THE WAR IS NOW OFFICIALLY A SUCCESS: “Hurt and Disillusioned, Some Arab Fighters Go Home “

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Salaam went to Iraq to do battle with Americans and die a martyr. He returned home with shrapnel wounds and tales of fighting U.S. military might with a rifle.

From a Baghdad hotel he moved to a training camp where volunteers practiced shooting and trench warfare. Then Salaam, 24 years old and unemployed, was sent to war.

“I was sleeping behind mounds of sand and firing from Kalashnikovs on helicopters. It was craziness,” he said.

“We stayed at the front five days and we didn’t eat anything. I saw two dead bodies shot in the head.”

Thousands of volunteers from across the Arab world are thought to be in Iraq to fight advancing U.S. and British forces. On Wednesday, jubilant Iraqis welcomed U.S. troops in Baghdad.

Salaam, a Lebanese Shi’ite Muslim, said he was unprepared for the hostility of some Iraqis to volunteers like himself.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have fully appreciated the situation. But here’s someone who does:

Hundreds of Muslim fighters, many of them non-Iraqis, were putting up a stronger fight for Baghdad than Iraq’s Republican Guard or the regular army, a top United States military officer said yesterday.

“They stand, they fight, sometimes they run when we engage them,” Brigadier-General John Kelly said.

“But often they run into our machine guns and we shoot them down like the morons they are.”

Think of it as evolution in action.