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Aug. 18— Idi Amin, who has died at an age thought to be 78, was one of the most brutal military dictators to wield power in post-independence Africa.

While chief of staff of the Ugandan army, under Dr. Milton Obote’s civilian government, he seized power in 1971. He made himself president, with the rank of field marshal, and after eight years of power left Uganda a legacy of bloodthirsty killings and economic mismanagement. Parliament was dissolved; no elections were held; secret police exercised absolute power of life and death; and the courts and the press were subjugated to the whims of the executive.

The death toll during the Amin regime will never be accurately known. The best estimate, from the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, is that it was not less than 80,000 and more likely around 300,000. Another estimate, compiled by exile organizations with the help of Amnesty International, put the number killed at 500,000.

In the perspective of history he will go down as one who damaged the cause of African nationalism. His rule of Uganda became a synonym for barbarity.

With Ugandan independence in 1962 and the rapid Africanization which followed, he was elevated to army commander by 1964. Obote trusted him enough to put him in charge of the highly political military operation two years later: the attack on the “new palace” of the Kabaka (king) of Buganda on Mengo Hill. There was no military glory involved — Sir Frederick Mutesa and his supporters had only a few hunting rifles — but the victory of this Moslem officer of peasant origins over the Christian patrician ruler of the sophisticated Buganda, hitherto the dominant tribe, invested Amin with a mystique that was to make him a legend and carry him to the heights of power.

The Battle of Mengo Hill, as he liked to describe it, was something he never ceased to describe to visitors, in greater and more gory detail with the passage of the years. It gave him the conviction he was not as other mortals; that bullets could not touch him, that he was selected by God to walk with kings, presidents and prime ministers alike and, when directed by God in mystic dreams, to humble them.

Amin’s first foot on the ladder was the traditional one for poor boys with little training, seeking to better themselves: he joined the army. He became an assistant cook in the King’s African Rifles (KAR).

The first sign of his sadism came after the fatal decision to make him a commissioned officer. In 1962, commanding troops of the 4th KAR, he carried out the Turkana Massacre, an operation that began as a simple assignment to check cattle rustling by tribesmen in the Turkana region of Kenya. Complaints from villagers reached the British authorities in Nairobi; bodies were exhumed from pits and it became clear that the victims had been tortured, beaten to death and, in some cases, buried alive.

The British colonial authorities in Kampala, with Uganda’s independence only months away, decided it was politically impossible to court-martial one of the country’s only two black officers. The man who was later to be toppled by Amin, Dr. Milton Obote, concurred.

In December 1969 came the mysterious episode when assassins, never identified, tried to kill Obote as he walked from a party rally. Badly wounded, he ordered an investigation while recovering in hospital. Amin could not be found but turned up later at the meeting where Brigadier Okoya, the deputy army commander, indicated that the net was closing in. A date was set for a second meeting, on Jan. 26, when decisions would be taken and the guilty ones named.

At 11pm on Jan. 25, shots were heard in the Kampala suburb where the deputy commander was living. Friends called police and went to the house, to find Brigadier Okoya and his wife both dead from multiple bullet wounds.

Later in 1970, while the Obote government was still in power, police investigating an armed hold-up, arrested a gang of kondos, the local word for thugs in illegal possession of arms. Under questioning, one of them indicated he took his orders from Brigadier Amin. This was embarrassing, as Obote was about to promote Amin to chief of staff, so the police commandant, Inspector-General Cryema, took no action.

The kondos were released from detention and were killed in unexplained circumstances soon afterwards. Cryema was arrested and executed soon after Amin took power, in the coup of Jan. 25 1971, while Obote was attending a Commonwealth prime ministers’ conference in Singapore.

As this reign of terror got under way, the chief of Justice, Kabimu Kiwanuka, a former prime minister of Uganda, was arrested in his robing room and brutally killed by plainclothes thugs. The Anglican Archbishop, Janani Luwum, was killed in a simulated car crash in Kampala. Other leading figures were expunged in similar brutal circumstances, including the vice-chancellor of the university.

