Here is GOOD NEWS from Iraq — this time from the New York Times rather than the ever-thorough Arthur Chrenkoff: ordinary Iraqis had enough and went after the “insurgents” on their own.
SOMETHING is happening in Iraq that is good news for the U.S.:
Ordinary Iraqis rarely strike back at the insurgents who terrorize their country. But just before noon today, a carpenter named Dhia saw a troop of masked gunmen with grenades coming towards his shop and decided he had had enough.
As the gunmen emerged from their cars, Dhia and his young relatives shouldered their own AK-47’s and opened fire, police and witnesses said. In the fierce gun battle that followed, three of the insurgents were killed, and the rest fled just after the police arrived. Two of Dhia’s young nephews and a bystander were injured, the police said.
“We attacked them before they attacked us,” Dhia, 35, his face still contorted with rage and excitement, said in a brief exchange at his shop a few hours after the battle. He did not give his last name. “We killed three of those who call themselves the mujahedeen. I am waiting for the rest of them to come and we will show them.”
It is a watershed:
It was the first time that private citizens are known to have retaliated successfully against insurgents. There have been anecdotal reports of residents shooting at attackers after a bombing or assassination. But the gun battle today erupted in full view of half a dozen witnesses, including a Justice Ministry official who lives nearby.
Basically, what this seems to indicate is that Iraqis are starting to get their political feet on the ground and feel a sense of ownership in their new society. And they are defending it against those who want to either turn the clock back two years to The Bad ‘Ol Days of Sadaam…and against those who would like to turn it back a few centuries, to be like the late, unlamented Afghani Taliban regime. Bad news for anti-democratic forces…but a suggestion that the U.S. is now closer to the day when the Iraqis will be running their whole country themselves.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.