[Shadow_Group] Rules of Engagement - Iraq

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Rules of Engagement

A white flag can be a ruse, a corpse can be a booby
trap and a wounded enemy can be a living bomb-or
simply a wounded enemy. The fog of war is thicker than
ever.

Frederic Lafargue / Gamma for Newsweek
A tank rolls past bodies in Fallujah, where insurgents
have sometimes used corpses as booby traps  

By Rod Nordland and Babak Dehghanpisheh

FROM: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6542346/site/newsweek/<http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6542346/site/newsweek/>
Nov. 29 issue - The once flawless green dome of
Fallujah's al Hadhra Mosque is riddled with bullet
scars. Neighboring buildings have become scorched,
crumbling stumps. About 150 local civilians, mostly
haggard-looking men, took shelter there last week,
having no safer place to stay in the ruined city. A
young man joined the group, unnoticed by U.S. troops
guarding the area. One of his hands was swathed in
bloody bandages; he kept it hidden inside his
checkered shirt as he whispered excitedly to a friend,
loudly enough to be overheard by an Iraqi reporter in
the crowd: "Five of us were martyred this afternoon."
Everyone could see he was an insurgent-but no one told
the Americans. The men at the mosque saw nothing to
celebrate in the Americans' retaking of the city from
terrorist leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi and his
insurgent allies, who had ruled the city for the past
seven months. "The resistance didn't destroy houses,"
said shopkeeper Mohammed Ouda, 36. "They didn't harm
people."
 
That claim-absurd but evidently sincere-only
underscores the impossibility of America's task. The
truth is that Zarqawi and his partners in jihad have
been responsible for many hundreds of civilian deaths
in Iraq, including a horrific series of mosque
bombings in Shiite areas, the August 2003 bombing of
the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the videotaped
beheadings of at least half a dozen Western hostages.
One of many grisly discoveries made by U.S. forces in
Fallujah last week was the mutilated corpse of a
middle-aged woman tentatively identified as Margaret
Hassan, 59, the longtime chief of Iraqi operations for
the international relief group CARE. She was kidnapped
in Baghdad on Oct. 19, and her captors subsequently
issued three videotapes of her begging for her life
and being abused by her captors. Last week the Arabic
TV channel Al-Jazeera said it had received a tape of
her apparently being put to death. The station said it
would not air the footage for reasons of taste.

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Arab broadcasters did air endless reruns of a
different on-camera shooting. An embedded TV crew in
Fallujah filmed the storming of a mosque by a squad of
Marines on Nov. 13. Inside the mosque a Marine is
heard shouting, "He's f---ing faking he's dead!" A
prisoner, apparently wounded and disarmed, is lying on
the floor. Another Marine agrees: "Yeah, he's
breathing." "He's faking he's f---ing dead!" the first
Marine repeats. An unnamed Marine raises his rifle and
fires. "He's dead now," someone says. The shooter
reportedly had been wounded in the face the day
before, and a friend was killed by a bomb planted on
an insurgent's corpse. The military is investigating
the incident. That hasn't stopped many Arab viewers
from passing quick judgment on the shooting, which
they regard as only the latest case in a long history
of U.S. abuses against Muslims.

 NEWSWEEK RADIO | 11/21/04 
 
IRAQ: WAR WITHOUT RULES
Guests: Rod Nordland, NEWSWEEK Baghdad Bureau Chief,
from Syria and Donald Abenheim, Defense expert and
Visiting Fellow, the Hoover Institution

 Listen to the audio
 Listen to the complete show 
 
For the insurgents, Iraq has become a war without
rules, and yet the militants also score big propaganda
victories every time Americans break their own codes
of warfare. In the battle for Fallujah the insurgents
feigned surrender, waving white flags to approach
within killing range of U.S. Marines and Iraqi
government forces. They positioned their fighters in
mosques, medical centers and civilian neighborhoods.
They booby-trapped their fallen comrades' corpses and
shot at crews trying to collect the Muslim dead.
Practically every taboo has been discarded. Women,
children and international relief groups have become
deliberate targets. Ambulances are used to smuggle
weapons. Torture of hostages has become a public
spectacle, with videos passed out like press kits to
TV stations, and posted on the Internet when the
Arabic channels balk at showing such atrocities.