About six weeks after Amin seized power came the explosion at Makindye Prison in Kampala, when 32 army officers, crammed into a tiny cell, were blown up by a charge of dynamite. The group was made up of Christian tribes such as the Acholi and Langi, which had supported the government of the fallen President Obote. It now seems that two thirds of the Ugandan army’s soldiers, out of a total of 9,000 men, were executed in Amin’s first year of power.

According to Amnesty International, the ICJ, and exile sources, Amin deliberately created four rival and overlapping agencies to carry out his mass killings. These were the Military Police, the Presidential Guard, the Public Safety Unit and the Bureau of State Research. His bodyguards were drawn from his own Kakwa tribe and, with their special language and accent, they were well placed to detect any attempt by an outsider to infiltrate their ranks. This, combined with Libyan security experts, and Amin’s own good luck, headed off seven major assassination attempts organized by dissident army and air force officers between 1972 and 1979.

In 1976 came the hijacking of an Air France plane bound from Athens to Paris, initially by two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two from Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang. The plane was forced down at Entebbe and the crisis only ended with an audacious airborne raid by Israeli commandoes. But one passenger, the unfortunate Dora Bloch, who held joint Israeli-British citizenship, had been taken from the airport to hospital in Kampala.

After the raid, according to Uganda’s minister of health at the time, Henry Kyemba, who later escaped into exile, Bloch was taken screaming from her hospital bed and brutally executed the same day. This incident did much to convince world opinion that, in Amin, the international community was dealing with a madman.

In 1977, after Britain broke diplomatic relations with his regime and then withdrew the two remaining diplomats who had stayed on attachment at the French Embassy, Amin declared he had beaten the British and conferred on himself the decoration of CBE which, he said, stood for “Conqueror of the British Empire.” Radio Uganda then solemnly read out the whole of his title: “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Alhaji Dr Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE.”

The Islamic religion became a fetish for Amin, and his uncouth espousal of it did great harm to the Muslim cause in Africa. Amin succeeded in enlisting the support of his Islamic near-neighbor, the Libyan leader Colonel Gadafy. But other Muslim leaders in Syria, Jordan and Iraq rebuffed him when he traveled to their capitals looking for alliances. However, contingents of Libyan troops and planes helped his regime survive, against the odds, on more than one occasion.

Amin’s fanaticism came to a head in a bizarre telegram sent to the then United Nations secretary-general, Kurt Waldheim, when he purported to analyze the Middle East situation and focused his hatred on the Israelis.

The message contained these phrases, personally dictated by Amin to his secretary: “Germany is the right place where, when Hitler was the supreme commander, he burnt over six million Jews. This is because Hitler and all German people knew that the Israelis are not people who are working in the interest of the people of the world, and that is why they burnt the Israelis alive with gas.”

Reaction in black Africa was profound. Leaders like Nyerere and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, who had condemned Amin from the start as a dangerous, unbalanced man, were vindicated.

Amin’s downfall came in 1979 when Ugandan troops crossed the frontier into Tanzania, looting and wrecking in villages along the Kagera river. The Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, retaliated by dispatching an armored column, led by three tanks. Hundreds of Ugandan exiles volunteered to join it, and when it triumphantly entered Kampala, it was led by a young Ugandan army officer, Colonel Oyite Ojok.

Libya’s maverick leader, Colonel Gadafy, had begun sending troops to help shore up the regime, but hastily reversed the airlift after some 400 Libyan casualties. Amin followed them into brief exile in Tripoli and then moved on to Saudi Arabia, where he was given a villa in Jeddah on condition that he remain incommunicado indefinitely. The Saudi motive was to silence him because of the harm they believed he was doing to Islam.

In the subsequent 24 years, he gave no interviews and stayed close to home.

By Viviana Alonso

Buenos Aires, Argentina, Aug. 15 (IPS)— Ten years after the privatization of the sewage and water systems in the Argentine capital, many areas of greater Buenos Aires have not yet been connected to the water and sewer mains, and services have not improved, despite the fact that rates have doubled.

