Today New Orleans, tomorrow Tal Afar. posted by Richard Seymour

Yesterday, the World Socialist website asked if the US was preparing another massacre in Tal Afar. It was a perfectly sensible question. In April 2004, Tal Afar was one of the areas that the US lost control of, along with Fallujah, Samarra and Sadr city. It had become the hub of the resistance smuggling operations on an important route from Syria into Iraq. It was also one of the earlier sites of Shia-Sunni cooperation in resisting the occupiers. The US responded by launching a series of bomb attacks on the city, which killed hundreds of civilians and forced tens of thousands to flee. It could not retain control of the city, however, and had to continue a war of attrition which only paused during the ferocious assault on Fallujah in November 2004. It has since become one of the key scenes of resistance to the occupation. The city is majority Turkomen, who are largely opposed to the US-rigged neoliberal constitution.

Today, The Guardian reports that 200 "suspected insurgents" have been rounded up in the city, after parts of the city were surrounded by US-led forces and residents were ordered to flee from several districts. Most refused to leave, in part because the occupiers instructed them to leave through the southern part of the city, and they had been threatened that policemen affiliated to the occupation that if they did so they would be killed. Reports of exactly what is happening or has happened in Tal Afar are lacking, and those that are available have little detail. The Guardian makes a delphic reference to plumes of smoke, which one assumes is the result of heavy bombing, and cites fleeing residents as saying that a) there are not "foreign fighters" in the city as the occupiers claim and b) the assault has deprived residents of the city of food and drinkable water. Not for the first time, the electricity has been cut off as well, as have phone lines. An experience, then, that is on the whole no longer alien to many Westerners. Of course it would be impossible to have "rounded up" 200 "suspected insurgents" had there not been extremely heavy fire and many civilian deaths. Without television cameras and bawling news anchors, however, those will be silent deaths, unrecorded, unmemorialised, no more than a figment in a few minds.


The last assault on Tal Afar: terrorist suspect pleads innocent.

But pan-Iraqi unity is developing, in various ways. In one such instance Sunnis donated blood to Shias injured during the extraordinary stampede in Baghdad last week. Moqtada al-Sadr is, whatever else he is not, a hardline anti-sectarian, responding to the stampede by denouncing the occupation and Sunni-Shia unity (as so often, you have to move past the salacious headline). In fact, the stampede itself seems to have galvanised considerable Iraqi unity, just as the assault on Fallujah did in April 2004. There have been impressive demonstrations for unity led by Sadr's supporters in response to the plans for the break-up of the country too. And the labour movement is flexing its muscles - even in the midst of the slaughter in Tal Afar, the news reports the closure of Baghdad airport due to a pay dispute. As in Heathrow, so in the New Iraq.

This all transpires as the UN decries "the systematic use of torture" by Iraqi police, as well as "extra-judicial executions" carried out by "forces linked to the Ministry of Interior". It comes with revelations that, despite the fire aimed at the UN, it was the US that authorised Saddam's biggest oil deals, and as news emerges that the US is planning to stay in Iraq for a very long time. It comes as the truth emerges that the US is fixing Iraq's new constitution. Criminals, invaders, torturers, bombers, murderers - people who treat their own citizens as enemies and wage wars of aggression overseas: the new bosses of Iraq are honouring the old one in fine style.