THE WASHINGTON TIMES
LATIFIYAH, Iraq — Anti-government forces in this city just south of Baghdad say they are preparing a grim welcome for Britain’s Black Watch regiment when it moves north from Basra as early as this week.
“It’ll be easy to beat the British because the British are weaker than the Americans,” boasted Abdullah Al-Ashiq, the reputed head of resistance fighters in this city, the U.S. Marine defenders of which are being shifted for an anticipated offensive in Fallujah, an insurgent stronghold.
The British “are used to fighting against pathetic forces like the Mahdi’s Army of Muqtada al-Sadr,” he scoffed. “That means they haven’t got good experience in real fighting. Just wait. The British will discover the difference between us and them — the hard way.”
Preparations to fight the British are at fever pitch, with the positioning of booby traps, roadside bombs and mortars.
Some of the British forces are expected to hunker down in the city’s main police station, which is fortified with huge concrete slabs. But the extremists said they have infiltrated the Iraqi national guard, and that their spies within the police will provide them with precise information about British troop movements.
Mines also are hidden in tunnels and underpasses, while the area’s orange groves and palm trees provide ideal cover for guerrilla fighting. The insurgents repeatedly have blown up the rail line that brings supplies from Baghdad. No trains are running now.
Any substantial casualties among the 850 Black Watch soldiers would bring more political trouble for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose Cabinet approved the deployment last week despite harsh criticism at home.
Four senior members of previous Conservative Party governments renewed the attacks yesterday, with former Defense Secretary Michael Heseltine saying the transfer of the Black Watch was far too big to be a purely operational matter.
The move was “militarily extraordinarily ill-judged” and appeared linked to the Nov. 2 U.S. presidential election, Mr. Heseltine said.
In Latifiyah, thought to be the place where terrorists held and decapitated Briton Kenneth Bigley and two Americans, some residents said the British troops might be given a short period to “prove themselves.”
“I think the situation will be sorted out peacefully, because the British have a good policy to negotiate,” said Abu Rashid, a 55-year-old farmer. “The Americans don’t.”
The extremists’ main bases are an oil storage and processing depot on the outskirts of Latifiyah, and a mosque called Al-Masraa.
A reporter who entered the mosque found many fighters who spoke in a Syrian or Jordanian dialect. Some of them were reading from the Koran, while others intoned the afternoon prayer. The foreigners refused to be interviewed.
There are 22 mosques in the city, all dominated by Sunni hard-liners who follow the same Salafist philosophy as terror mastermind Osama bin Laden and Iraq’s most feared terror leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi.
Zarqawi and his followers, who claimed responsibility for the Bigley slaying, have been able to operate with impunity in the city, but there is widespread public resentment against them.
Once a mainly Shi’ite farming area, much of the land and its homes were given to Sunnis by dictator Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, and Shi’ites now represent about 20 percent of the population.
Recently, hard-line Sunnis have used Latifiyah to shoot and rob Shi’ite pilgrims who trek southward to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala — on the same road that the British soldiers must use now.
The hard-liners have ruined many Shi’ite-owned shops and, just south of the city, destroyed the Sa’eed Faraj, a shrine revered by the sect. The contractor who started to rebuild it has been killed.
“These people are not normal Sunnis who we can get along OK with,” said a former Shi’ite shop owner. “They’re from the Salafist sect, and they hate us.”
Some Shi’ites are so angry that they were happy to provide information that could help expose the terrorists.
“The Tawhid and Jihad group [led by Zarqawi] is hidden in Al-Ba’ath district in northern Latifiyah, and they generally begin their shooting sprees around 11 in the evening,” said Hassen Jassem, a 26-year-old farmer.
“Day by day, they harm us more and more. They stop us praying the Friday prayer in our traditional way. They demand we pray in the Sunni way. If we refuse, we’re kicked out of the mosque.”
Residents blame the attacks on their shops and property on a group of armed men known as “the Opel group” — a reference to the cars they use — and say the police are unwilling to leave their heavily defended station to protect the citizenry.
“I was afraid, so I got out,” said minibus driver Ramadan al-Yassini, 47, who made his decision when a Shi’ite school principal was killed.
Iraqi police and national guard units backed by U.S. troops raided the town Sept. 4 and said they had arrested nearly 500 people and seized large caches of weapons.
But 12 police officers were killed in the raid, and an insurgent calling himself Abu Tahrir said later that his men had targeted the government forces with a suicide car bomb before attacking with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.
“The mujahideen holy warriors only lost eight martyrs,” he said. “They arrested just 80 men, and most of them were just civilians.”
• Distributed by World News and Features. Paul Martin in London contributed to this report.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.