Iraq's volunteer army

http://www.thememoryhole.org/media/al-jazeera/article-volunteer-army.htm

BRIEF: Volunteer brigades have been a feature of conflicts in modern history. In the 1930s about 2,400 men and women travelled to Spain to fight against the fascist government of General Franco.

Iraq's volunteer army

The invasion of Iraq has prompted hundreds of Muslims to take up arms against US-led forces. While there have been some low-level desertions in the Iraqi army, there has also been a personnel flow in the opposite direction.

In the build-up to the war, hundreds, maybe even thousands of volunteers have made their way to Iraq where Al Jazeera television has shown them receiving training in urban warfare and street fighting. Their aim is simple – to defend Iraq against the US invasion that creeps ever closer to Baghdad.

The recruits hail from all over the Muslim world. “Abu Abdul Rahman” says he left his wife and children in Egypt to come to resist a clear case of tyranny:  “I came to Iraq secretly to participate in a mission blessed by God. It is a mission of martyrdom.”

A Libyan member of the international brigade identifying himself as As-Sanousi said that “the American administration carries all the elements of evil” and that he had come to Iraq to fight for God. Abu Assul Al-Din, a Syrian, expressed his firm conviction that ‘the weapon of martyrdom cannot be defeated’.

Before the US-led invasion the  ‘Mujahideen Corps’ were based at a special camp, 20 kilometres to the north east of the capital, dedicated to training the volunteers.

“We came to fight the invaders and we will gain martyrdom if Allah wills”, said a Tunisian volunteer, his face covered by a mask to conceal his identity. Like the Arab mujahideen who fought to eject the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in the 1980s many volunteers fear being imprisoned by their own governments if they ever return home.

The volunteer brigade is inspired by other recent wars. Following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, mujahideen from the Hizbullah led a campaign of self-sacrifice attacks to drive US forces out of Beirut. And in Somalia, peoples’ militias were successful in driving out vastly better-equipped US marines.

Many Muslim volunteers smuggled themselves into Bosnia eight years ago - a US intelligence source estimated around 7,000. They made up a significant proportion of Bosnian Muslim Army forces, and managed to establish themselves in several Croat cities and villages, laying siege to many more for extended periods. Towards the end of the war in Bosnia, their assistance contributed to the army making such spectacular gains that it was the Croatians that needed to call for the truce, backed by Europe, the US, Russia and the UN.

Though the Iraqi government is aware that its secular Ba’athist credentials are anathema to most of their new recruits it has thrown opens its doors to them and also invoked religious sentiment itself. Iraqi Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan said at a press conference in Amman last September that "we call for confronting the aggression and aggressors not only by the Iraqi capability, but we call on all the Arab masses ... to confront the material and human interests of the aggressors.   Iraq has a religious right to defend itself and...all Arab citizens wherever they might be have the right to fight by all available means the aggression through its representatives on their land.”

In recent months, Saddam Hussein has also been keen to repair the Shiite holy sites in Karbala – which his own forces had inflicted terrible damage on in the 1991 Gulf War. Today, alcohol is banned in public places and there has been much discussion recently of applying Islamic law. Toby Dodge, an expert on Iraq at Warwick University says, “it is obvious that there is a great tendency to go back to Islam among the Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites, it is the return to religion after a long period of suffering.”

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