An Interview with Dr.Muhammad Abu Nasr
May 22, 2005
Recently the US State Department has undergone
a sinister campaign against the scholarly Iraqi Resistance
Reports edited by Dr. Muhammad Abu Nasr, a
member of the Free Arab Voice.
NACAZAI C.C. member Ziad Shaker elJishi
phrased the following questions to Dr. Abu Nasr
on this urgeant matter.
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Free Arab Voice
http://www.freearabvoice.org/
North American Committee Against Zionism
and Imperialism (NACAZAI)
www.nacazai.org
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1.Comrade Abu Nasr you have been recently the
subject of an attack by the US State Department over
the distribution of the Iraqi Resistance Report
(IRR), can you give us a brief history of the Iraqi
Resistance Report, your work with it, and its
purpose?
The Iraqi Resistance Report grew out of the interviews
and stories that were translated for the Free Arab
Voice (FAV) prior to the US invasion of Iraq in the
spring of 2003. After the US actually began
hostilities, I did what I could to provide information
on the course of the US aggression and Iraq's
resistance.
This material came from many sources. Some was
originally in English. Other material was in Arabic
and some in Russian.
In the first days after the American occupation of
Baghdad, reports on the resistance became less
frequent, obviously. The official Iraqi TV and
newspaper sources no longer functioned and the Russian
sources that had posted information on the internet
during the American attack left Baghdad to return to
their country.
But as the Resistance struggle gathered momentum in
2003, FAV began getting requests from readers for more
reports on the Resistance. At that stage, our
information sources were largely Arabic newspapers,
such as al-'Arab al-Yawm in Amman, which does good
reporting from Iraq, and the website for al-Jazeera
satellite TV, which in the beginning of the US
occupation was more forthcoming with information that
it later became.
In the early months, to be honest, I was somewhat
skeptical of the value of the material I could
provide. Many stories that I translated from Arabic
originated with Agence France Presse (AFP) in fact,
and I felt that the main service I was rendering was
to gather pertinent information – which was already
available in the western media – in one concentrated
place where people who wanted to follow the Resistance
story could do so more easily, without having to
search through the back pages of “continuations” of
newspaper articles.
As time passed and the Resistance grew, the US
clampdown on information concerning the Iraqi people’s
struggle also tightened. Al-Jazeera TV came under
more severe controls both inside Iraq and from the US
State Department pressuring the government of Qatar.
But as some sources were forced into a more passive
role, other sources of information emerged on the
Internet from which we increasingly drew in compiling
news of the Resistance struggle.
Mafkarat al-Islam, or Islammemo.cc, was one of several
websites that provided information at that time, much
of it also culled from other international news
agencies. But during the first American offensive on
al-Fallujah in the spring of 2004, correspondents
working directly for Mafkarat al-Islam were in the
thick of the fighting and provided vivid exclusive
eyewitness accounts of the combat unlike anything
appearing in the controlled press of the western
countries. I don’t think any other media sources had
correspondents on the front lines, the way Mafkarat
al-Islam did in al-Fallujah. True, after a time
al-Jazeera provided heart-rending coverage of the
suffering of the people of the city, subjected as they
were to all the high-tech savagery at the disposal of
the “greatest military on earth.” But al-Jazeera,
under intense American pressure, was shy about
reporting the Resistance struggle itself.
After the first siege of al-Fallujah, Mafkarat
al-Islam’s network of correspondents submitting
“exclusive” stories to the website appears to have
grown very rapidly and extensively. Since the Iraqi
Resistance Report focuses precisely on the Iraqi
Resistance, the stories submitted by the
correspondents of Mafkarat al-Islam, that covered
Resistance attacks first hand or nearly first hand,
simply could not be overlooked. But while it provides
immediate reports on the Resistance struggle from the
front lines – reports that have proven to be highly
reliable, in general – Mafkarat al-Islam is entirely
in Arabic and therefore requires translation if the
information it contains is to reach audiences outside
the Arab Nation.
