The Battle of Zuwiyah will not go down in world history as a turning point, but in the personal histories of the men who took part, it may. The weapons were sticks, stones and Kalashnikov assault rifles; it was part of the Battle of Baghdad, supposedly between US forces and Saddam loyalists, yet it pitched Iraqi against Iraqi in an intense and ugly fight that drew blood and confirmed the power of local pride.
The people of Zuwiyah, a relatively well-to-do neighbourhood which is part of the district of Kharada, decided they would not tolerate looters. So, seeing as the US Marines were failing to enforce public order after their occupation of the capital, they took matters into their own hands.
They could be called vigilantes. They could be called neighbourhood watchmen. Whatever they are called, they showed a power to spontaneously self-organise which would impress the Paris Communards and should shame the coalition planners who failed to foresee the ransacking which menaces the Iraqi middle class.
It was a taxi driver who first took up a weapon against the looters. Amir Mahdi Ibrahim saw them pouring into his street of shops, the Babylon Hotel, schools and a mosque, on Friday. He reckoned there were about a hundred of them, outsiders, coming with their cars with the gleam of plunder in their eyes.
”They invaded the hotel,” he said. ”We were unarmed, we didn’t have any kind of weapons. I went to some neighbours and asked if anyone had a weapon. A man called Abu Haider said he had a gun. I went to his house and picked up a Kalashnikov.
”I approached the hotel and started shooting in the air. The whole neighbourhood rallied round, with rocks and sticks, and about a hundred of us attacked them.”
The Zuwiyah residents flattened the tyres of some of the looters’ cars, set fire to others, and scared most of the looters away. Some of the looters, about five, Ibrahim reckoned, had Kalashnikovs, and fired back. They were all driven off, but not before one young resident, Hamzah Hussein, was wounded in the arm. He was there yesterday, back from the hospital with his arm in a sling, shy and proud.
Self-defence
The battle acted as the catalyst for residents to step into the breach left by the collapse of civilian authority and the failure of the US occupiers to protect any life or property save their own. Local people set up checkpoints, posted armed guards at key points – they were still on duty at the hotel yesterday — and confiscated the goods and vehicles of any suspected looters who tried to pass through.
In Zuwiyah yesterday a handwritten sign at a roadblock warned: ”Chike Point. Slow Daon.”
Residents were still angry that a request to a unit of US Marines to help them stop the looting had been turned down. At one point, the marines took some of the residents’ guns, although they later returned them, accepting they were for self-defence.
”Most of the neighbourhood thinks that the marines are directly to blame for this kind of vandalism,” said Aaid Hamza Al-Khalaji, a local vet. ”In a coup d’etat or invasion the first thing that is announced is a curfew, martial law.”
The Battle of Zuwiyah shows that ordinary middle-class Iraqis will not stand passively and let outsiders have their way with their lives. If they can organise themselves to take up arms against looters today, they can organise against their occupiers tomorrow, should they be provoked enough.
Khalaji recalled the words uttered by Ayatollah Khomeini when accepting a ceasefire with Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq war: it was like drinking poison, the ayatollah said.
”We’re happy about the removal of Saddam Hussein, but we are drinking poison for this,” Khalaji said. ”That’s the feeling of most Iraqis. We want the Americans to re-establish order because they destroyed the existing infrastructure.”
At least in the part of the city east of the Tigris, the US was making a greater effort to get things under control yesterday. A scattering of foot patrols was going out. Marines were unloading bricks from the back of a Humvee to build a defensive barrier for the St Raphael Hospital. A handful of shops and restaurants — still no more than one in a hundred — reopened, although the continuing lack of mains power was a huge obstacle to daily life and work. A marines representative said: ”We’re working on it.”
At one checkpoint, marines and local residents were working together to screen passing vehicles for loot, and to check whether vehicles themselves were looted.
An enraged man, who had been accused of looting and was then cleared by the testimony of neighbours, pawed the ground, eager to brawl with his accusers, before he departed the scene. Marines hung back, on the edge of events, watching but letting the Iraqis take the strain.
The US-Iraqi team had already confiscated a mound of goods which lay on the road: toilets similar to those in presidential palaces, gas masks, boxes of Tunisian ceramic tiles, computers, printers, and classroom chairs.
Two residents were having a dispute about what they were doing. Ayad Dawud was in favour. Badar Al-Said said innocent people were being humiliated. ”Lots of families have been moving from district to district with their own furniture and are being accused of looting,” he said.
In the car park of the old police academy — looted, of course — potential agents of the new order gathered at noon yesterday. They were the same as the agents of the old order. They were Iraqi policemen, responding to a call from the US to come forward to help restore the peace.
All looked prosperous, with new-looking, neatly pressed shirts and slacks. Their faces were the faces of men accustomed to being feared and obeyed. A week ago, they would have arrested anyone who said a word against their beloved leader, Saddam Hussein. Now, on a show of hands, all said they were ready to arrest the evil dictator on sight.
Human rights abuses
Asked whether the people would accept their return, one senior officer, Mohammed Ali — he would not give his exact rank — said they would. ”We can understand the way they think, the psychology,” he said. ”If there’s an order to the coalition forces to deal with these looters there’s no common language. We might have further chaos and civil unrest.”
Asked about whether the police, all members of the Ba’ath party, were not guilty of human rights abuses, he said: ”Things I have or have not done are in the past. All our work was to keep peace and security in the country. We weren’t dealing with political crimes.”
He was ready to deal with looters. ”If the Americans give us the authority, we will prosecute every one of these people, and will not let chaos go into the streets.”
The US, however, is in no hurry to return authority to the old police. The minutes passed in the hot midday sun in the car park, as 50 ex-policemen waited and sweltered. Noon became 1pm. No Americans turned up. – Guardian Unlimited Â