Beyond Fallujah: A Year with the Iraqi Resistance (Patrick Graham, Harpers)

[swag]

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/06/0080071

excerpt:

After the looting of Baghdad, Mohammed had concluded that the Americans were not interested in helping Iraqis. He believed that the reconstruction was being carried out with money from the frozen accounts and oil revenues of Iraqis. In May he and a dozen others had gotten together and sworn allegiance to God and Iraq. They told me that six people in the immediate area had been killed fighting the Americans, all of them in a shaheed—martyr—attack on a nearby base.

“The freedom of this country is now a civilian responsibility,” Mohammed said. “In this region, each one protects his own house.”

Abu Ali is older, in his mid-forties, and wore a dishadasha. He was friendly but wary, sizing me up. At first, I didn't realize that he and Mohammed were in the resistance. I had expected to be taken to some undisclosed location where paranoid men, their faces hidden behind scarves, would deliver a ten-minute rant against Zionism and the infidels before driving off in Toyota pickups. I didn't anticipate the endless glasses of tea, or Mohammed, with a child sleeping on his lap, telling me that he didn't think Osama bin Laden was a good Muslim.

Later, I asked the Sheikh how I was supposed to believe that Mohammed was in the resistance. Of course, it would have been stupid for Mohammed to say he was in the resistance if he wasn't. A raid meant the possibility of someone in one's family being killed, followed by months baking in the sun in a makeshift prison, perhaps one of Saddam's former tennis courts. But U.S. military intelligence had experienced enormous difficulty recruiting informers after the war, despite having offered $2,500, almost a year's salary in a country with no employment. It did seem strange that a freelance journalist would happen across the resistance in someone's garden.

It was a matter of trust, the Sheikh explained. They were family and neighbors, and in this small-village world people knew what was happening even if they didn't talk about it. The Sheikh was vouching for me, and he was also vouching for Mohammed.

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