I bought an out-of-date magazine, new ones being too expensive, and saw pen friends advertisement. I was keen to have a pen pal, as we had little contact with the outside world. I chose to correspond with a boy my age who was from a town called Al Fallujah in Iraq. We stayed in touch for over four years, exchanging letters, photographs and stories.”

This friend, after thirty five years, in June 2003, was to arrange a rare interview for Chehab with a group of the resistance fighters of which his friend had clandestinely, without informing his parents and siblings, become a member. His friend took him to meet a sheikh from the Al Dulaimi tribe who lived in Samarra. The sheikh began with a question: “Why are the Americans being attacked?” and then he answered his own question. He explained, “It’s because they humiliate people – breaking down gates and doors to enter homes, and beating and handcuffing husbands in front of their wives and children. It all leads to bitterness and hatred, and so people resort to violence to take revenge… American forces didn’t come here to overthrow Saddam Hussein but to crush Iraqi people – Iraq is for Iraqis, but now we are occupied territory. What’s happening is shameful and immoral. Talk to people anywhere in the country, and they will tell you that the U.S. forces smash down doors with no respect whoever is inside…. So that’s why we must defend our great Iraq, where we were born and for whom we are prepared to die.”

He also talked of Americans stealing money and valuables from the Iraqis whom they searched. Such tales of thievery are described at several places in the book and are attributed as one of the causes of grievance toward the occupying army.

Majority of the people who constitute the backbone of the resistance movement are not al-Qaeda operatives; they are Iraqi citizens. Whatever al-Qaeda operatives are there in Iraq, they joined the resistance movement, they didn’t instigate it. “Sheikh Saleh laughed when he recalled that the Americans always attributed attacks against them as being carried out by Saddam loyalists.”

Explaining the cause of Fallujah insurgency, the author described, “On April 28, 2003, members of the Eighty-second Airborne Division opened fire on a demonstration in Fallujah, killing fifteen people. One of the elders in Fallujah told me what happened. The trouble started when a female teacher protested to a U.S. marine about their school having been transformed into a military base. It appeared that the exchange got out of hand, and the marine forced the woman to lie on the ground. This angered her students and other young men who had been watching, and a fight started. Shots rang out and resulted in the death of the teacher, several students, two Iraqi males, and an American soldier. Some of those who witnessed the scene claimed that the soldier must have been killed by American fire, as the Iraqi men had no weapons in their hands.”

The resistance in Iraq is motivated by local reasons and not by the precepts of a world wide jihad propagated by Osama bin Laden. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian from the village Zarqa, joined hands with Osama bin Laden only in 2004 when his group, Tawhid Wa Al Jihad Movement, declared, “Announcement of Good Tidings! The Tawhid Wa Al Jihad Movement has joined hands together under the banner of Al-Qaida in a pledge of allegiance between Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Emir (commander) of the Mujahideen, and Sheik Osama-Bin-Laden.”

According to the author, “Until 2004, Zarqawi felt that bin Laden did not concentrate enough on the Arab-Israeli conflict but fought his wars elsewhere – in Yemen, Sudan, Afghanistan, Chechenya, and Bosnia. For Zarqawi, a homegrown Jordanian brought up in Palestinian environment close to the border with Israel, fighting Israel was his first priority.”

Before the downfall of Saddam, Iraq was not infiltrated by the al-Qaeda operatives; Saddam took care of that. After the war, the al-Qaeda operatives fled from Afghanistan and stealthily entered Iraq, found common cause with the various insurgent groups including Zarqawi’s and joined the battle against the foreign occupation.

But their number is not large. According to the author, “Others I spoke to about foreign fighters presence in Fallujah said they had come across people from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Palestine, and Syria, but that they were relatively few and not in hundreds as the media claim. The majority of the Jihadi elements are Iraqis, mainly Fallujans. This was confirmed by many other people I met in the town and its surrounding areas.”

The author enquired al-Zarqawi how his organization is financed to which he said, “While it was the poor citizens of Iraq who funded this struggle, I have the support of the richest people on earth.” To the question from where he gets his arms, al-Zarqawi said, “We get some weapons from the Americans themselves either by stealing them, paying bribes to the Americans, or penetrating their heavily protected camps by bribing their Iraqi guards. But remember, plenty of weapons in this part of the world were buried underground by Saddam’s regime. With a little money we’ve been able to smuggle large amounts of ammunition and weaponry, and what we have now is enough to enable us to fight the American forces for another four years. He elaborated further by saying they were planning ahead to ensure that they would have enough weapons to outlast the battle, however long that proves to be.”

Writing about the neo-con dominated administration of President Bush, the author wrote, “I remember reading a document prepared by Richard Perle in 1996 in which he outlined his vision. Titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, it was prepared for an Israeli think-tank to advise the then-Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The plan called on Israel to work with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll back various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of its Hashemite dynasty to the Iraq throne, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East, to threaten Syria’s territorial integrity. Perle’s idea was shared by Douglas Feith, national security adviser, and David Wurmser, adviser to Dick Cheney on the Middle East.”

The author also described in some details the conspiracies hatched by the dissidents living in exile in conjunction with the CIA staff to depose Saddam Hussein. The CIA lost credence when it pulled away at the eleventh hour from some of these schemes; as a consequence the local dissidents and their partners in exile were exposed. Many of them were executed by Saddam’s ruthless regime. After the fall of Baghdad, the rampant corruption and mismanagement of the reconstruction of Iraq is also detailed. Several ‘no-bid’ contracts amounting to billions of dollars were given to Halliburton and some other companies which had generously funded President Bush’s re-election campaign.

The security situation under Paul Bremer’s tenure was extremely grave. The author wrote, “However vicious and murderous Saddam’s regime was, under his iron rule there was virtually no crime, no burglaries, no rapes, no murders. Yet the lawless place that Baghdad has become has disconcerted the Iraqi population and undermined America’s efforts to prove that life is better under democracy.”

In the chapter titled Low Moral Ground, the author dealt with Abu Ghraib. The atrocities committed in this notorious prison (and other prisons in the U.S. and the British control in Iraq) were horrible and inhuman. Many of the female victims, after release from the prison, killed themselves out of shame and many others were heartened by their families, and they survived. But the trauma of the brutalities that they encountered in the prison always haunted them.

The brutalities experienced by the male prisoners at the hands of their prison masters were no less traumatic and despicable. Contrast these atrocities with the vaunts of liberating the Iraqi people from the atrocities of Saddam Hussein’s regime. These atrocities generated much hatred against the foreign occupiers and created countless insurgents who wanted to rid their country from the foreign tyrants.

The other chapters have the titles of “The Occupation through Iraqi Eyes,” “Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds and the Role of the Religious Leadership,” “Iraq and its Neighbors: Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Iran, Kuwait, and Turkey,” “The Palestinian Connection,” and “The Future.” The book consists of 275 pages spread over nine chapters. It was published in November 2005 by Nation Books, New York.

The author’s thumbnail biographical sketch described on the inside of the back cove reads: “Zaki Chehab is one of the Arab world’s leading journalists. He is political editor of the London-based Al Hayat and of the Arabic TV channel LBC. For over twenty five years he has covered Middle Eastern conflicts as a commentator for Arab and western media, including CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera.”

The book is lucid, easy to read and informative. It is highly recommended for the readers who are interested in the current affairs.