South of Baghdad, in the area known as the Triangle of Death, the U.S. military announced the end of Operation Plymouth Rock but has continued raids to hunt down and kill or capture Baathists.

The 850-strong British Black Watch regiment, which took part in this operation, returned to its main base in Basra in southern Iraq on December 4 in preparation for going home. According to the BBC, another battalion is on stand-by to replace these troops at the request of the U.S. military.

Two days earlier, Italy’s new foreign minister Gianfranco Fini said that Italian troops would remain in Iraq until they are no longer needed. On December 6, Japan’s defense minister Yoshinori Ohno returned from Iraq where he visited Japanese soldiers. Reports in the media indicated that Ohno’s visit was a prelude to Tokyo extending its troop deployment in Iraq beyond December 14, when they were scheduled to depart.

The U.S. Department of Defense said the increased number of troops in Iraq is needed to maximize stability in the country prior to elections currently scheduled for January 30. This will be the largest U.S. troop level in Iraq since an estimated 170,000 invaded the country in March 2003. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the additional troops are necessary to “capitalize” on the takeover of Fallujah. His deputy director of operations added that the additional troops would “keep insurgents on the run… keep the pressure on.”  
 
Wealthy Sunnis finance ‘insurgency’
The U.S. military said it uncovered a treasure trove of information in Fallujah about Baathists in their strongholds south of Baghdad, according to the French Press Agency. The information in documents and on computer files includes names of Baathist leaders and sources of financing, cellphone numbers, and names of family members of “foreign fighters” who were to be compensated in case of their deaths in battle.

Using that information, U.S. forces said they had captured 204 Baathists and uncovered 11 arms caches during Operation Plymouth Rock. According to the New York Times, one focus of U.S. operations in the area is the wealthy, landowning Janabi and Kargouli families that profited from close ties to the Hussein regime. Munitions factories, weapons research facilities, and battlefield testing grounds were reportedly located on their lands. The regions they controlled were recruiting grounds for Hussein’s elite Republican Guard.

A leading member of one of these families, Abdullah al-Janabi, headed Fallujah’s main mosque and was effectively the leader of the Baathist forces in the city, according to the U.S. military. He escaped capture during the U.S. assault, along with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of Tahwid and Jihad. The latter is a group that has claimed responsibility for numerous bombings of Iraqi civilian and military targets and kidnappings and beheadings of hostages.

U.S. intelligence officers say that Mehdi al-Janabi, Abdullah’s brother, leads Baathist forces in Yusufiya, one of the towns in the “Triangle of Death.” Another of the Janabi brothers has been reportedly identified as a Baathist “financier” and is currently imprisoned in the Abu Ghraib jail.

Attacks on U.S. troops and forces of the Iraqi interim government continue to be centered in the Baathist strongholds in the majority Sunni regions to the south and north of Baghdad, and the Sunni Arab sections of the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. According to media accounts, fighting is concentrated in four to six provinces, while most of Iraq’s 18 provinces remain relatively calm.

An article in the December 8 Washington Post said that Baathist leaders who have found sanctuary in Syria are channeling funds and other support to their people inside Iraq for armed attacks. “Based on information gathered during the recent fighting in Fallujah, Baghdad, and elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle,” the article said, “a handful of senior Iraqi Baathists operating in Syria are collecting money from private sources in Saudi Arabia and Europe and turning it over to the insurgency…. A U.S. military summary of operations in Fallujah noted recently that troops discovered a global positioning signal receiver in a bomb factory in the western part of the city that ‘contained waypoints originating in western Syria.’”

The U.S. government recently gave a list of those officials to Damascus, demanding they be arrested or expelled, the Post said. The Syrian government has denied that it is harboring any of these individuals.  
 
Tight grip on Fallujah
The U.S. military maintains a tight grip on Fallujah, where it faced some of the deadliest fighting in years, according to a December 2 report by the Army Times. The article said that 71 U.S. troops were killed there in November, significantly more than the previously reported figure of 51 deaths. The number of U.S. soldiers wounded was 623, also higher than the initial report of 425. According to the U.S. military, an estimated 1,500 Iraqis were killed and 1,200 captured in that battle.

Given the extent of the city’s devastation—with hundreds of buildings destroyed, most power lines downed, many roads punctured by bomb crates, and the water and sewage system damaged—U.S. forces occupying the city are not in a rush to allow civilians to return to Fallujah. The U.S. military is also taking time to sift through everything it has found in the organizing centers of Baathist resistance.

The U.S. military recently ordered the Iraqi Red Crescent (IRC) to leave the city, according to a December 6 report by ABC TV. The relief agency said it distributed food, water, and blankets to around 1,500 people. The U.S. military would interrogate military-age males who came to the IRC for aid and tested them for signs of gunpowder, according to the French Press Agency. The International Organization for Migration estimates that 210,600 of the city’s 250,000 residents fled before the U.S.-led assault. Many are currently staying in make-shift shelters in neighboring towns and villages as night-time temperatures head towards freezing.

About 1,500 people demonstrated in the nearby village of Habaniya demanding they be allowed to return to their homes in Fallujah, reported Al-Jazeera TV on December 5. During the protest, the broadcast said, fliers were distributed in the name of Jaish Muhammad (Muhammad’s Army). The group’s leader, Moayed Ahmed Yassin, was captured in the assault on the city. Iraq’s interior minister has said that Yassin was a member of Hussein’s Republican Guard.

The December 5 Boston Globe said that the U.S. military is discussing a range of plans for when and how residents could return to Fallujah. The plans include corralling people into a “processing center” outside the city to compile a database of identities, including DNA and retina scans. Residents would be required to wear badges with their addresses at all times. Busses would ferry people around in the city. Cars, often used in bombing attacks, would be banned. All men would be required to work in military-style battalions in construction, waterworks, or clearing rubble.

