Day By Day

Saturday, March 19, 2005

Rough Justice in Ramadi

John Ward Anderson reports in the WaPo on vigilante justice meted out inside the Sunni triangle.

In the violent city of Ramadi, a center of Sunni insurgent activity 60 miles west of Baghdad, the bodies of seven men were found lined up in an unfinished house on the western outskirts of town, according to eyewitnesses.

Unlike the corpses elsewhere, which were mostly Iraqi police and soldiers, the bodies in Ramadi apparently were foreigners, fighters working for Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings, kidnappings and assassinations.

Each of the seven had been shot in the head or torso. The bodies were secretly buried in a local cemetery, the witnesses said.

Read the whole thing here.

The jihadis were killed by a local clan in retaliation for the torture and killing of one of their leaders. The details are brutal. I won't revisit them here.

There are several important points to make here:

1) This is a tribal society with deeply rooted standards of honor. People look not to the Iraqi authorities for justice, but to their own clans. The whole cycle of murder, retaliation, and revenge was conducted in secret, out of the view of Iraqi authorities. It will be extremely hard for any central government to assert itself in such a culture. It will be the work of generations before anything that remotely resembles a western-style "rule of law" will emerge here.

2) The original murder of a clan leader by Jihadis was retaliation for his "collaboration" with the Iraqi government. Basically, he had ratted them out. In the past the local population might have been cowed. Now they aren't. They took revenge. This is becoming more common throughout Iraq. The Iraqis aren't becoming Europeans, but they are asserting themselves more and more against the Jihadis. The romantic guerrilla dream is of a force striking out from within a sympathetic populace that hides and protects them. There is no sympathy here for the jihadist "bastards" and no protection either.

3) But there is no strong attachment to the Iraqi state or confidence in the supposedly inspiring vision of a liberal democracy. People don't care that Jihadis are operating in their midst so long as they attack foreigners only. They don't believe that their world will be transformed for the better. They want only to be left alone or, possibly, to profit from the situation. The response of the vigilantes to threats of revenge from the jihadis says it all. "We got our revenge, [a clan spokesman said] and we have our precautions. Let them [the jihadis] do as they like."

RELATED:

Captain Ed over at Captain's Quarters notes that the US Military in Iraq reports that insurgent attacks have tailed off in recent months. He attributes this to the determination of the US command and the increasing effectivenss of Iraqi troops. He writes:

The increasing control by Iraqis of Iraq has changed the tenor of both the terrorist campaign and the regard with which Iraqis hold for it. In the beginning, the romanticism of insurgents allowing Iraqis -- any Iraqis -- to take control of Iraq attracted some support. However, as the US has stood fast to its commitments for sovereignty and elections and the rebuilding of domestic security forces, the Iraqis have seen the distinction between home-grown tyrannists and liberation. The terrorists then had to switch tactics to kill Iraqis, which confirmed their status in the eyes of Iraqis.

He then asserts:

Democratization, as we have seen, provides the only long-term solution to terrorism. When given a choice, people want freedom, not tyrannies.
Read the whole thing here.

Perhaps he's right in the [very] long run. But for now and the forseeable future the collapse of romantic radicalism in the Sunni areas of Iraq has not been matched by widespread adherence to anything remotely resembling western style liberalism. "Freedom" today means a very different thing to the tribalists of Ramadi than it does to Americans.

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