The Iraqi Resistance Report draws heavily on the
material culled from Mafkarat al-Islam, but it has no
connection with Mafkarat al-Islam and we’ve never had
any contact with it or its staff. The Iraqi
Resistance Report is simply interested in providing
information on the Iraqi people’s struggle against the
occupation. This is no simple task given the
intensity with which the US and the monopoly media
under its control try to black out that struggle,
hiding not only the losses suffered by Iraqis, but
also the scale and intensity of the Iraqi Resistance,
and even the quantity and quality of losses suffered
by American troops.
The Iraqi Resistance Report is determined to draw
information from wherever it can in order to break
through this wall of lies.
2.In its attack, the US State Department said you
"faithfully translate" the stories posted by
Islammemo/Mafkarat al-Islam and tried to dismiss
them on the grounds that they present exaggerated
American casualty figures that are unrealisitc and
false. Can you comment on that?
Well, as I said above, the Iraqi Resistance Report
draws its information on the Resistance struggle from
wherever that information is forthcoming. Mafkarat
al-Islam has developed into n extremely valuable
source, both for general accuracy and for the
immediacy of its reporting from the battle lines.
As to the question of casualty counts, yes, the
casualty counts one finds in Mafkarat al-Islam are
much higher than those offered by the US government.
This is something that must be looked at carefully.
Even the US military admits that the rate of
Resistance attacks in Iraq is quite high – something
on the order of 80 or 100 per day and even more. The
number varies, of course, with the dialectical ebb and
flow of combat. Yet the western media will generally
cover one or two attacks per day and the Pentagon
expects the world to believe that out of 80 bombings
and assaults only one or two US soldiers are killed,
if even that many. We occasionally see video of the
burning hulk of a Humvees and are told that only one
soldier was injured in the rocket attack that
demolished the vehicle in which he was riding together
with four or five buddies. Ordinary car wrecks would
be more deadly.
When the war started in 2003, the British press
reported that the US had 40,000 troops in American
uniforms in Iraq who were not US citizens. Besides
that, there are reportedly 25,000 mercenaries
operating in the country on behalf of the US but not
technically “soldiers.” That’s a much larger
contingent than that of Great Britain, the second
major contributor to the American “coalition” of
aggressors. Then there are the CIA paramilitary
people whose deaths are not allowed to be reported.
So we’re talking easily 75,000 troops who look like
“Americans” but whose deaths don't count as American
military casualties. Perhaps their deaths account for
some of the discrepancy between Pentagon figures and
those of Mafkarat al-Islam.
Another interesting thing that I’ve observed is that
when Mafkarat al-Islam reports Resistance attacks on
Iraqi puppet targets – puppet police stations, puppet
military recruiting station, and the like – relatively
high death tolls of 18, 20, 25, or more people are
sometimes reported. But in those cases such figures
are reported not only by Mafkarat al-Islam, but by the
major western news media as well.
But when attacks target Americans, somehow all the
mainstream media fall silent and the figures appearing
in Mafkarat al-Islam reports of, say, three or four
Americans killed, appear in stark contrast to general
silence. That way those three or four dead then
appear as “wild exaggerations.” That all appears very
strange.
But over all, the problem is this. We know that there
are dozens of Resistance attacks every day. The
mainstream media report a very tiny fraction of those
attacks. Or, looked at the other way round, the
mainstream media cover up the vast majority of those
attacks. Mafkarat al-Islam provides accounts from its
substantial network of more than fifty reporters on
attacks throughout the country. Can we personally
vouch for the accuracy of every detail? Do we know
for sure that the “four dead Americans” in this attack
weren’t “merely” critically wounded? Of course only
someone who was on the scene of that, and every other
engagement could do that.
Look, this is a war. The attacks and ambushes are not
taking place in a laboratory under clinical
conditions. People standing around an attack zone are
regularly cut down by indiscriminate gunfire by
American troops who are “scared shitless,” to use an
American _expression, after a bomb just went off next
to them. Immediately after attacks the Americans seal
off the whole area where the attack took place
specifically to prevent journalists and photographers
from approaching.