Lt. Col. Dave Bellon, intelligence officer for the Marine unit expected to be based in downtown Fallujah, said previous attempts to win the trust of Iraqis telegraphed weakness. Questions like “What are your needs? What are your emotional needs?” are wrong, Bellon said. “All this Oprah [stuff]. They want to figure out who the dominant tribe is and say, ‘I’m with you.’ We need to be the benevolent, dominant tribe.”  
 
Tokyo, Rome firm in U.S.-led coalition
In the middle of the offensive against Baathist forces, imperialist powers and most other governments in the U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” have indicated their commitment to keep their troops in Iraq for an indefinite period.

“We need to guarantee stability,” said Italian foreign minister Gianfranco Fini in a December 3 interview, explaining that Rome’s troops will stay in Iraq as long as needed. His remarks echoed statements that Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, made in November. Rome has 3,500 troops, based in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. This is the third-largest contingent in Iraq behind London’s 9,000 soldiers.

The government of south Korea is increasing its troop strength in Iraq to 3,600, according to the Washington Times, which would displace the Italian contingent as the third largest. At the end of November, Seoul decided to extend its troop deployment in northern Iraq for another year.

Japanese defense minister Yoshinori Ohno gave a positive assessment of the performance of Tokyo’s 550 troops, stationed in the southern city of Samawah. According to the Financial Times, Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi is expected to bypass the Diet, Japan’s parliament, and seek cabinet approval to extend the deployment of Japanese troops. Replacement troops bound for Iraq are already on their way for a three-month tour of duty, reported the New York Times. Japanese troops had not been sent abroad since the end of World War II. The Japanese rulers are using the deployment in Iraq to strengthen their ability to use their military more effectively around the world.

Aside from U.S. troops, about 26,000 soldiers are part of the U.S.-led forces in Iraq now.

According to a December 3 Associated Press report, 74 British troops have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. They include five members of the Black Watch regiment who died during the unit’s recent deployment in Baghdad. Italian troops have suffered 19 deaths. No casualties among Japanese soldiers have been reported so far.  
 
January 30 election
Meanwhile, wealthy leaders of Shiite-led political parties and groups throughout the country are gearing up for national elections set for January 30, when a 275-member National Assembly is to be chosen. Shiites constitute roughly 60 percent of Iraq’s population and were repressed by the Sunni-led Hussein government. Sunnis are about one third of the population.

Shiite-led parties have rejected postponing the elections. They have organized an unprecedented mobilization in mosques, community centers, and schools in support of the elections, the New York Times reported, making a delay difficult if not impossible. Banners urging people to vote hang from the streets in majority Shiite cities, organizers speak in schools and prayers leaders in Shiite mosques declaring that support for the elections is a “religious and national duty.”

U.S. president George Bush and U.S. ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte have said the elections should go ahead as scheduled.

A committee appointed by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shiite cleric in Iraq, has selected a bloc of 240 candidates for the elections. Iraqis will vote for blocs or coalitions of candidates, not individuals. Included in the Sistani-backed bloc is Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia fought U.S. troops in April and again in August from his stronghold in Najaf and Sadr City, a Baghdad district.

A Shiite cleric recently drove through the streets of al-Amel, a southern Baghdad district, carrying a loudspeaker and mocking those who had scrawled anti-election slogans on walls in the neighborhood, reported the December 6 Financial Times. “Let those who wrote this show their faces, if they are men,” he reportedly said. Two dozen armed supporters followed the cleric’s motorcade on foot, painting over graffiti that threatened to “cut off the heads of voters.” The Financial Times reported that two weeks earlier a delegation of Shiites from Basra calling themselves the “Brigades of Anger” asked al-Sistani for permission to take reprisals in Latifiyah against Sunnis suspected of killing Shiites.

Leaders of the Sunni-led Iraqi Islamic Party now threaten that the armed conflict could escalate if the elections are not postponed until order can be restored in the Sunni areas. Speaking in a building that once housed Baathist offices, Yousef Ghabdan, a leader of the party, said, “Many experts have warned of a civil war after the elections, and certainly this could happen.” The Iraqi Islamic Party is the largest Sunni-led party. It quit the interim government in November to protest the assault on Fallujah.

At the same time, leaders of the two largest Kurdish parties have threatened to boycott the national elections unless Kurdish control is restored in Kirkuk, an oil-rich city in northern Iraq, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Decades ago, Kurds were brutally expelled from the city and its surrounding province under an “Arabization” campaign by the Hussein regime. The Kurds have asked that the election for the provincial council be postponed until Kurds are again a decisive majority.

In the past few months thousands of Kurds have “virtually” returned to Kirkuk by changing their voter registration from the place where they actually live to the northern city. In neighborhoods throughout Kirkuk and its vicinity new homes are being built—all of them belonging to Kurds. Outside the city, about 7,000 Kurds live in tents waiting to see if they will be given land and housing as reparations for their earlier expulsion.

Kurds say Kirkuk is part of Iraqi Kurdistan, an area in the country’s northeastern part. Kurdistan—spanning the borders of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Armenia, and Syria—is inhabited by an estimated 25 million Kurds. The wealthy Arab rulers of Iraq—Shiite and Sunni—fear the national aspirations of the Kurdish people, as do the rulers in Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Given the close collaboration of Kurdish forces with Washington over the last decade, however, a federated Iraq with a large measure of autonomy for the Kurdish areas is not an unrealistic prospect.  
 
 
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