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info, comment, analysis |
As Yassir Harhoush sees it, the work he'll be doing
for the new U.S.-sanctioned Fallouja Brigade isn't all that different
from what he was doing last week - only then, he says, he was part
of the insurgency.
"I was fighting the Americans," Harhoush, a 28-year-old
former soldier in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, said Friday afternoon. "I
have not stopped. This is just a temporary truce. If the Americans
attack, we will defend ourselves again."
...
"Now the Americans are on the outskirts, but in
two days they should be completely gone," said Col. Nafaa Kurdi Hais,
who stopped by to see how his new troops were doing.
"If they betray us, the battle will be renewed," he
said, noting matter-of-factly that just a week ago he too had been
fighting the Americans. "We were all defending our city�. If the resistance
was limited, the Americans could have easily overcome us."
...
Hais, like others, discounted the U.S. military's
assertion that many foreign fighters were involved in the Fallouja
confrontations, nodding as his second lieutenant, Omar Mohammed Ubaidi,
said: "There were no foreign fighters. Maybe there were some Arab citizens
living in Iraq for a long time, some have even taken Iraqi wives, and
maybe they chose to participate."
In any case, the force has no obligation to hunt
down foreign fighters, Ubaidi said - a view that appears to differ
from that of the Marines.
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