Iraq trembles as US troops pull back

Sitting in a Baghdad park last week, Amal Nadhim recalled the day she saw a giant American military truck plough down a busy street, crushing cars that stood in its way. The Iraqi driver of one of the cars was “crazy with anger” after his vehicle was destroyed, but he dared not challenge the US soldiers.

“Images like these will remain in our minds for ever,” said Amal, a 33-year-old childminder who, like many Iraqis, does not know whether to cheer or dread the planned withdrawal of US forces from Iraqi cities by Tuesday’s deadline.

It is the first big step in a phased draw-down of American troops that is due to be completed by December 2011.

After a spell of comparative calm, a wave of bombings has raised questions about the readiness of Iraqi forces to take over security duties from US combat troops.

It is also provoking contradictory emotions as Iraqis, desperate for the Americans to leave, begin to fear that whatever follows may be worse.

“I am really concerned for these kids,” Amal said as she watched over a group of children in the Zaiuna district in eastern Baghdad.

“The violence is increasing as the Americans withdraw and, whatever the reasons behind it, we will be its victims.”

Several prominent Iraqi insurgents warned that the spate of bombings that killed more than 200 people last week was merely a prelude to fresh attacks aimed at US military and Iraqi government targets.

“The resistance will not subside,” warned Sheikh Harith al-Dhari of the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq. He said: “I expect the insurgency to increase in both strength and ferocity, at least until the total withdrawal of the \ occupiers. Logic dictates that as long as there is fire under the pot, then the pot will continue to boil.”

US officials remain outwardly confident the home-grown forces they have been training over the past six years will be up to the task of containing the violence. Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, has already declared the impending US withdrawal a “great victory” for his country.

The Iraqi government is pressing on with its first sale of oilfield development rights tomorrow, and Tuesday has been declared a public holiday to celebrate the troops’ withdrawal.

Yet officials on both sides acknowledge the continuing danger of factional rivalries that could undermine the government’s fragile authority.

The main concern of both Maliki and President Barack Obama is not that Al-Qaeda terrorists will regain the footholds they have lost in Iraq; the greater threat is that sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shi’ites or between Arabs and Kurds may plunge the country into a civil war from which America can never extricate itself.

The most optimistic person in Iraq last week may have been Shaimaa Aqeel, 21, who sat at a mosque in the Shi’ite suburb of Sadr City insisting that “everything will be okay” once the Americans have gone.

“They claimed to protect us but in fact they bombed us,” she said. “All the political strife will end once the Americans have gone. Sunni and Shi’ite politicians will work together.”

In Baghdad, Abu Adel, a shopkeeper, had reason to take a contrasting view. Last Monday he lost his 20-year-old son in a bombing in Baghdad’s central Karrada district. His neighbour, Hussein Kamal, tried to comfort him, but both men believe the future is full of foreboding.

“If such things can happen while the Americans are still here, God alone will save us after they have withdrawn,” said Kamal. “These attacks reflect disputes between our politicians and parties. Iraqis are always the victims.”

A key test will come in Falluja, the Sunni-dominated city that was once a notorious insurgent hotbed but has since been rendered comparatively secure. Last week Abu Muhammad, a commander of the Jaish al-Mujahideen resistance, said a call had gone out to insurgent factions to return to the city.

“Military attacks will continue and increase against the coalition forces and other forces allied to it,” Abu Muhammad pledged.

“Falluja was the launchpad of the resistance in Iraq. We now await the retreat of the Americans into their fixed, fortified bases, where we feel they will be trapped like rats in glass cages.”

In deference to Maliki, and to avoid complaints that the withdrawal is merely a polite fiction to bolster the Iraqi government, US forces have agreed to suspend virtually all military operations for at least the first few days of July in order to persuade Iraqis that a genuine change has occurred.

“The Americans will be “invisible for the people”, said one of Maliki’s supporters. “They will turn into genies.”

In practice, the Americans will still be close at hand, supplying “advisers” and “trainers” to urban Iraqi units. US military helicopters will continue to fly unrestricted sorties. No significant reduction in the present 131,000 US troops is planned before next year.

Al-Dhari, the sheikh from the Association of Muslim Scholars, is among numerous opposition Iraqis who have condemned the withdrawal arrangements as a sham. “What is the point if the enemy leaves your house only to move next door, where he can still monitor your movements and behaves as if he continues to live with you?” al-Dhari asked.

Yet for the Pentagon and the Obama administration as a whole, the arrangement could prove a valuable test of the Iraqi government’s stability and the much criticised competence of its security forces.

The question that no American has yet answered is: what happens if the withdrawal experiment fails?

In Falluja last week there were hints that police and other officials will simply run away if violence breaks out. “I needed the wages so I joined the police,” said one policeman who gave his name as Ammar. “But my brothers were killed by American fire, and I’ve pledged to both my mother and my wife that I will not fight.”

There have been other reports of low morale, inefficiency, indiscipline and corruption among government forces. Most commanders are seen as loyal to the Shi’ite-led government. Sunni groups have been largely excluded from the security forces.

Yet independent US analysts are not yet ready to “press the panic button”, as Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution put it last week. Pollack, a former CIA and National Security Council analyst, described the withdrawal as “a very important trial balloon in determining where Iraq is headed”.

He believes the continuing presence of US advisers — with plenty of firepower in emergency reserve — may bolster Iraqi forces and reduce the risk of serious violence.

Anthony Cordesman, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, recently returned from Iraq, where he found the local security forces “making real progress”. But Cordesman agreed the main challenge remained “ethnic and sectarian tensions”.

If Iraq collapses into civil war, Obama could face a nightmare. The president has so far proved “flexible and responsible” in his approach to troop withdrawals, Pollack said. But most of his advisers “have no interest in Iraq and really want it to go away”.

Abu Teba, a 44-year-old builder from the Yarmouk district of Baghdad, is among those who fear the worst. “How will Iraqi forces handle our security when they are on their own?” he asked, after yet another bomb had wrought havoc in Baghdad last week.

“There is so much violence while the Americans are still here.”