Untreated waste continues to be dumped into rivers and to leak into the water table, ruining people’s basements, according to complaints filed with the Buenos Aires Office of the People’s Defender (ombudsman) against Aguas Argentinas, the privatized company that serves 10 million people in greater Buenos Aires.

In fact, only complaints filed with that Office against the privatized telephone companies surpass the number lodged by clients of Aguas Argentinas.

Nevertheless, the company is demanding reparations for the losses it suffered as a result of the crash of the local currency since early 2002, when the government scrapped the “convertibility” system that pegged the peso to the dollar for over a decade. The local currency now stands at 2.9 to the dollar.

The company, which blames the Argentine government for the devaluation, has brought a complaint before the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), an arm of the World Bank.

People’s Defender Eduardo Mondino has called for the cancellation of the contract under which the water and sewage services were privatized, and is demanding indemnification for the communities that have been hurt by the privatization.

Residents of the outlying Buenos Aires districts of Morón, San Isidro, Quilmes, Avellaneda, San Fernando, Tigre and La Matanza are all demanding compensation.

Many homes in those low-income and working-class neighborhoods are still not hooked up to the water and sewage systems, and waste treatment plants are urgently needed.

According to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights, access to water is a fundamental human right.

In La Matanza, an impoverished district of 1.2 million people, “sanitary vulnerability” — a concept that takes into account access to clean water and sewage services, the state of the water table, and the poverty level — is high.

La Matanza resident Teresa Heredia told IPS that “cases of hepatitis and diarrhea have mushroomed. There are also many children with parasites, because the water is pumped from a well, and it is contaminated.”

Another local resident, Guillermo Navarro, said he presented a complaint with the Office of the People’s Defender because the basement of the building where he lives is constantly flooded due to the level of the water table.

For the past two years, “the basement has been rendered useless. There is a constant smell of humidity and mildew, and we are always worrying about the gas, electricity and telephone connections,” complained Navarro, an Aguas Argentinas client.

A document sent to the Buenos Aires government by a group of La Matanza residents complains that Aguas Argentinas is not operating in compliance with local laws.

In 1991, then-president Carlos Menem, who began to privatize public enterprises upon taking office in 1989, issued a call for bids for the state-owned water and sewage company Obras Sanitarias de la Nación (OSN), under the argument that a well-run privatized company would ensure better and lower-cost services, and would be better able to expand the water and sewage network.

“The water sector was, however, not deficit-ridden...and would be considered by many to be an appropriate, even vital, area in which the public sector should be involved,” states a study by researchers Alexander Loftus and David McDonald at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.

In fact, the authors add, the utility even posted a surplus in 1992, the year before it was privatizzed.

However, OSN had been unable to respond to demand. Only half of the nine million residents of outlying districts had piped water, and 65 percent were not connected to the city’s sewage system.

The World Bank played an active role in the privatization of OSN, which it later held up as a model for privatization programs in the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia.

The water and sewage services in the Philippines were privatized in 1997. Although 87 percent of the population of that country now has access to running water, there have been serious problems with supplies and pollution due to a lack of water pressure and leaky pipes.

In addition, the rates charged by the privatized company amount to 10 percent of the income of the poorest households, according to a study by the Center for Public Integrity, a US organization.

One of the main stakeholders in the privatized utility in the Philippines is French giant Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, which is also the top shareholder in Aguas Argentinas.

Argentina was a pioneer in the privatization of water and sewage services. At the time, the concession contract for OSN was the biggest in the world, covering metropolitan Buenos Aires and 14 outlying districts, and serving a total population of 9.3 million people, stated a report by Andrea Catenazzi at the General Sarmiento National University.

According to the contract, the consortium that won the 30-year concession would not have to pay a thing, but would have to promise to expand and improve services, while pledging not to raise rates for 10 years. In addition, one of the keys to winning the bid was to offer the greatest reduction in rates.

However, the government actually increased rates by 74 percent prior to the privatization, thus making the concession more attractive to investors.

