Iraq United

From Teresa Neilsen-Hayden's Making Light:

It is now impossible for us to win this war. I’ve thought so ever since the Iraqis’ spontaneous mass resupply of Fallujah in the first week of April. When the other side is getting the miracles, it’s time to think seriously about bailing. And they did; no doubt about it. Here’s a good summary of that story, if you missed it.

The short version is that Shiites are in the majority in Iraq, but under Saddam Hussein the Sunnis had the power, and some of them weren’t gentle about using it. And Fallujah isn’t just a Sunni-dominated area:

The level of sympathy for Fallujah in Shia areas is remarkable because the city once formed a backbone of support for Saddam Hussein’s regime, and was home to many officers in his intelligence services and Republican Guard. Some of those Baath Party loyalists were responsible for the brutal suppression of a 1991 Shia rebellion in southern Iraq, in which tens of thousands of people were buried in mass graves.

But when the rest of Iraq saw what we were doing in Fallujah, their ethnic and religious differences evaporated. All of a sudden you were getting amazing quotes like “No Sunnis, no Shiites, yes for Islamic unity,” the marchers chanted. “We are Sunni and Shiite brothers and will never sell our country.” Here’s a report from the Lebanon Daily Star about the response in one Baghdad neighborhood:

Baghdad’s Muslims have been rushing food and medical supplies to their local mosque for delivery to the beleaguered residents of Fallujah. Since the mosque imam in Baghdad’s Adhamiya district set up his appeal last week, the response has been phenomenal. The mosque courtyard has been transformed into a giant warehouse filled with white UN bags containing rice or beans, boxes of vegetables and bottles of oil and water. …

“It took only an appeal from the imam and the faithful from the neighborhood flocked with supplies and medicines for the besieged residents of Fallujah,” said Monder Moslah, a mosque security guard. On Saturday, a supply convoy sent by ethnic Turkmen from the northern city of Kirkuk arrived, he added, highlighting what he said was a national example of solidarity by all Iraqi communities. …

Iraq’s Christian Chaldean minority, which fear an emergence of an Islamic republic, expressed support for the Fallujah residents. Father Butros Haddad, who heads the Virgin Mary church in Baghdad’s Karrada district, said the patriarchate Saturday donated some $1 million to buy food and medicine for Fallujah residents.

In a lot of cases, people were simply gathering up whatever supplies and transportation they could muster, and heading for Fallujah to deliver it in person. They broke through U.S. roadblocks to get there. This is from Helen Williams, a Welsh humanitarian aid worker:

People were shouting good luck to us and blessing/thanking us for going to Fallujah. At one junction some boys threw bread and cake into the bus for us.

As we approached Fallujah on these back roads they deteriorated, becoming no more than a bumpy dirt track, barely two cars wide. Coming the other way were cars full of families and their possessions and vehicles with signs on them reading “Aid to Fallujah - from the people of Hilla/Nagaf/Ramadi” for example.

It seemed that all the people of Iraq, whether Shia, Sunni or Christian wanted to help Fallujah with whatever they could - water (there is no clean drinking water in Fallujah), blankets, food or medical aid - it was wonderful to see.

I’m sorry I can’t find more photos. It was one of those improbable events—not quite on the scale of the evacuation of Dunkirk, but definitely beating out Joffre’s reserves getting to the Battle of the Marne courtesy of the Paris taxi fleet. And the focus of this sudden, miraculous sense of unity and resolve was their determination to have us get the hell out of their country.

Mind, all that was before they saw the souvenir snapshots of our troops grinning while they tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners.