Email from Abu Nasr on Iraq Resistance
Tuersday, 04 Nov 2003

Dear Jay,

How are things?

I've been kind of busy lately. The Free Arab Voice came back and now, as of a couple days ago, was shut down again by some Zionist group calling itself the internet haganah which contacts the host company and says FAV supports killing Jews. Well, yes it does when the Jews in question happen to occupy Palestine, but if that's hate then I guess the French Resistance was a hate organization.

Anyhow right now I'm writing to tell you about the website of the Iraqi Communist Party - Cadre.

Don't get too excited because almost everything there is in Arabic, and most of that is just articles that they pull from anybody and everybody who opposes the US occupation of their country. So it's all kinds of stuff from moderate liberals to radicals. The same goes for the few items that they have in English, except for the two ICP-Cadre statements that I translated a few months ago and then you posted on your site (in fact, they still list your name on them as a reference, though the "link" to your site is inoperative). (Maybe if you wrote to them, they would activate the links at least which might be a nice comradely thing.)

But one intriguing thing that did suddenly appear on the ICP-Cadre site the other day was a 14-page day-by-day account of the Resistance struggle in October. Unlike the Resistance reports that I write for FAV, which are based on the Arabic media, which in turn are based on the western media (AFP mostly, actually, the French are MUCH better than the US or UK agencies), I say, unlike that, the ICP-Cadre report includes news items that they get directly from witnesses in the country and reports. That isn't necessarily a guarantee of 100-percent accuracy, but at least it is not tied to what the US military is willing to divulge.

And that is interesting too. NOBODY in the Arab world believes the US casualty figures. They are just too absurd. Cars hit landmines that disable tanks and nobody dies, supposedly. Several helicopters have been shot down before the Chinook and in previous cases people only got "wounded."

Today a kind of gloating article full of Schadenfreude appeared in a Jordanian paper saying "for once (in the case of the Chinook) the Americans are admitting their real losses."

The article is just rich in bitter, black sarcasm as it says that everywhere else in the world cars crash and people die, but if they're Americans in Iraq take direct hits from RPGs or hit anti-tank mines they only get "slightly injured."

What is particularly significant about the article, though, which appeared in the "Jordanian Affairs" section of its newspaper, was that the author is known for his links to the Jordanian secret police and so when his articles appear, people read them to see what the secret police want to tell them. (Which is why his article on the death toll in Iraq could appear on the "Jordanian affairs" page!)

Thus, what we have is virtually a statement that the Jordanian intelligence service thinks the US casualty figures coming out or Iraq are ridiculously laughable, and they are definitely in a position to know.

That brings me back to the Iraqi Communist Party - Cadre report for October's Resistance attacks. It's too long and too tedious to translate the daily litany of strikes, but below is a summary if the final October toll and a comment on the overall toll of the war so far.

As I say, in the full monthly report in Arabic, these figures are accounted for on a day-by-day basis in attacks that take more casualties than the US figures admit, but not wildly unlikely figures. Therefore these figures are credible, given that even the US admits that the average number of guerrilla attacks is now 33 per day.

Some of the references in these accounts will be unfamiliar to westerners. But I think the coverup in Iraq has reached incredible proportions. For example, I have heard accounts from individuals who were Arab volunteers and who actually were present personally at the epic Saddam International Airport Battle during the invasion. Many witnesses who were there (and who don't know each other) say the same things: Saddam personally was there, hundreds of Americans were killed, captives were beheaded with swords. Apparently films were made but nobody will show them and at least one Arabic news report said that Bush threatened to use nuclear weapons if Iraq broadcast the films at the time.

There are lots of rumours out there but that there were a lot of Americans killed in the airport - definitely more than the total they admit died in the war - comes from too many people who were actually there for reasonable people to discount those reports. Corroborating evidence comes from the fact that Palestinian cameraman working for Reuters, Mazen Dana, was shot dead on 17 August (one US bullet through his heart) when he was filming supposedly US graves at the International Airport.

After the occupation too, there have been lots of reports that the Resistance fighters generate videos of their attacks. This is not surprising; Hizb Allah did this regularly in South Lebanon, and some of the Palestinian guerrilla groups do it too. But none of the Arabic networks like al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyyah have the courage to air them even though they supposedly are sitting on them, and needless to say the western media won't do it either.

So if the figures below cited by the Iraqi Communist Party-Cadre sound farfetched, bear in mind that the Pentagon has a near stranglehold on what news gets out of Iraq. And even websites like the Free Arab Voice keep getting shut down.

Comradely,

Muhammad Abu Nasr

The Iraqi Communist Party - Cadre (ICP-Cadre) has published a report in Arabic on US imperialist losses in its war against Iraq on its website. The Arabic account is available

That report is 14 pages long. But here is the grand total for October:
734 Americans killed,
870 wounded,
240 vehicles, (including tanks, armored vehicles,
cars, and personnel carriers) destroyed,
28 railway cars destroyed,
7 helicopters destroyed,
13 explosions on oil pipelines.

The ICP-Cadre also comments on the the US claim made during October that the number of Americans killed after 1 May 2003 now equals the number killed in the invasion of Iraq. The ICP-Cadre says that that statement is true as regards the ratio, but not the raw figures.

They say that the number of Americans killed in the invasion was about 2,500, including those butchered alive in the attack on Saddam International Airport, as shown in films that were made at the time, and those whose charred bodies were left after that Airport Battle.

The number of Americans who have been killed since the start of the War of Liberation, i.e., since 10 April 2003, the ICP-Cadre says, is about 3,000; with 3,000-4,000 additional Americans wounded. As for the official US number of 116 dead, the ICP-Cadre says, Condaleezza Rice can just keep the small change in her purse.

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