The winning consortium was led by Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, which holds a 25.3 percent stake in the new company, Aguas Argentinas.

The consortium signed a contract in May 1993 in which it agreed to invest $4 billion to improve the water pipe and sewage systems and expand them to an additional 4.2 and 4.8 million people, respectively. It also offered a 26.9 percent reduction in rates.

The privatization of OSN went ahead despite the initial staunch resistance put up by the employees of the state-owned company, grouped in the Greater Buenos Aires Union of Sanitary Works Employees (SGBATOS).

By offering a special program that left 10 percent of shares in the hands of the workers, administered by the union, the government won support from the union leaders, who did not even make use of their veto power during the privatization process. The union even accepted a reduction in the company’s personnel, from 7,600 to 4,000.

A regulatory body was also created, whose budget came from a 2.7 percent surcharge that Aguas Argentinas added to its customers’ bills.

But “The distinction between the union, the company directorate and the regulator is often hazy and sometimes non-existent,” says the study by Loftus and McDonald.

“Certainly, the collusion of these interests in the process meant that the privatization of the Buenos Aires sewerage and water network was easier to hurry through and was destined to benefit and strengthen elite groups,” it adds.

As soon as it took over the utility, Aguas Argentinas lowered rates by 26.9 percent. However, the reduction was deceptive, given the fact that rates had been raised 74 percent before privatization.

Just one year later, the company asked to be allowed to increase rates, even though it had pledged not to do so for 10 years.

The Office of the People’s Defender reports that the rates charged by Aguas Argentinas rose 103.2 percent between May 1993 and January 2001, while inflation amounted to just 7.3 percent in that period.

The negotiations for the privatization were put in the hands of a group of advisers headed by then-minister of natural resources María Julia Alsogaray, who later faced accusations of corruption.

Over a decade later, the trials in which she has been charged with illicit enrichment are still before the courts.

Aguas Argentinas now provides service to Buenos Aires proper and 17 surrounding districts, an area of 1,830 sq kilometers that has a population of 10 million people.

The company claims to have invested $1.7 billion, and to have connected nearly two million people to the water system and 1.15 million people to the sewer network between 1993 and 2001.

But Buenos Aires province’s minister of infrastructure, Raúl Rivera, says 50 percent of potential Aguas Argentinas clients in the areas served by the company, or 3.5 million people, still lack water and sewage services, which amounts to a breach of contract.

The report by Catenazzi at the General Sarmiento National University states that “The concession-holder has tended to concentrate its investment mainly in the maintenance of the infrastructure that it inherited.”

That infrastructure came to the consortium free of cost, “since the contract that was based on an offer to cut rates meant that the concession was granted free of charge for 30 years, and as a monopoly,” the study adds.

The Office of the People’s Defender reports that Aguas Argentinas saved $35,000 a day in costs by failing to build a wastewater treatment plant in the neighborhood of Berazategui, and by continuing to dump untreated wastewater into the Rio de la Plata estuary.

According to researcher Martín Schorr at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, Aguas Argentinas enjoyed a 23 percent profit rate in the 1990s, compared to average rates of eight and seven percent among water companies in the United States and Britain.

Complaints against Aguas Argentinas filed with the Office of the People’s Defender focus on the company’s failure to expand the water and sewage systems to unconnected neighborhoods, excessive fees for connections, heavy interest rates, unjustified extra charges, and cut-offs of services.

The company failed to respond to attempts by IPS to contact it for this article. Any information provided about Aguas Argentinas was already in the public domain.

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By Thalif Deen

United Nations, Aug. 13 (IPS)— The United States is trying to bestow UN legitimacy on a hand-picked, 25-member political body whose mandate to govern war-devastated Iraq is strictly under American tutelage.

US Ambassador John Negroponte introduced a draft resolution Wednesday that calls on the 15-member UN Security Council to formally “welcome” the month-old Iraqi Governing Council and also to create a new UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).