  CHRISTOPHER DICKEY | SHADOWLAND 
Why U.S. Troops Are Stuck in Iraq
 
 


The insurgents may not win many hearts and minds, but
that's not the point. Their fighting force is based on
a shamelessly cynical alliance between Qaeda-inspired
religious fanatics and the remnants of Saddam
Hussein's gang of enforcers. The jihadis have nothing
but contempt for Iraq's Shiite majority, and their
newfound Baathist friends share that attitude. Their
allied forces are waging an extreme form of asymmetric
warfare-the weak struggling against the mighty.
Sympathizers insist the insurgents have no choice but
to break the rules against the Americans' overwhelming
firepower. The fighters' ideology, as far as they have
one, derives from a doomsday vision known among
Islamic experts as the Takfiri philosophy. Adherents
consider themselves empowered to decide who is a good
Muslim and to exterminate everyone else (the kafirs)
in the name of creating a pure Islamic state.

The jihadis' grand strategy is to provoke a war
between Islam and the West, as Al Qaeda's leaders have
openly boasted. But the more immediate goal is to
provoke overreactions like the killing at the mosque.
To win, in short, they simply have to keep operating.
Unconventional-warfare experts have a saying: when an
army fights insurgents, it's like playing chess
against an opponent who's playing poker. The Americans
may have checkmated the resistance in Fallujah-but the
incident at the mosque left the insurgents holding a
full house.

The Americans desperately need Iraqi hearts and minds,
but their efforts often seem futile. Since the war
began, U.S. troops have tried to keep the number of
civilian casualties as low as possible. The leading
British medical journal, The Lancet, recently
published a study that used interviews and
extrapolations to estimate the total figure at 100,000
or more, mostly from aerial bombardment. Other
statisticians have since dismissed the study's
conclusions as unreliable and speculative. An activist
group calling itself Iraq Body Count
(iraqbodycount.org) has assembled a carefully
documented tally of confirmed war deaths. According to
the group's research, the killings of between 14,000
and 17,000 civilians have been reported since the
conflict's start. Fewer than 4,000 of those deaths
have taken place since the official end of major
combat in May 2003.

But that's still a lot of innocent dead-far more than
were killed, say, on September 11-and many Iraqis
accuse the Americans of reckless disregard for
civilian lives. A conspiracy-obsessed form of logic
has taken over, and every bit of information is
evidence of something sinister on the part of the
foreign occupiers. Some Iraqis even accuse the
Americans of having a "hidden hand" in the CARE
director's death. Baghdad schoolteacher Mona Kareem,
47, suspects that the Americans orchestrated the
murder as a way of both discrediting the insurgents
and keeping the Iraqi people dependent on U.S.
assistance. "Killing [Hassan] results in harming the
reputation of the resistance and Iraqis in general,"
Kareem argues. "[It] makes all humanitarian
organizations think twice before coming into the
country, not to mention investment companies." The
bottom line: "Less services and more unemployed
people, and an open field for the Americans and Iraqi
government to do whatever they want." Such a line of
reasoning might leave Americans scratching their
heads, but it seems utterly sensible to many Iraqis.

U.S. forces have no choice but to shrug off the
craziness and soldier on. In a place like Fallujah,
that's not always easy. The main battle was at an end
last week, but the sounds of sniper fire and
explosions continued to echo across the ruined
neighborhoods throughout the day. Stray dogs feasted
on the dead in the streets. A local cleric organized a
team of volunteers to gather corpses for burial, but
they quit after the first day. Too many of the bodies
had been booby-trapped. In some ways, holding on to
the city is a tougher order than taking it was. "You
don't know what to expect," says Lance Cpl. Scott
Green, 21, from Mashpee, Mass. "Anyone can pop up with
a weapon." An insurgent group's standard objective is
to cause ordinary people to lose faith in the
authorities through insecurity and fear. Somehow the
Americans need to bring normal life back to Fallujah.
That's a long way from happening. 

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.







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