Inside The Iraq "Insurgency", an Iraqi Photographer Embeds With Them

[leftchick]

This is an excellent piece from 60 Minutes as they traveled with some Marines in Ramadi. The whole thing is worth a read. Here is a person "embedded" with the resistance...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/16/60minutes/main667271.shtml

Under Fire, Alongside The Fallen

~snip~

Rapicault "leads from the front," as the Marines like to say, and he's focused on getting the rest of his men home. Most often, Rapicault's men never see the enemy—they don't truly know who he is or what he's fighting for. They have never seen the enemy like this—that watches for an approaching American patrol and prepares to set off a roadside bomb. Iraqi photojournalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad embedded himself with the insurgents and took pictures of them setting up their IEDs.

Abdul-Ahad describes the IEDs. He says the insurgents take a "couple of big mortar shells or artillery shells, they wire it with some explosive. They take the wire into the edge of the street and they hide behind a building." Then they "kind of put their heads into the ground and try to listen to the tanks coming."

The insurgents usually use cell phones, using local kids in the neighborhood as spotters for U.S. tanks.

"And they have spotters everywhere," he says. But he adds, "Most of the insurgency is — if I can use this word — is pathetic. Pathetic in the term that when they are waiting for the tank, and the tank is five meters away, and they kind of put the wires together and nothing happens, because it's an old battery or something. And that happens in some of the cases, you know. But other cases, they do kind of detonate things and do cause lots of damage."

Abdul-Ahad told us that some of the fighters he met were religious extremists from Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Syria, but he claims that many others weren't fanatics at all. For example, a businessman was fighting because he despised the foreign occupation and its chaos.

"He wanted to end the occupation. And this is why he decided to sell off his business to fund a small cell of fighters, and to fight the Americans in Fallujah," Abdul-Ahad says.





Iraqi insurgents prepare a roadside bomb in front of an embedded Iraqi photojournalist. (Photo: GETTY IMAGES/Ghaith Abdul-Ahad)