There is more than one triangle of resistance

By Haifa Zangana
(Haifa Zangana is a novelist and former prisoner of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime. She is a weekly columnist for al-Quds newspaper and an occasional commentator for the Guardian, Red Pepper and al-Ahram Weekly. She lectures regularly on Iraqi culture, literature, and women issues)

The Guardian

"Psychologically, it was useful to gain the American people's empathy with their courageous soldiers; "For an American soldier in Iraq, there is no more dangerous neighbourhood than what has come to be known as the Sunni Triangle, the area west of Baghdad, around the town of Falluja."

More important was the success of the brand name to dehumanize Iraqis, to justify the occupation's atrocities, civilian's killings in particular; because; "in the Sunni Triangle, it is not easy to determine who is a combatant and who is not. And this sometimes results in unintended consequences that the military says it can't avoid. Civilians sometimes get caught in the crossfire. They get shot, or worse, they get killed."

For Iraqis, the "Sunni Triangle" has become synonymous with the US-led occupation's brutality - Falluja's destruction, followed by Samara, Tel Afar and parts of Najaf. It is symonymous with daily killings , air-strikes, arbitrary arrests, detentions and torture; with Abu Ghraib, house raids and search and destroy operations; with massacres in Haditha, Al Qaem, and Al Ishaqi. It is also the brand name for all the US-UK military operations that have killed, to date, over 100,000 civilians and driven the country into a sectarian civil war to "establish democracy". The US president recently expressed the aim: "We will fight the terrorists overseas so we don't have to fight them here at home, in the streets of our own cities"."

The increase in attacks on occupation troops in recent months - in Basra, Amara, Diwaniya, Kirkuk, Mosul and Baghdad - clearly defies the " Triangulation" and "Sunnization" of the resistance.

What the occupation and its puppets have chosen not to see is that the Iraqi resistance would not have continued and sustained its attacks, over three years, in 13 provinces unless it was first Iraqi, second national, third and above all supported and protected by Iraqi people through various social networks, communities, tribes, NGOs, and political parties."