Free Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East by Gwynne Dyer Page B

preferred a “broad front” approach that even extended to Sunni-Shia cooperation against the American occupiers in Iraq. While there were irreconcilable differences between the two groups, those could be left to be sorted out (by killing if necessary) after the infidels had been defeated. Zarqawi, on the other hand, quite apart from his takfiri hatred of Shias, feared that any collaboration between the Sunni and the Shia resistance forces could indeed result in a “broad front”—but one that would smooth over the differences by becoming secular and nationalist, and leaving religion and jihad out of the picture. That was not the war he wanted to fight.

    The Sunni uprising in Fallujah began on March 31 when a vehicle carrying four American contractors strayed into the city centre and was set upon by a mob. The contractors were killed, and a video was shot of their bodies being burned, their heads being kicked off by the crowd, and two of the charred bodies being strung up, headless, handless and footless, over the stream of traffic crossing the Euphrates bridge, and left there for hours. It was an action well calculated to infuriate the American occupation authorities, and they rose to the bait, declaring that they would seize and occupy Fallujah unless the citizens handed over the people guilty of the atrocity. “What is coming is the destruction of anti-coalition forces inFallujah,” growled Lieut.-Col. Brennan Byrne, commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. “They have two choices: submit or die.” Obviously nobody in Fallujah was going to hand over the guilty parties, even in the unlikely event that they were still in the city, so in practice the U.S. Marines and supporting army units were committed to the street-by-street conquest of a hostile Arab city of 300,000 people. The young men of Fallujah would die like flies before the huge firepower and trained infantry brought against them by the United States, but they would fight anyway, and quite a few Americans would die too.
    Five days later, just an hour and a half’s drive from Fallujah, the Mahdi Army, the Shia militia founded by Muqtada al Sadr, took control of the holy city of Karbala, and other Mahdi forces seized four other Shia-majority cities in the south of Iraq. It was the first time that Shia Arabs had openly confronted the American occupation, but Sadr, son of the martyred Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq al Sadr, who had been murdered by Saddam Hussein, was determined not to yield until the U.S. agreed to early elections for an Iraqi government. To put it very simplistically, the minority Sunnis were fighting to recover lost privileges, while the Shias were fighting to get a free vote in which their majority status would at last be recognized and rewarded. But it was possible for the two sects to have a loose alliance against the American occupation forces in the meantime.
    After five days of heavy fighting in Fallujah, which caused hundreds of civilian casualties, the Marines had taken only a quarter of the city and were ordered to stop. Fighting continued to flare up sporadically until the end of April, when U.S. forces were entirely withdrawn from the city and it fell completely under insurgent control. Many other Sunni towns around Baghdad fell under rebel control at the same time—and the Sunni fighters in Fallujah sent aid to Sadr’s besieged Shia forces in Karbala, Najaf and Kufa. As the U.S. forces surrounding the Shia cities ground slowly forward, trying to kill the ill-trained militiamen who were defending the holy cities without damaging them too much, posters of Moqtada al Sadr began to appear in Sunni areas, put up by Sunnis who admired his stand against the Americans. As Zarqawi had feared, a joint Sunni-Shia insurgency that stressed nationalism and not religion was becoming possible in Iraq. It had to be stopped, and the only way was to instigate a Sunni-Shia civil war.
    It was necessary to instigate such a war, because