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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Religious Appeals Have Turned Against The Kurds |
| 2004-11-12 |
| Muslim fundamentalist insurgents seeking to topple the government are holed up in a conservative city with little sympathy for secularism or pluralism. They raise the banner of Islam, and they call on the rest of the country to rise up and expel the oppressors. The government reacts by massing forces around the city. It demanded that the militants surrender or the city give them up. If not, the city would be destroyed. Fallujah this week? Yes, but it was also the Syrian city of Hama in the spring of 1982. The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood seized Hama as the first step towards its goal of a national uprising against the secular Baathist regime. The Syrian President demanded their surrender. His army shelled the city, and special forces went in to kill or capture the militants. The Syrians employed the same strategy that the US is using now. Its tanks and artillery waited outside the city; they fired on militants and civilians alike. Its elite units, like the American Marines surrounding Falljuah today, braced themselves for a bloody battle. The US condemned Syria for the assault that is believed to have cost 10,000 civilian lives. The Syrian army destroyed the historic centre of Hama, and it rounded up Muslim rebels for imprisonment or execution. Syria's actions against Hama came to form part of the American case that Syria was a terrorist state. Partly because of Hama, Syria is on a list of countries in the Middle East whose regimes the US wants to change. Iraq's American-appointed Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, declared a state of emergency on Sunday to assume powers reminiscent of those wielded by Saddam Hussein: to break up public gatherings, enter private houses without warrants and detain people without trial. Perhaps in waging war against the Iraqis who want to expel the Americans and topple America's chosen Iraqi leaders, the insurgents have compelled the US and its Iraqi allied regime to behave like the two Baathist regimes that they believed were so totalitarian they had to go. Other Iraqi cities must now fear the use of what The New York Times correspondent Tom Friedman called "Hama rules" against them. Unrest in the northern city of Mosul, where relations between its Kurdish and Arab residents have deteriorated to the point where Arabs on the west bank of the Tigris and Kurds to the west rarely cross the bridges to each other's neighbourhoods. Already, because the autonomous Kurds of northern Iraq are the only ethnic group allied to the US in Iraq, Arabs have begun killing Kurds. And Kurds are seeking refuge in the Kurdish-controlled northern region... |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 I fail to see what the title of the article has to do with the body of it . . . Kurds only get a passing mention in the tirade against the Cleansing of Fallujah. They make it clear here that the reason that the US was against the Syrian action in Hama was the wanton shelling/shooting of civilians not the elimination of terrorists. Makes sense that if we are attempting to eliminate the terrs then we are avoiding the mistakes of Hama. So . . . |
| Posted by: Jame Retief 2004-11-12 7:03:14 AM |
| #1 Umm... it seems to me that the Coalition gave the local civilian population a good many months to leave, before applying the Hamas option on the terrorists/Ba'athists and their sympathizers remaining within Fallujah city limits. No moral equivalence to be found here. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2004-11-12 6:20:33 AM |