Washington is confident that the resolution, which is expected to be put to a vote before the end of the week, will pass.

But the move to seek UN recognition for the Council has been criticized by human rights groups, academics, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and even by Arab states.

“The Iraqi Governing Council — hand-selected by the invading forces — makes a mockery of the concept of self rule,” said Medea Benjamin of Iraq Occupation Watch, an anti-war group that scrupulously monitors the US military occupation of Iraq.

“Many Iraqis are rejecting the Council as a puppet of the occupation, and the United Nations should also reject this,” said Benjamin.

She pointed out that the Council was chosen in secrecy, with no clear criteria for membership.

“A true process of self-governance would allow Iraqis a much greater say in the composition and criteria for the selection of their transition team. We urge the United Nations not to sanction a process and a Council that emerged from an illegal invasion,” she added.

Consisting of 13 Shiites, five Sunnis, five Kurds, one Christian and one Turkmen, the Council has authority to nominate ministers, review laws, sign contracts and approve the national budget.

But the chief US civil administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, and his Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) have the power to overrule the Council’s decisions, making it a tool in the hands of the United States, critics say.

Bremer, who has ruled out any popular election in Iraq in the foreseeable future because of security concerns, has promised that Iraqis will play a more central role in running the country through the Governing Council.

But the 22-member League of Arab States, which represents the political will of all Arab countries in the region, has refused to recognize the US creation.

“If this Council was elected, it would have gained much power and credibility,” Secretary-General Amr Moussa said last week.

Addressing a press conference in Baghdad on Aug. 13, Sergio Vieira de Mello, Annan’s special representative in Iraq, said although the Arab League refused to recognize the body, it had “welcomed” the establishment of the Council as “an important first step towards the full restoration of Iraqi sovereignty.” Vieira de Mello was killed on Tues., Aug. 18 in the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad.

The Arab League had also indicated it will receive members of the Council at the League’s headquarters in Cairo starting next week in order to begin a dialogue, added Vieria de Mello.

“I can see a gradual process of rapprochement between the Arab League and the Governing Council in the months ahead,” he predicted.

Negroponte told reporters Wednesday that the draft resolution focuses on just two issues: “Firstly, we are proposing that the Security Council welcome the Governing Council as a step towards representative government, and secondly, we are calling for the establishment of a UN Assistance Mission for Iraq in order to support a recommendation by the secretary-general.”

“The resolution does not have any broader implications,” he said. “And it establishes the fact that the United Nations has an important role to play in Iraq.”

But John Quigley, professor of international law at Ohio State University, is not convinced Washington is sincere about the UN’s role.

“Now that it is bogged down in a bad situation in Iraq, the United States is seeking to remove some of the pressure it faces by giving the appearance that the operation is a UN activity,” said Quigley.

“The Security Council must be careful not to legitimize the military action whereby the United States took control of Iraq,” he said.

Quigley said the Security Council should be pressing the United States to act in conformity with Geneva Conventions (governing the treatment of civilians during wartime) as long as its forces remain in Iraq, and to depart at the earliest possible date.

Norman Solomon, executive director of the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy, also criticized the US political tactic in the Security Council.

“After violating the UN charter by invading Iraq, the US government wants the Security Council to bless the occupation and the ‘governing council’ the occupiers handpicked,” said Solomon.

The “arrogance of the current US proposals is laughable, except that the results would facilitate the continuation of a situation that is deadly and extremely damaging to any legitimate concept of international order,” said Solomon, whose group promotes a diversity of voices in the mass media.

The White House, he said, has proceeded as though military might can solve just about anything — “and now that it’s clear this hubris is not working out to its liking, the manipulators based in Washington are trying a new tactic.”

In effect, he said, they want, retroactively, to get a “good war-making seal of approval” from the Security Council.

This would be impossible from the 191-member General Assembly, he said, but with “carrots and sticks,” the United States might succeed in pressuring enough of the 14 other members of the Security Council to get the resolution passed.

