Through Web sites, headlines and graffiti, the Arab world is celebrating the people of Fallujah as victors over a superpower.
This embrace of the Iraqi city has raised fears that it will become a magnet for recruits to al-Qaeda's anti-Western campaign. But many Arabs say Fallujah stands out more as a boost to their self-esteem after witnessing the Iraqi army barely put up a fight against the US invasion last year.
US Marines besieged the city west of Baghdad in April after four Americans were ambushed and killed there. Ten Marines and hundreds of Iraqis, many of them civilians, died before the Marines pulled out and handed security over to an Iraqi volunteer force.
The three-week siege is inspiring "a literature of resistance and war," Egyptian novelist Gamal el-Ghitani said. "Fallujah is a symbol, in one of the worst eras we have witnessed, that it is not impossible to stand up to America."
He said it also sends a message to Arab dictators about the lesson people may draw about resisting oppression.
"I used to laugh, despite the ghastly daily news, about how a bunch of poor, helpless Iraqis with primitive weapons are forcing the greatest superpower in the world to negotiate. Honestly, the American army was ridiculed," he said.
El-Ghitani hadn't even heard of Fallujah until then. Now it is being likened to Beirut under Israeli siege in 1982, to the resistance in Egypt-ian cities on the Suez Canal against the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of 1956, and even Napoleon's 1799 siege of Acre.
Ibrahim el-Firjani, a Libyan university professor, said Fallujah has "shown America the real Arabs, not those lining up to surrender."
In Lebanon, the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el-Hilweh renamed a major street Fallujah.
Hamoud al-Heimi, a high-school student in San'a, the Yemeni capital, said his neighborhood soccer team now calls itself Fallujah. In the society pages of a Yemeni paper, doctors congratulated a colleague on the birth of his daughter, Fallujah -- "the land readied for planting."
Al-Suweidi, a district of the Saudi capital Riyadh which is known to harbor militant dissidents, has been nicknamed Fallujah. The al-Qaeda-linked Saudi group that beheaded US hostage Paul Johnson Jr. called itself the "Fallujah brigade."
"Volcano of Fallujah," a video posted on the Internet and apparently produced by one of many anti-US groups fighting in Fallujah, included segments on "burning an infidel's Hummer," and "killing and dragging of [Israeli] Mossad and CIA agents." It signed off with an appeal for money and fighters.
In a diary of the siege signed by Abu Anas al-Shami, identified as an adviser to the militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Internet surfers read of Egyptians, Saudis, Syrians, Jordanians, Yemenis and Libyans coming to Iraq to fight Americans.
"God wanted, in his wisdom, to render Fallujah a haven for the heroes and holy warriors of Iraq, and a favorite in the hearts of the itinerant holy warriors from different parts of the world," al-Shami wrote.
Evan Kohlmann, a Washington-based consultant on terrorism and security affairs, said men like al-Shami want to turn Iraq into the next Afghanistan -- a rallying point for a full-scale attack on the West.
A Saudi columnist, Daoud al-Shirian, said that Fallujah draws disgruntled young Arabs because it is in their midst, not in distant Afghanistan or Chechnya.
Though foreigners are playing a role in Iraq, most of the anti-US fighters are believed to be Iraqis motivated by nationalism, not extremist Islam. Many Arabs who draw pride from Fallujah aren't interested in going to Iraq because they have their own battles to fight, some with guns and bombs, some with words.
Abu Qutadah, an al-Qaeda suspect jailed in Britain, published a poem in an Arab newspaper likening Fallujah to a West Bank town invaded by Israel in 2002 to root out suicide bombers.
Fallujah, he wrote, is "the sister of Jenin in fire and light."
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
OUTRAGE: The former strongman was accused of corruption and responsibility for the killings of hundreds of thousands of political opponents during his time in office Indonesia yesterday awarded the title of national hero to late president Suharto, provoking outrage from rights groups who said the move was an attempt to whitewash decades of human rights abuses and corruption that took place during his 32 years in power. Suharto was a US ally during the Cold War who presided over decades of authoritarian rule, during which up to 1 million political opponents were killed, until he was toppled by protests in 1998. He was one of 10 people recognized by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in a televised ceremony held at the presidential palace in Jakarta to mark National
LANDMARK: After first meeting Trump in Riyadh in May, al-Sharaa’s visit to the White House today would be the first by a Syrian leader since the country’s independence Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa arrived in the US on Saturday for a landmark official visit, his country’s state news agency SANA reported, a day after Washington removed him from a terrorism blacklist. Sharaa, whose rebel forces ousted long-time former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad late last year, is due to meet US President Donald Trump at the White House today. It is the first such visit by a Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946, according to analysts. The interim leader met Trump for the first time in Riyadh during the US president’s regional tour in May. US envoy to Syria Tom Barrack earlier
US President Donald Trump handed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban a one-year exemption from sanctions for buying Russian oil and gas after the close right-wing allies held a chummy White House meeting on Friday. Trump slapped sanctions on Moscow’s two largest oil companies last month after losing patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his refusal to end the nearly four-year-old invasion of Ukraine. However, while Trump has pushed other European countries to stop buying oil that he says funds Moscow’s war machine, Orban used his first trip to the White House since Trump’s return to power to push for
RSS