Can we expect clinical accuracy from witnesses under
such extreme stress? Of course not. But as with
anything else we must try to get at the truth on the
basis of what information is available.
The western monopoly media black out more than 95
percent of the attacks that they admit are taking
place, and for those they do cover, they rely largely
on Pentagon press releases (whose accuracy is
obviously in doubt) or reporters “embedded” with US
military units, many of whom can’t even communicate
with the local witnesses.
Mafkarat al-Islam provides detailed information of
many of those attacks blacked out by the controlled
western media. What we in the Iraqi Resistance Report
strive to do is bring to English readers as much as
possible of that material that is available to readers
of Arabic, but denied to readers of western languages.
3.What do you think stands behind this attack on
yourself and the IRR by the state department?
The Bush Administration has learned the lesson of Viet
Nam when news of the war came back to the US
relatively freely and as a result millions of
Americans came to oppose their government’s dirty
invasion of that country, or at least the cost of that
war in American lives.
Desperate to keep the US and the world from grasping
the nature and extent of its aggression in Iraq, the
Bush Administration has embedded reporters, making
them dependent on Pentagon press kits. It forbids
photographs of the return of the coffins of US dead
from Iraq – flying them in under cover of darkness
like smugglers. With so much of the monopoly media at
its beck and call, the US feels it can declare
“victories” – as it did late last year in al-Fallujah
when half the city remained unbowed and unoccupied for
a full two months after American media crowed that
they had “seized control of” the city.
So to have any media outlets, particularly those
immediately accessible to readers of English or other
western languages, that break through that blackout of
information, that challenge the official version is a
serious problem for the US leadership. They fear
another Viet Nam coming on. They want to wage a war
in Iraq as if it were some kind of video game, killing
Iraqis at will but leaving the average American
unaffected as if it were only some far-away dream – or
nightmare – but the Iraqi Resistance Report won’t let
them hide the war behind their curtain of lies.
The Iraqi Resistance report strives to bring home the
reality of the war. That is why the US government
feels it must attack it.
4.What do you think should be done to spread the
word on the IRR and this recent attack by the US
State Department?
First, let me say that the way the Iraqi Resistance
Report has spread is already fairly amazing to me. It
appears on lots of websites that I know of and many
more I don’t know of. I know of whole or partial
translations of the Resistance Report in Czech,
German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese,
Russian, and Spanish, and I think translated versions
appear in other languages besides. And remember, none
of us gets a salary for turning these reports out or
for translating or distributing them. It’s all
volunteer and all the result of people’s spontaneous
drive to get at the truth. The US imperialist-Zionist
stranglehold on the media are driving people entirely
on their own all over the world to seek out
alternative sources of information as they try to work
out for themselves what’s going on. I continue to
find this an amazing “mass action” in its own right.
As to how to spread the word about the attack, I
suppose for our part we can send out this interview
and other informative notices to the same people who
receive the Resistance Report.
But in another sense, the State Department itself
through its attempt to discredit the Report is
actually increasing interest and receptivity. This
has already been very noticeable.
5.Recently the western media have been howling that
the Resistance is trying to start a civil war in
Iraq between Sunnah and Shi'ah. Is that true, and
how likely is it?
As a matter of fact even before the US invasion in the
spring of 2003, it was the US that was trying to
exacerbate differences between Iraq’s various
religious and ethnic communities. The US occupied
much of northern Iraq immediately after the 30-nation
aggression of 1990-1991 – creating a kind of Kurdish
chauvinist separatist state under US colonial
protectorate. Neo-conservative and also liberal
thinkers in Washington and London have written
articles and books calling for splitting up Iraq on
sectarian and ethnic lines.
In fact this is nothing but the “divide and conquer”
strategy that is as old as the Roman Empire at least.
Needless to say, no national liberation movement is
interested in splitting itself up while confronting a
foreign occupation. The very idea is ludicrous.
