Fallujah, a largely Sunni Muslim town north of the Iraqi capital, was sealed off by U.S. forces in preparation for stepped-up military assaults. In Baghdad, U.S. troops with tanks and other combat vehicles were sent into Sadr City and other working-class neighborhoods where a Shiite Muslim group has led protests against occupation forces. In both cities the U.S. forces launched air strikes.

In Fallujah, local residents told reporters that several people had been killed when a U.S. warplane dropped bombs on a working-class district after U.S. officers said their troops had come under mortar fire from that area. U.S. troops sealed off the town as a prelude to a military push called “Operation Vigilant Resolve” involving 1,200 U.S. Marines and two battalions of U.S.-trained Iraqi paramilitary forces. U.S. officers vowed to “pacify” the town, where celebratory crowds had greeted the deaths on March 31 of four armed guards under contract to the Pentagon.

In the Iraqi capital, up to 1,000 U.S. troops accompanied by a column of tanks moved into and around Sadr City, a largely Shiite Muslim working-class district that is home to 2 million people. U.S. soldiers opened fire on people attending a funeral for compatriots killed the previous day by occupation forces. Angry funeral-goers threw stones at the troops.

After a U.S. troop convoy entering the nearby Shuala district came under attack, helicopter gunships strafed the area—the first reported air attack on an area in Baghdad since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government by U.S. and British-led troops last year.

Over the previous two days, Sadr City had been a center of several protests and armed actions directed against the occupation forces in a number of cities and towns, from Basra in the south to Fallujah. Eight U.S. soldiers and 22 Iraqis were killed in clashes in the Baghdad suburb between the U.S. troops and members and supporters of a militia associated with Moktada al-Sadr, a Shiite Muslim cleric who opposes the occupation. Twenty-four U.S. troops and 85 Iraqis were wounded.

The fighting erupted after the U.S. proconsul of Iraq, Paul Bremer, “declared Sadr an outlaw and said the occupying force ‘will not tolerate’ attempts to supplant its authority,” Reuters reported.

By the morning of April 5, U.S. forces had built earthen barricades across all the entrances to Fallujah in preparation for a crackdown.

U.S. officers said they were targeting those responsible for the deaths of the four guards, a privately hired component of the occupation forces. The four were ambushed and killed as they drove through the city. An angry crowd then gathered, some of whom set fire to the bodies, hanging two of them from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The incident was played up by the U.S. big-business media in a propaganda campaign to whip up patriotic sentiment in U.S. bourgeois public opinion.

Referred to by U.S. officials as “contract workers,” the four guards were highly paid employees of Blackwater U.S.A., a business founded in 1998 by former Navy SEALs that provides hired guns for big-business and political leaders. They are mostly former policemen and Special Forces.

Such mercenary outfits have been integrated into the U.S.-led occupation forces. The New York Times reported that up to two dozen such companies are fielding up to 15,000 hired soldiers in Iraq.

On April 4, during a street protest by 5,000 people in the Shiite city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, supporters of Sadr reportedly opened fire on a Spanish-run garrison. Spanish and Salvadoran troops fired back, sparking a several-hour-long battle. Twenty-two Iraqis were killed and 200 wounded. Among the occupation forces, a Salvadoran soldier was killed and several other troops were wounded.  
 
 
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