Western media are only interested in car bombings that kill civilians. The reality is that occasionally the bombs missed their intended targets, which are the U.S military convoys. Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies notes in this regard that 77 percent of all attacks were against military targets of the U.S. and "Coalition Forces", and only 4.2 per cent of these attacks were led in civilian areas.

According to Iraqi sources, in contrast to Western media accounts, most of the terrorist acts such as kidnappings and hostages attributed by the Western media to the Iraqi Resistance movement were actually carried out by the U.S-created militias. These reports also point to the role of U.S. and Israeli Mossad intelligence agents involved in a process of distorting the image of the Resistance. There is, in this regard, a growing body of analysis, which suggests that the various acts of violence and kidnappings attributed to the Resistance are part of a deliberate, and conscious propaganda effort by the occupying forces to distort reality.

The strategy is to absolve the U.S. of any crimes and legitimize a prolonged Occupation. "Whenever major terrorist operations happened, it was mostly with US knowledge or involvement. Israel's Mossad planned major terror operations in Iraq, recruiting 2,000 mercenaries before the war and sending them to various Iraqi cities to offer protection and support to the occupation forces", reported the Egyptian, Al-Ahram Weekly.

The hidden agenda is to blame the Iraqi Resistance for these attacks. In other words, the intelligence operation essentially consists in demonizing the Resistance movement, thereby weakening public support for it. Who is behind the violence in Iraq? U.S. forces and their Israeli agents together with the main militia groups, which now form the core of the new Iraqi army, police and security forces.

People have often been found dead after the police and security forces have arrested them. According to Adnan Al-Duliemi, head of the Muslim Endowment, a religious organisation that supervises mosques and Muslim shrines, Iraqi Police Forces were "complacent about, even complicit with those killings". He called on the "government to open an investigation into the killings. The U.S. and its allies have much to gain from a divided Iraq embroiled in sectarian violence.

No investigation of these police killings has been conducted and the Occupation forces together with Western media blamed this orchestrated police violence on the Iraqi Resistance. These fabricated stories are fed into the Western news chain. They are used to portray the U.S fighting one group of Iraqi (Muslim) fanatics who see the U.S. as "infidel", rather than as a violent occupier.

Western media reports on Iraq are then linked up with 9/11 stories, namely that the U.S. had been attacked on 9/11, and that this war is "justified". This type of reporting, which consists in dehumanizing the Iraqi Resistance, is aimed at a receptive Western audience, which shares the perpetrators frame of reference, to exploit an overarching climate of fear and prejudice, and in the process encourage more racism and Islamophobia.

Part of the alternative media seems to have joined the bandwagon. Several alternative media commentators have depicted the Iraqi Resistance in much the same way. According to an Iraq dispatch from Patrick Cockburn of CounterPunch, who is embedded with the Kurdish Peshmerga:

“The strength of the armed resistance is misunderstood outside Iraq. It has always been fragmented. Unlike the National Liberation Front in Vietnam or the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, it is not well organised...They have no political wing. The fanatical Sunni fundamentalists, commonly called the Salafi or the Wahhabi, see Iraqi Shias [sic] and Christians as infidels just as worthy of death as any US soldier. When American forces damaged two mosques in Mosul in the fighting last November, the resistance blew up two Iraqi Christian churches. Such sectarianism makes it impossible for the resistance to become a truly nationalist movement, but there are four or five million Sunni Arabs a strong enough base for an insurgency". (CounterPunch, May 13, 2005).

No corroborating evidence, no names, and no concrete documentation, however, are provided regarding the "fragmented" nature of the Iraqi Resistance aside from anecdotal news items, which invariably tend to downplay the violence of the Occupation, not to mention the crimes and atrocities committed by US forces. Moreover, why should the Iraqi Resistance be modelled on the Vietnamese NLF or the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which Western journalists tend to romanticize, in order to cast a bad light on the Iraqi Resistance? Both, the IRA and the NLF were also involved in countless violent acts, which resulted in civilian casualties. In fact Vietnam was never a democracy.

While imperial occupations have a similar logic, the circumstances of countries and their people are different. The Iraqi Resistance targets Iraqi collaborators, who side with the US led Occupation, because they are rightly considered to be "spies and traitors and deserve to be liquidated". (Incidentally, this pattern of executing collaborators is similar to that followed by the French Resistance during World War II.) .

It is important to remember that without popular support, which is the basis of any national resistance movement, the Iraqi Resistance would not be able to operate. Of significance, is that after two years of U.S. brutality and violence, Iraqi Resistance groups have been able to integrate, modify their methods and fight effectively against the biggest military machine in history.

While there are foreign volunteers fighting alongside Iraqis, there is no evidence of "foreign fighters" such as the Salafi and Wahhabi sects (of Saudi Arabia) in the Resistance movement. This is part of the U.S.-created Al-Zarqawi myth, much more useful than the myth of WMD.

Moreover, the Occupation forces themselves have yet to provide concrete evidence of these "foreign fighters", let alone evidence to substantiate the presence of Al-Zarqawi. From an Iraqi perspective, the "foreigners" in Iraq are U.S. soldiers and mercenaries from Britain, Italy, Australia, South Korea and Japan, etc.

Moreover, there is, in this regard, a clear distinction between "insurgents" and "resistance". The term "insurgent" used profusely by mainstream and alternative journalists alike tends again to denigrate the resistance, while upholding the legitimacy of the Occupation, which is directed against the "insurgents".

In a subsequent dispatch from Iraq, Cockburn wrote:

"Many of the resistance groups are bigoted Sunni Arab fanatics who see Shia [sic] as well as US soldiers as infidels whom it is a religious duty to kill. Others are led by officers [sic] from Saddam's brutal security forces. But Washington never appreciated the fact that the US occupation was so unpopular that even the most unsavoury groups received popular support...[U.S. forces] massive firepower meant they won any set-piece battle, but it also meant that they accidentally killed so many Iraqi civilians that they were the recruiting sergeants of the resistance". (CounterPunch, 16 May 2005).

And what evidence is offered in support of these assertions? While the US led occupation is intent on fomenting social divisions and religious hatred, there is ample evidence of a mass movement where Sunnis and Shiites have in fact joined hands in opposing the US led occupation.

This over-armed military machine is unpopular because it kills so many Iraqi civilians "accidentally". Remember, that more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians, most of them innocent women and children have been killed and continue to be killed "accidentally".

And the total destruction of the vibrant city of Fallujah, and the killing of more than 6,000 innocent civilians, using napalm bombs deliberately designed to kill many civilians in densely populated areas, is just by "accident". The rate of civilian deaths in Iraq under U.S. Occupation is far greater than anything perpetrated by the regime of Saddam Hussein.