- TIKRIT -- The attacks against
American soldiers here often begin like this: A taxi stops briefly on a
street corner. The driver passes whispered messages with code names for
locations and times, then whizzes off down the road.
-
- "We have special ways to send orders, with passwords
that some taxi drivers know," says Omar Saleh, a 22-year-old fighter
in a clandestine group called Muhammad's Army.
-
- The resistance group formed last May in this "Sunni
Triangle" stronghold of Saddam Hussein, about 160 kilometres north
of Baghdad.
-
- "The driver meets me in the street, and tells me
where to go and at what time," says Saleh - a guerrilla name he has
chosen in order to conceal his identity from strangers.
-
- After six months of the U.S.-led occupation, insurgents
waging their low-intensity war received a fresh supply of weapons in early
October, according to Saleh, who says he doesn't know from where the shipment
had come.
-
- The arsenal included valuable new items that offered
many new potential targets and a greater fighting range.
-
- New 160-millimetre mortars allow Tikrit's fighters to
strike military targets from a longer distance than in previous months,
he says. And anti-tank land mines offer more possibilities for attacks.
-
- The U.S. Army lost its first top-line battle tank in
post-invasion Iraq on Oct. 28, when a 69-tonne Abrams M1A2 tracked vehicle,
armed with a 120-millimetre cannon and equipped for digitized communications,
hit an anti-tank mine on a road near Balad, about 65 kilometres south of
Tikrit.
-
- Two 4th Infantry Division soldiers were reported killed
and one wounded in the explosion.
-
- Before the big tank was taken out, it had seemed that
the Iraqi fighters' arsenal would be unable to pierce American armour.
-
- An army Black Hawk helicopter was shot down by insurgents
on Friday, killing all six U.S. soldiers aboard and capping the bloodiest
seven days in Iraq for Americans since the fall of Baghdad.
-
- The week's carnage began last Sunday, when 15 American
soldiers died after the Chinook helicopter in which they were travelling
was hit, apparently by a heat-seeking surface-to-air missile.
-
- Saddam was thought to have hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of these SA7 missiles when his army collapsed on April 9.
-
- Saleh says his group did not fire the missiles, but he
believes they remain in plentiful supply.
-
- "We have everything," he says. "Each group
has its own store of weapons and they are responsible for keeping their
own weapons cache.
-
- "We have huge numbers of weapons."
-
- Given the secret nature of Iraq's resistance groups,
Saleh's account of Tikrit's insurgents cannot be confirmed independently.
-
- He spoke to a reporter only after being introduced by
a mutual acquaintance he has known for many years.
-
- Arranging to meet on a sidewalk of this city of 75,000
people, Saleh spoke in the reporter's moving car ó the only place
in Tikrit he believed would be safe enough to discuss the ongoing war against
U.S. troops.
-
- He insisted that the reporter wear an Arabic headscarf
and abaya floor-length coat, to disguise the fact he was meeting with a
Western woman.
-
- Tikrit, headquarters for the 4th Infantry Division, has
seen almost daily attacks on American soldiers for months.
-
- Saleh, a stocky man in a well-ironed checked shirt and
black trousers, says his contact ordered two such attacks during the last
week in October.
-
- The first came on Oct. 26, when he and three others were
ordered to meet after midnight to attack a military base outside town with
hand grenades and mortars.
-
- "We could hear the soldiers scream," he recalls.
-
- The second attack came three days later, when he and
nine others converged on another base and lobbed mortars over the wall.
-
- From a distance, Saleh was not certain what they had
hit.
-
- He and his friends had been members of one of Saddam's
crack Fedayeen units from the time they were teenagers and were assigned
combat duties in the war. They were left adrift in April, when American
troops stormed north from Baghdad and seized Tikrit - the last holdout
- ending Saddam's rule in his hometown.
-
- With no job and an intense distaste for the Americans
occupying Tikrit, Saleh signed up for battle weeks later.
-
- Also knitted into the underground web of fighters, Saleh
says, are about 75 foreigners, mostly Syrians, who have been distributed
among several groups.
-
- "They have been here for months."
-
- U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last Sunday
that U.S. forces had captured "between 200 and 300" foreign insurgents
"and we've killed a number of others."
-
- Pentagon officials say they believe the mounting daily
attacks against American soldiers are organized regionally, with little
sophisticated command and control structures.
-
- More troubling for the U.S. military, however, is that
the insurgents appear to be better organized and armed than in previous
months.
-
- "It's getting worse in the sense that, as today,
the enemies of freedom are using more sophisticated techniques," U.S.
administrator L. Paul Bremer told CNN's Late Edition on Sunday.
-
- "This was a new one," he said, referring to
the twin-propeller Chinook helicopter that was shot down near Falluja.
-
- "There is a much more sophisticated use of improvised
explosive devices - standoff weapons."
-
- Saleh agrees that the insurgents' loose-knit command
structure is improving its skills and accuracy.
-
- He says about 600 volunteers are based around Tikrit,
organized in "divisions" of about 100 men, with a commander controlling
each division.
-
- A sheikh, who Saleh would not name, also issues orders:
"He is a religious man who believes in jihad."
-
- The fighters themselves are not religious, however. Most
members of his division are former Fedayeen fighters like him.
-
- "We all know each other from before," Saleh
says. "This is not religious. It is also not in order to support Saddam."
-
- Rather, he explains, the reason for the attacks in Tikrit
is the continued control of the city by American troops.
-
- "The purpose of fighting them is to get them to
leave the cities," he says. "They arrived as liberators and turned
into occupiers."
-
- - Vivienne Walt is a freelance journalist on assignment
in Iraq
-
- Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.
All rights reserved.
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