The controlled mainstream media regularly promote the
absurd tale that the Iraqi Resistance wants a civil
war, presenting Iraqi Resistance attacks as mindless
sectarian violence. In fact the vast majority of
those cases turn out to be clear attacks on puppet
police stations or chauvinist collaborationist party
headquarters. Mafkarat al-Islam, to its credit,
usually brings out what the targets of such attacks
were, debunking the propaganda “spin” put on the
assaults by the monopoly press.
This is not to say that there is no danger of
sectarian conflict – there certainly is. But it is
being fomented by the US and its collaborationist
stooges who are growing increasingly desperate as the
Resistance increases in strength. They know that when
the US is driven out of Iraq, they will be doomed. As
that fate looms ever closer, they turn to sectarianism
in an attempt to save their parasitic existences.
But, whether it’s carried out directly by the puppet
security forces or the chauvinist Badr Brigades or
Peshmergah gunmen, or perhaps on occasion by
individuals who have been persecuted by those
collaborator forces, sectarianism only serves the
interests of the occupation and the Iraqi Resistance
is well aware of that fact.
6.The US media suggests that when American-backed
Iraqi military and police forces are fully staffed
and trained that the US will be able to begin
withdrawing its troops. What is your response to
that?
That’s actually a very amusing question, since the
Americans are having a great deal of difficulty
keeping their puppet forces intact. The puppet troops
have repeatedly shown themselves unwilling to do
battle with the Resistance, many units have deserted
wholesale when faced with the prospect of risking
their lives and killing fellow Iraqis to protect the
American invaders. The most they seem to be “good”
for is spreading sectarian conflict – which is
certainly not going to facilitate an American
departure any time soon.
I think the American leaders, actually, have come
under pressure – and they are likely to come under
increasing pressure, in fact – to commit themselves to
withdrawal from Iraq. One way that they can take some
of the pressure off themselves, I believe, is to talk
in terms of withdrawal “when the Iraqi puppet forces
are able to defend themselves.” This is also a cover
for embroiling European and other American allies in
Iraq, committing them to train puppet police and
military forces, relieving the US of part of the costs
of its occupation, and picking up a bit of
“international legitimacy” for their utterly illegally
imposed puppet regime in occupied Baghdad.
7.The US department confessed that Cuba and
Venezuela both rely on the IRR reports is this not a
good sign of the importance and potency of the IRR
reports?
It is indeed gratifying. And, yet I must say that
it’s not at all surprising that states that stand up
to US arrogance and power and are therefore the target
of US pressure, sanctions, terror, and potentially
all-out aggression would wish to inform themselves of
the experience of the Iraqi Resistance. The US has
been phenomenally successful in turning the world into
its enemies, particularly since the end of the Cold
War, when the United States assumed the role of world
tyrant.
It’s rather pathetic, actually, that the State
Department should single out the Iraqi Resistance
Report and a couple of other sites as a “trio of
disinformation” when our experience is that people all
over the globe are reading and translating the
Resistance Report all on their own. So it’s not a
“trio” of sites that is challenging the imperialist
monopoly blackout of information on Iraq; it’s
thousands of people and websites all operating on
their own all over the world. In fact I believe it’s
this is a major aspect of Washington’s worries – not
just the fact that the Iraqi Resistance Report and a
couple other websites are publishing stories that the
US wants to hide, but the fact that all over the world
there has been great interest in the information
offered by these “unembedded” sourcs. Three websites
on their own couldn’t elicit this kind of rabid attack
from the State Department.
8.Anything else you would like to add?
I would just like to express my appreciation for all
the support the Iraqi Resistance Report has received
after the State Department launched its attack. We’ve
got more requests to receive the Iraqi Resistance
Report and two new translated editions have appeared
just in the last few days. By attacking the Iraqi
Resistance Report, the US State Department bet its
international prestige against people’s craving to
learn the truth – and, judging by the increased
interest in the Resistance Report, it seems the State
Department lost.