AMY GOODMAN: First we go to Free Speech Radio News’s Aaron Glantz in Baghdad. It was reported Tuesday.

AARON GLANTZ: This is a funeral. Hundreds of young men fire machine guns into the air as their comrades carry the coffin of a dead boy into Baghdad’s Abu Hanifa Mosque. Last night while the American army dug trenches around Falluja, the Sunni resistance struck Iraq’s capital city following on American Hum-V patrols. The U.S. Army responded with Apache attack helicopters, the only victim, a young boy standing unarmed in front of the mosque watching the action unfold. It was a night of Apache helicopter attacks in Baghdad, a new tactic of the American army, which is facing an increasingly violent resistance. At about the same time Apache helicopters struck the poor Shiite neighborhood of Shula, killing three Iraqis in their homes. The intended target was a nearby mosque, a stronghold of the young cleric, Moktada al-Sadr who opposes the occupation and was declared an outlaw yesterday by George W. Bush, whose spokesman linked Sadr’s movement with the anti-Israel groups Hamas and Hezbollah. The Sheikh Nasser Al-Saadi is head of Sadr’s office in Shula.

NASSER AL-SAADI: We are defending our country and demanding rights for the people. Any good man, like Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah or Moktada al-Sadr, any decent man in the world should feel very proud of us. The Americans are making the people angry by using the Apache people and killing the people in their houses, killing the innocent. We have a picture of a child whose entire face is disfigured by bullets.

AARON GLANTZ: In the streets, the anger is palpable. A cheering crowd gathered around the smoldering remains of an American military vehicle. Mudafar Israer is among them.

MUDAFAR ISRAER: I don’t follow Moktada. I just want the occupation to end. Young people just lost their patience, so they did it, but the real thing hasn’t started yet.

AARON GLANTZ: In a carefully worded statement, Iraq’s most respected cleric, Grand Ayatollah Sistani said Sadr’s cause was righteous, but Sistani said there was no reason to resort to violence, a significantly softer statement than the ones coming from Washington and Iraq’s Bush Administraition-appointed Interior Minister, Ayad Alawi, who used to run a Pentagon-funded organization dedicated to promoting a military coup in Iraq. He compared Moktada al-Sadr to Al Qaeda.

AYAD ALAWI: We, from our brother Moktada al-Sadr tell all the others to calm down because there’s a lot of forces in Iraq, like Al Qaeda, a lot of forces trying to kill themselves as suicide bombers. They want to stop Iraq from heading towards democracy and liberation. We will move against that very strongly.

AARON GLANTZ: But in the Shiite slum of Shula, Alawi’s words seem hollow. Like everyone around him, Raazi Abdulrehda supports the attack on the Americans. RAAZI ABDULREHDA: The Americans have got to go round and round and make us feel uncomfortable. They block the streets, always checking us, and put a lot of in prisons.

AARON GLANTZ: About 135,000 American soldiers are currently serving in Iraq. Washington is considering sending 40,000 more. More than 600 American troops have died on the soil of this country. For Free Speech Radio News, I’m Aaron Glantz in Baghdad, Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: We remain in Baghdad with Pratap Chatterjee. Managing Director of “Corpwatch.org,” independent reporter. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Patap Chatterjee.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Thank you for having me, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what is happening right now in Baghdad?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, Amy, as Aaron’s story indicated, there’s a tremendous amount of conflict within Baghdad, three neighborhoods in particular. Al-Bunnia, which is a Sunni stronghold and often called the Falluja of Baghdad, has seen continuing strikes in the last couple of days. I was there yesterday, and the local kids took us around. We saw a red Volkswagon immediately crushed by a tank as it ran over it. The troops exited into a side lane shooting as they went to put people out that they felt were behind the problems. That’s on the Sunni side, many of the people who are very aligned to Saddam Hussein, but on the other side of the religious spectrum, so to speak, when you cross the Tigris and go over to Qubeny and then on to Shula, as Aaron mentioned, we saw hundreds of people in the street dancing and singing, and chanting against America. We were at the headquarters of Sadr, outside Sadr, city and people were standing on the roof waving Kalashnikovs, clerics and holding up pictures of Sadr and saying, “Down with America.” We went actually into the city, it was interesting, in sector seven there’s a playground, a children’s playground, which had been taken over by tanks, and the cannons are pointing straight into the neighborhoods, seven of them. This is really the scene that’s unfolding across Iraq, where there’s been — I haven’t been outside Baghdad as yet down to the South, but I came through Kurdistan, through Kirkuk. In Kirkuk, the two days that I was there, the two occasions, there was one bomb that blew up when people were trying to plant it, and another occasion, a suicide bomber killed a couple of people. What’s interesting here is that the increasing calm now between the Sunnis and Shiites, between people in Falluja, who are holed up, cut off from outside contact to the people in Najaf saying, “We need to work together,” and what remains to be seen is if they do, it will be, as they say, the Americans’ worst nightmare, because there seems to be a lot of popular — not in the religious level, but just in sheer frustration, nothing is — they live the anger of the people — the people are voicing, especially will in Falluja, when they attacked the blackwater mercenaries coming through town. What they’re seeing today is a number of American corporate contractors who travel to town bearing Kalashnikovs and wearing flak jackets whom the local people assume must be C.I.A. — why are the people wearing plainclothes? What they don’t realize, don’t understand, is that these people are here simply for money to serve the big companies. To the, it’s one and the same thing. These people are not soldiers. They must be here for some more insidious reason. Their companies are there to profit out of the billion of dollars that America is pouring into this quote, unquote, “reconstruction.” But when we — in order to establish a stronghold and establish bases here, and so it’s really two Iraqs. One Iraq with the contractors, and I stand right now as I speak to you in front of the Palestine Hotel and Sheraton, and about 20 meters from me, are three soldiers and two tanks, and hundreds of people are walking with flak jackets and are paid $1,000 a day to work for American companies like Bechtel and Halliburton, whereas on the other side of the street, three out of four — on the other side of the river, three out of four Iraqis have no jobs.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re listening to Pratap Chatterjee.