TEHRAN, 26 March 2003 — The leader of Iraq’s main Shiite opposition group warned Washington yesterday that US troops would face armed resistance if they stayed in Iraq once President Saddam Hussein was toppled. “Iraqis are against foreign dominance, and if they (the Americans) don’t want to leave Iraq, the nation will resist,” said Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir Hakim, head of the Tehran-based Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). “One of the legitimate ways of resistance against occupiers is force and weapons,” he told a news conference.
The gray-bearded Hakim said SCIRI, which draws its support from Iraq’s Shiite majority, said he had tens of thousands of troops stationed inside and outside Iraq, ready to resist any foreign occupation. The group’s armed wing, known as the Badr Brigade, has paraded hundreds of lightly armed fighters in Kurdish-ruled northern Iraq. But it has tended to keep the size and whereabouts of its other forces a closely guarded secret.
Iran, which fought an eight-year war against Iraq in the 1980s, has given aid and shelter to the group for more than two decades due to their shared Shiite beliefs and enmity for Saddam. But Tehran has said it will not allow its soil to be used as a launch pad for an attack on Iraq.
Hakim said Badr had no military or operational contacts with Washington, and no decision had been taken yet for his forces to confront the Iraqi government. His men would respect “international rules and regulations” on crossing the Iranian border, he added. The United States is thought to be wary of Hakim’s group because of its strong ties to Iran.
Other opponents of Saddam Hussein brushed off setbacks suffered by US and British troops in the early days of the campaign, insisting the allies were on course for the crucial battle of Baghdad. Opposition leaders were particularly dismissive of the stiff resistance the invasion force has encountered in Iraq’s key southern cities, arguing that it was put up by the regime’s “repressive agencies.”
And they said ordinary Iraqis were too terrorized by the regime to greet the allies as the “liberators” they profess to be.
Moreover, “the people have not forgotten the 1991 episode, when they saw US forces arriving in the same areas of southern Iraq they entered now, only to withdraw and let their uprising be crushed” by Saddam, explained Al-Sharif Ali ibn Al-Hussein, who heads the Constitutional Monarchy Movement (CMM). Iraqi civilians “are caught between the regime’s anvil and the Americans’ hammer,” said Hamed Al-Bayati, London representative of the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), the main Shiite opposition group. Unlike most other major dissident factions, SAIRI opposes the US-British invasion of Iraq on grounds that it is the Iraqi people who should overthrow the regime.
