THE US military has started using attack helicopters as well as jet fighters and bombers in attacks against the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, cities that were bastions of support for Saddam Hussein and centres of the resistance to the US and UK armies of occupation after 2003 until both sets of occupiers were driven out of the country.
The US military admitted that the fighting in Fallujah post-2003 was the most desperate that the US had experienced since the Vietnam war.
In Vietnam, the US used Agent Orange, a chemical weapon of mass destruction that is still producing children without arms, legs and heads.
In Fallujah, the US used poison gas, and phosphorus weapons and also depleted-uranium-tipped ammunition to kill large numbers of men, women and children. As in Vietnam, among the newly born children there are still the grossly deformed.
Now the US imperialists are back, and their bombings of these cities will undoubtedly aid the ISIS movement which has not got the support of the Sunni masses in western and northern Iraq.
In fact, there was no Al-Qaeda or anything like ISIS in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and when they tried to impose themselves after the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein, they were driven out of the region by the ‘Awakening Movement’ of the Sunni tribes. In fact, the US had to come to the Sunni tribes, cap in hand, and pay them to do the job.
So the appearance of US helicopter gunships and fighter planes attacking Fallujah and Ramadi can only strengthen the Islamists.
Last Sunday, the helicopters were part of a mixed force of fighter and bomber jets and drones that carried out a total of six raids, two in Fallujah and one west of Ramadi, the US Centcom command said.
California Representative and Democrat Barbara Lee was not alone in stating that ‘the helicopter operations are part of her larger concern about US military involvement in the Middle East – given that the American people are war-weary and this action has not been debated or authorised by Congress.’
Her spokesman James Lewis said that from the start Lee ‘has been gravely concerned with mission creep and risks to American servicemen and women’, that will end up in the return of US ground forces.
However, there is no doubt that revolutionary change is on the way in Iraq.
When the Islamic State group attacked the Shi’ite village of Al-Saud in central Iraq last week, the villagers received immediate help from the neighbouring Sunni town of Dhuluiyah.
‘It is the first time Sunnis and Shi’ites fight together like this against IS,’ said Mullah Maher al-Juburi, the imam of Dhuluiyah, a town nestled in a U-bend on the Tigris river.
‘They help us, we help them.’
Dhuluiyah has a special place in Iraq’s history of struggle.
It was the target of the first major US counter-insurgency raid after the invasion, in June 2003.
It then became a centre for the Awakening Movement that drove the Al-Qaeda groups that have flocked into Iraq, after the execution of Saddam, out of the surrounding region.
‘We know the people we are fighting. We recognise their faces,’ said Ibrahim al-Juburi, a 56-year-old former general in the army of executed president Saddam Hussein.
‘We helped put them in jail in Abu Ghraib, Tikrit, Badush (near Mosul) and Taji’ during the Awakening, he said.
Some escaped in prison breaks, and advancing IS fighters freed the rest in June.
Al-Juburi said: ‘We will never let them in again … We know it is a foreign project.’
‘We’re all in this together now,’ said Ghassan, a tall Shi’ite policeman. ‘I consider myself to be from Dhuluiyah now.’
Several residents from Al-Saud and other Shiite villages are now in Jubur, fighting alongside the Sunni tribesmen. And some Sunni tribes north of Dhuluiyah assisted the army as it launched an offensive last week.
There is no doubt that this is the way forward for Iraq – through the revolutionary unity of the Sunni and Shia masses to destroy ISIS and establish a revolutionary government that will send all imperialist troops packing and use the gigantic oil wealth of the country to rebuild it and restore it, while giving every support to the Palestinian masses in their struggle for freedom and a Palestinian state.