Washington is already reportedly offering inducements, including weapons and increased military aid, to at least three countries — India, Pakistan and Turkey — whose troops Washington desperately needs to bolster the fledgling multinational force for Iraq and relieve the pressure on US soldiers in the war-ravaged country.

The force now includes troops mostly from former Soviet republics and Latin American nations.

France, Germany, India, Pakistan and several other nations have declined to provide troops unless there is a new UN resolution authorizing the proposed multinational peacekeeping force in Iraq.

“Sooner or later, all (military) occupiers need a puppet regime staffed by locals.” The Iraqi Governing Council is one such creation, Solomon said.

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By Rory McCarthy

Islamabad, Afghanistan, Aug. 18— At least 22 people died when hundreds of suspected Taliban fighters seized control of a police station in southern Afghanistan over the weekend of Aug. 16-17, one of the most serious attacks against the government for a year.

At least 400 heavily armed gunmen poured into Barmal, 125 miles southeast of Kabul, late on Sat., Aug. 16 in a convoy of trucks. Mohammed Ali Jalali, the governor of Paktika province, said they had come across the Pakistani border, five miles away.

The fighters attacked the police station with rockets, heavy machine guns and grenades. Seven policemen, including the district chief of police, were killed, and at least 15 of the gunmen.

“These police died defending themselves,” the governor said yesterday. “The attackers, they were a very big group.”

The mob held the building throughout the night and then destroyed it yesterday morning, Aug. 17, before apparently driving back across the border into Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas.

There has been increasing violence in the southern, Pashtun, provinces of Afghanistan, once the Taliban heartland, in recent weeks.

In the space of 24 hours last week 64 people were killed by a series of shootings and bomb blasts across the south.

In an effort to confront the violence, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, replaced the governor of Kandahar with one of his closest colleagues on Saturday.

Though popular with western governments, Karzai has struggled to enforce his control in his own country, and it is unclear how much change the new governor, Yusuf Pashtun, will manage to bring about.

The killings underline the setbacks suffered in the postwar reconstruction of Afghanistan. The promise of national elections next June will be difficult to keep.

The Aug. 17 attack was significantly bigger, and showed that the Taliban fighters are no longer focusing just on western soldiers, but are going for Afghan officials as well.

Other recent targets in the south have included Afghans working for western aid agencies, soldiers of the new national army, and clerics who have defended the government.

If, as appears likely, the attackers did start from Pakistan, the government in Islamabad is likely to come under severe pressure to explain why there has been no curbing of Taliban ambitions.

“This was an operation by the terrorist groups and it happened in a district just by the border with Pakistan,” said Javid Loodin, a spokesman for Karzai.

“The security concerns that we have in those areas arise from the cross-border problem. They come across the border, perform their terrorist operations and when the Afghan government forces try to respond they cross back.”

Military analysts in Pakistan say that the Islamabad government is turning a blind eye to the actions of Taliban insurgents. Until the Sept. 11 attacks, Pakistan gave direct financial support and covert military advice to the Taliban.

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Khursheed Kasuri, is due to make an official visit to Kabul on Thursday and will face a difficult reception.

Before the Aug. 17 attacks there had been a spate of clashes on the border between Afghan and Pakistani forces.

Two Pakistani soldiers were killed on the border last week in a hail of fire from US forces who took them for Taliban fighters.

Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, was forced to call the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, over the weekend to apologize.

The western peacekeeping forces, now commanded by Nato in its first mission outside Europe, are confined to the capital, Kabul, and their number is limited to 5,000.

There are another 12,000 US soldiers engaged in combat operations in the country, but their focus remains on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network.

Western governments are reluctant to commit soldiers and the money to expand the peacekeeping operations.

A sweeping disarmament program was meant to begin in March or April to curb the influence of at least 100,000 militia fighters loyal to dozens of warlords but is still at least a month away from starting.

Source: Guardian (UK)

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By Ferry Biedermann

Baghdad, Iraq, Aug. 15 (IPS)— The shy young man in the cafeteria of a Baghdad hotel hardly seems the type to carry out attacks on US soldiers. But Walid (not his real name), a student of English Literature at Baghdad University, has a story to tell that is compelling and detailed. A fellow student confirms that the account tallies with what his friend told him at the time.

