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Q&A: Robert Fisk Reports from Occupied Territory

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
June 12, 2003

On June 11, 2003, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman interviewed Robert Fisk, reporter with the Independent newspaper of London. He recently left Iraq where he was chronicling the rising resistance to the U.S. occupation. Ten American soldiers have been killed in ambushes across Iraq in the past 15 days including one yesterday in Baghdad who was attacked with rocket propelled grenades. Fallujah has been a hotbed of Iraqi resistance since April when U.S. troops fired into large crowds of civilians twice killing at least 18 people.


This is a rush transcript.


AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, can you talk more about what you found there?


ROBERT FISK: I don't think I've ever seen a clearer example of an army that thought it was an army of liberation and has become an army of occupation. It's important perhaps to say – I did mention it in [a recent] article that a number of those soldiers who were attached to the 3rd infantry division who were military policeman, American ordinary cops like one from Rhode Island, for example – they had a pretty shrewd idea of what was going on. You got different kinds of behavior from the Americans. You got this very nice guy, Phil Cummings, who was a Rhode Island cop, very sensitive towards people, didn't worry if people shouted at him. He remained smiling. He just said that if people throw rocks at me or stones at me, I give them candies. There was another soldier who went up to a middle aged man sitting on a seat and he said, 'If you get out of that seat, I'll break your neck,' and there was quite a lot of language like that as well. There were good guys as well as bad guys among the Americans as there always are in armies, but the people who I talked to, the sergeants and captains and so on – most of them acknowledge that something had gone wrong, that this was not going to be good.


One guy said to me, every time we go down to the river here – he was talking about the river area in Fallujah – it's a tributary of the Tigris – it's like Somalia down there. You always get shot at and you always get stoned, I mean, have stones thrown at them. Some of the soldiers spoke very frankly about the situation in Baghdad. One man told me – I heard twice before in Baghdad itself, once from a British Commonwealth diplomat and once from a fairly senior officer in what we now have to call the coalition, C.P.A., the Coalition – for the moment forces or whatever it's called – Authority, the authority that's hanging on there until they can create some kind of Iraqi government – they all say that Baghdad airport now comes under nightly sniper fire from the perimeter of the runways from Iraqis. Two of them told me that every time a military aircraft comes in at night, it's fired at. In fact some of the American pilots are now going back to the old Vietnamese tactic of cork screwing down tightly on to the runways from above rather than making the normal level flight approach across open countryside because they're shot at so much. It's a coalition provisional authority I'm thinking of, the C.P.A., previously an even more long fangled name. There is a very serious problem of security.


The Americans still officially call them the remnants of Saddam or terrorists.


But in fact, it is obviously an increase in the organized resistance and not just people who were in Saddam's forces, who were in the Ba'ath Party or the Saddam Fedayeen.


There was also increasing anger among the Shiite community, those who were of course most opposed to Saddam, and I think what we're actually seeing, you can get clues in Iraq, is a cross fertilization. Shiites who are disillusioned, who don't believe they have been liberated, who spent so long in Iran, they don't like the Americans anyway. Sunni Muslims who feel like they're threatened by the Shiites, former Sadaam acolytes who've lost their jobs and found that their money has stopped. Kurds who are disaffected and are beginning to have contacts, and that of course is the beginning of a real resistance movement and that's the great danger for the Americans now.


GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert Fisk, whoís just come out of Iraq. There's a front page piece in The New York Times today, "GI's In Iraqi City Are Stalked By Faceless Enemies At Night,' and Michael Gordon writes about how organized the resistance is, how it seems to come alive at night and that what's clear, he says , is some attacks are premeditated, involve cooperation among small groups of fighters including a system of signaling the presence of American forces: talking about the use of red, white and blue flares when forces come and then the attacks begin.


FISK: Yes, I've heard this. I also know that in Fallujah, for example, there's a system of honking the horns of cars: when the vehicles approach, the American convoy approaches, there's one honk on the horn. When the last vehicle goes by the same spot, there's two honks on the horn, and the purpose is to work out the time element between the first hooter and the second because by that, they know how big is the convoy and whether it's small enough to be attacked. That comes from a sergeant in the military police in Fallujah taking part in this actual operation which I described to you just now, which you read out from my report.


One of the problems with the Americans I think is that the top people in the Pentagon always knew that this wasn't going to be 'human rights abuses ended,' flowers and music for the soldiers, and everyone lives happily every after and loves America. You may remember when Rumsfeld first came to Baghdad, something your president didn't dare to do in the end, he wanted to fly over in an airplane.


He made a speech which I thought was very interesting, rather sinister in the big hanger at Baghdad airport. He said we still have to fight the remnants of Saddam and the terrorists in Iraq, and I thought, hang on a minute, who are these people? And it took me a few minutes to realize I think what he was doing, he was laying the future narrative of the opposition to the Americans. I.E when the Americans get attacked, it could be first of all laid down to remnants of Saddam, as in remnants of the Taliban who seem to be moving around in Afghanistan now in battalion strength, but never mind. It could be blamed on Al Qaeda, so America was back fighting its old enemies again. This was familiar territory.


If you were to suggest that it was a resistance movement, harakat muqawama, resistance party in Arabic, that would suggest the people didn't believe they had been liberated, and of course, all good-natured peace loving people have to believe they were liberated by the Americans, not occupied by them. What you're finding for example is a whole series of blunders by Paul Bremer, the American head of the so-called coalition forces, at least coalition authority in Baghdad.


First of all, he dissolved the Iraqi Army. Well, I can't imagine an Army that better deserves to be dissolved. But that means that more than quarter of a million armed men overnight are deprived of their welfare and money. Now if you have quarter of a million armed Iraqis who suddenly don't get paid any more, and they all know each other, what are they going to do? They are going to form some kind of force which is secret, which is covered; then they will be called terrorists, but I guess they know that, and then of course they will be saying to people, why don't you come and join us.


It was very interesting that in Fallujah, the young men came out to see me from a shop just after the American searches there had ended and said some people came from the resistance a few nights ago and asked me to join. I said, what did you say, and he said, I wouldn't do that. But now, he said, I might think differently. I met a Shiite Muslim family in Baghdad who moved into the former home of a Saddam intelligence officer. This family had been visited three nights previously by armed men who said, you better move out of this house. It doesn't belong to you unless you want to join us. The guy in Fallujah said that the men, the armed men who came to invite him to join the resistance had weapons, showed their mukhabarat intelligence identity card and said, we're still being paid and we are proud to hold our I.D. cards for the Ba'ath Party. So, now you have to realize that Fallujah and other towns like it are very unlike Tikrit, are very much pro-Saddam. Fallujah is the site of a great munitions factory, it gave people massive employment. They all loved Saddam in the way Arabs are encouraged to love dictators or go prison to otherwise. But nonetheless, there is an embryo of a serious resistance movement now. ............."
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