Iraqis to U.S. after six years: ‘Get out’

Eighty days into the new U.S. administration and Iraq is still with us. That is, U.S. troops are still occupying Iraq. And the Barack Obama administration has asked Congress for another $83.4 billion to carry out the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iraqis are also reminding the world that, despite a significant slowdown in fighting and despite whatever differences exist among Iraqis, the vast majority of the population wants the U.S. out.

Six years ago on April 9, the U.S. commanders decided they had won the war and brought in a few hundred Iraqi hangers-on to stage the pulling down of the statue of Saddam Hussein with the help of a U.S. bulldozer. This year, some 50,000 Iraqis demonstrated on the same square to demand the U.S. get out. The crowd burned George W. Bush in effigy.

While the dissident Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr’s group is credited with organizing the April 9 demonstration, independent journalist Nir Rosen reports that members of the so-called Awakening Councils joined the protest. The U.S. military had made agreements with the Awakening Councils—local organizations of Iraqis in mostly Sunni areas that at one time fought the U.S. occupation—that led to a cease fire in those areas.

In Falluja, the city the U.S. military destroyed in 2004 after people there killed four U.S. mercenaries working for Blackwater, people held a similar anti-U.S. protest that day. (Al-Hayat). A statement of the Falluja-based Iraqi Islamic Party suggested to President Barack Obama that he has a responsibility to show that his policies are different from Bush’s, whose aggression was responsible for killing a million Iraqis.

Anti-U.S. protest was not restricted to the symbolic. In Mosul, a major northern city, a truck driver detonated a ton of explosives near a police station on April 10 and killed five U.S. troops.

On April 11 a bomber infiltrated a gathering of U.S.-allied Sunni fighters—soldiers working with the Awakening Councils—who were waiting to be paid in the town of Latifiyah south of Baghdad. When the bomb went off, it killed 12 people and wounded 30, including both regular and “Awakening” soldiers.

The message is that continued occupation will bring continued casualties to U.S. troops. This didn’t stop the U.S. commander, Gen. Ray Odierno, from asking for more U.S. troops to actively patrol Mosul and Buquba, where resistance fighting has stepped up. There are indications that the alliance of the U.S. with the “Awakening Councils” is collapsing.

On the occasion of the sixth anniversary of the war, the Belgium-based anti-occupation Brussells Tribunal organized an appearance before the European Parliament of Iraqi spokespeople that together give a view of the havoc the U.S. occupation has wreaked upon the Iraqi people.

Statements from Dr. Omar Al Kubaisy, Abdul Ilah Albayaty and Dr. Faleh Al Khayat can be read at www.brussellstribunal.org or watched on the new Brussells Tribunal YouTube section.

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