Walid says he belongs to a “resistance group” in the area around his birthplace Fallujah, where many of the attacks on US soldiers in Iraq have taken place.

Some two months ago he and five other fighters set out through a field towards a road along which they were informed a US army convoy would be traveling. Walid carried an RPG-7 rocket launcher and two grenades. He wore a blue track suit.

“No, not because of camouflage, it is my favorite color,” he said.

Once they arrived at the road, Walid and his five comrades spread out and waited for the convoy to arrive.

“We must resist anyone who insults our Arab tradition,” said Walid, by way of justifying the attack.

On the day of the attack, “a friend” came by to call him up at about 9pm. Most of the others were informed via satellite telephone. Walid knew only two of his fellow fighters. They carried three RPGs and two mortars.

“I was anxious and worried about the outcome,” Walid said. He recalls lying in wait for about 90 minutes. “I was not afraid to die,” he says. His main worry was that he would fail to hit his target, the last vehicle in the convoy.

When the five American Humvees and three or four Bradley fighting vehicles reached the spot of the ambush, Walid’s fears proved well grounded.

“I missed and we had to call off the whole operation,” he said.

His RPG exploded against some rocks and the US troops opened fire. The group scrambled to get away and Walid saw two of his comrades getting hit; he thinks they were wounded. He has not seen them again but he says he is sure everybody got away.

After the botched attack Walid was not called up again. He thinks that the group is observing a cease-fire. “Many of the operations went bad, they caused problems for the people,” he says.

Walid had been called up for training with a group of other newcomers just four or five days before the June attack. He had never handled an RPG before but that day he fired two grenades “in an open area.”

The group has plenty of weaponry and ammunition, says Walid. Besides the RPGs he talks about mortars and even anti-aircraft missiles, some of them bought from ex-army officers. “We had a variety of weapons that were well-hidden after the war.”

Walid does not conform to the picture that has emerged over recent months of the typical new Iraqi guerrilla fighter. He dislikes the old regime, he is not a Muslim fundamentalist and he is not even unwaveringly anti-American. A fervent handball player, he has an athletic figure and huge calluses on his hands.

The handball player positively welcomed the demise of the old regime. Its minions had frustrated his dream of playing the game at the highest level when they demanded a bribe of three million Iraqi dinars ($1,500 at the time) to try out for the national team.

“Most people didn’t respect the old regime, and don’t want it back,” said Walid. That is why he thinks that the leaders of his resistance group are not Baathists or supporters of Saddam Hussein. But he is not entirely sure — he has never met them. His friends in the resistance have told him they are “good people.”

He offers up some generalities about why he personally dislikes the US presence.

“They constantly pass by in their uniforms and with their weapons and they treat everybody badly, men and women,” he said.

Like many other Iraqis, Walid says he is particularly upset at the way some soldiers treat women during raids and searches. “They touch women and grab them,” he said.

What finally seems to have turned Walid against the US was a stint as a translator at a US military base near Fallujah. As an undergraduate student of English literature, his language skills are supposed to be reasonable but in fact they are weak. He insisted on speaking Arabic throughout this interview.

When he recalls his time with the US soldiers he grimaces, and bitterness fills his voice.

“They said we are non-believers, savages, that we have no right to live,” Walid said. He recalled that a sergeant said the Iraqis are “unbelievable people” and that “they can go to hell.” He lists every insult.

After three days Walid stopped going to the camp. He says the soldiers wanted him to come on patrol with them in their Humvees. “That would have put me in a dangerous position.”

After quitting his job at the base he provided the resistance group with the identity of several Iraqi informers, “traitors,” whom he had seen talking to the US troops.

But he says also that the political situation has improved because of the appointment of the Iraqi Governing Council, a first step to re-establishing a full-fledged Iraqi government. In the meantime, says Walid, the group is using its time to build up its strength.