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 Anti-Hussein Officials Rebuke U.S. Strategy |
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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Anti-Hussein Officials Rebuke U.S. Strategy
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 27, 2003; Page A29
SALAHUDDIN, Iraq, March 26 -- Iraq's U.S.-endorsed opposition has distanced itself from the Bush administration's war strategy, suggesting the plan to conquer the country without involving the Iraqi public has opened the way for military problems in the south.
Opposition organizations all desired direct Iraqi involvement in the war. Just how much popular resistance they could have mustered remains an open question. But from their offices here in the Kurdish-controlled area of northern Iraq, the groups have expressed little surprise that Iraqi civilians appear reluctant to greet allied forces, much less take up arms to expel government militias and soldiers from their midst.
The opposition groups -- loosely allied Kurdish, Shiite Muslim and secular organizations -- have long insisted that most Iraqis look forward to the ouster of President Saddam Hussein and his security-heavy Baath Party government. But they have expressed irritation that, in their view, the Bush administration has made little effort to include Iraqis in military or political strategy.
"There is a difference between a war of liberation and a war of conquest. Liberation means Iraqis are at the forefront. Conquest means the invaders are in charge," said Hoshyar Zubari, an official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of five groups recognized by the Bush Administration as allied opposition forces and one of two Kurdish organizations that have administered a 17,000-square-mile region of northern Iraq that has been protected by U.S. and British air patrols since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Unsubstantiated reports from the southern city of Basra, Iraq's second largest-city, claim the beginnings of a revolt. Its strength, if any, is impossible to gauge.
Opposition leaders regard Basra, largely populated by Shiite Muslims, as one of several southern cities ripe for rebellion. Hussein's army cracked down harshly on Shiites after a failed 1991 uprising following Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War. Opposition officials say numerous underground anti-government groups operate in the south.
They complain the Bush administration has been cautious about fomenting an uprising. As recently as Tuesday, Pentagon officials urged Iraqis to remain in their homes.
"There's a total lack of Iraqi involvement," said Zaab Sethna, an aide to Ahmed Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group based in London. "We have been surprised over the months the lack of cooperation with the opposition."
Shiite groups inside and outside the U.S.-endorsed opposition have said they would not ask their followers inside Iraq to rise up. The Shiites, Iraq's majority Muslim strain, are still aggrieved over then-President George H. W. Bush's encouragement of an uprising in 1991 and his subsequent refusal to support it.
The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite group based in Iran, said the Bush administration has shared none of its plans with the opposition. Its leader, Mohammed Bakir Hakim, told Iraqi Shiites on Tuesday to remain neutral in the war.
"We are not in favor of this war because it places the future of Iraq in foreign hands," he told reporters in Tehran.
"There is a historical issue with 1991," said Galib Asadi, a Supreme Council representative in northern Iraq. "We believe all Iraqis will go out into the streets when [Iraqi] authorities are prevented from using powerful weapons."
Here in the north, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and its sometimes rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, have been eager to send their own forces to the city of Kirkuk, just south of the Kurdish-controlled zone, which has a large Kurdish population. However, Kurdish officials complained that the Americans have decided to limit the Kurdish role south of the zone to occupying the countryside during a U.S. move on Kirkuk.
Until 1,000 troops from the Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade parachuted into the region tonight, the northern front had been relatively quiet as war raged in the south. This was largely due to Turkey's refusal to allow U.S. troops to stage a ground invasion of Iraq from its territory to the north.
Several dozen U.S. Special Operations personnel are in the north, but military action had been limited to occasional bombings of Kirkuk and the nearby city of Mosul. In recent days, U.S. warplanes have struck Iraqi bases near a dam north of Mosul, an officers club, a military intelligence office in Mosul, military barracks and a headquarters office of Saddam's Fedayeen, one of the militia forces that have been harassing U.S. forces in the south. Near Kirkuk, the U.S. attack planes have hit artillery and mortar positions, Kurdish officials said.
The absence of a substantial U.S. invasion force in the north has given Kurds hope they might be called upon to seize Kirkuk, but so far no such effort has materialized. "The strategy needs to be revised," said Zubari. Kurdish officials predicted that residents in Kirkuk would rebel if fellow Kurds invaded.
Opposition officials cite several other factors inhibiting a mass uprising. In Kirkuk, they said the Iraqi government has deployed an array of militia forces including Saddam's Fedayeen, the Mujaheddin al-Khalq, a fierce Iranian exile group, and armed members of the ruling Baath Party to keep civilians at bay. According to travelers who arrived in the autonomous zone before the war, Kirkuk residents were told to stay in their homes at all times. On the eve of the conflict, Baath Party officials rounded up young men in Kurdish neighborhoods, prompting hundreds of others to flee, they said.
The Iraqi opposition itself remains disjointed. A week into the war, and a month after a conference designed to demonstrate unity, officials have yet to create a central, functioning leadership. During the conference, they announced a six-member leadership committee. Only four actually joined it: Chalabi, Massoud Barzani, of the Kurdistan Democratic Party; Jalal Talabani, of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan; and Hakim, of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who lives in Tehran.
The others, Ayad Alawi, who heads the Iraqi National Accord, a grouping of former military officials, "is acting independently," Zubari said. Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi foreign minister, refused to join.
Even in northern Iraq, the groups are dispersed. Chalabi works in Dukan, a lakeside city northwest of here. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the local Supreme Council office are based in Sulaymaniyah in the west, while the Kurdistan Democratic Party headquarters are located here in Salahuddin. A phone call between Salahuddin to Sulaymaniyah requires use of a long distance number that relays the call through London.
?2003 The Washington Post Company
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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