Iraq's volunteer army
The invasion of Iraq has prompted hundreds of Muslims to take up arms against US-led forces. While there have been some low-level desertions in the Iraqi army, there has also been a personnel flow in the opposite direction. In the build-up to the war, hundreds, maybe even
thousands of volunteers have made their way to Iraq where Al Jazeera television
has shown them receiving training in urban warfare and street fighting. Their
aim is simple – to defend Iraq against the US invasion that creeps ever closer
to Baghdad.
The recruits hail from all over the Muslim world.
“Abu Abdul Rahman” says he left his wife and children in Egypt to come to resist
a clear case of tyranny: “I came to Iraq secretly to participate in a
mission blessed by God. It is a mission of martyrdom.”
A Libyan member of the international brigade
identifying himself as As-Sanousi said that “the American administration carries
all the elements of evil” and that he had come to Iraq to fight for God. Abu
Assul Al-Din, a Syrian, expressed his firm conviction that ‘the weapon of
martyrdom cannot be defeated’.
Before the US-led invasion the ‘Mujahideen
Corps’ were based at a special camp, 20 kilometres to the north east of the
capital, dedicated to training the volunteers.
“We came to fight the invaders and we will gain
martyrdom if Allah wills”, said a Tunisian volunteer, his face covered by a mask
to conceal his identity. Like the Arab mujahideen who fought to eject the Soviet
Union from Afghanistan in the 1980s many volunteers fear being imprisoned by
their own governments if they ever return home.
The volunteer brigade is inspired by other recent
wars. Following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, mujahideen from the
Hizbullah led a campaign of self-sacrifice attacks to drive US forces out of
Beirut. And in Somalia, peoples’ militias were successful in driving out vastly
better-equipped US marines.
Many Muslim volunteers smuggled themselves
into Bosnia eight years ago - a US intelligence source estimated around 7,000.
They made up a significant proportion of Bosnian Muslim Army forces, and managed
to establish themselves in several Croat cities and villages, laying siege to
many more for extended periods. Towards the end of the war in Bosnia, their
assistance contributed to the army making such spectacular gains that it was the
Croatians that needed to call for the truce, backed by Europe, the US, Russia
and the UN.
Though the Iraqi government is aware that its
secular Ba’athist credentials are anathema to most of their new recruits it has
thrown opens its doors to them and also invoked religious sentiment itself.
Iraqi Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan said at a press conference in Amman
last September that "we call for confronting the aggression and aggressors not
only by the Iraqi capability, but we call on all the Arab masses ... to confront
the material and human interests of the aggressors. Iraq has a
religious right to defend itself and...all Arab citizens wherever they might be
have the right to fight by all available means the aggression through its
representatives on their land.”
In recent months, Saddam Hussein has also been keen
to repair the Shiite holy sites in Karbala – which his own forces had inflicted
terrible damage on in the 1991 Gulf War. Today, alcohol is banned in public
places and there has been much discussion recently of applying Islamic law. Toby
Dodge, an expert on Iraq at Warwick University says, “it is obvious that there
is a great tendency to go back to Islam among the Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites, it
is the return to religion after a long period of suffering.”
Volunteer brigades have been a feature of conflicts
in modern history. In the 1930s about 2,400 men and women travelled to Spain to
fight against the fascist government of General Franco.
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