WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- Hamas and Hezbollah are operating openly in southern Iraq, an Iraqi-American recently returned from the country said Thursday.
"I was surprised to see an office for Hamas in Nasariah, and also a Hezbollah office in Basra and Safwan," said Zainab Al-Suwaij, a Shiite Muslim native of Basra. "I was shocked to see their flag and their sign there, and I was wondering what is going on. Do we as an Iraqi people, who are emerging from the terror of Saddam after 35 years, need this in our country?"
She said Hezbollah has been operating in Safwan, a town on the Kuwait border, for about four months. "The building is secure with guards and weapons," she told a forum at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Al-Suwaij has been working in Iraq with the U.S. Agency for International Development to rebuild the Iraqi school system and to implement women's empowerment programs. In 1991, at age 20, she joined in the failed uprising against Saddam Hussein and survived the fighting in Karbala before escaping the country. She is executive director of the American Islamic Conference, an organization founded after Sept. 11, 2001. The group states that American Muslims should play a leading role in rejecting Islamist radicalism and promoting democracy in the Muslim world.
Al-Suwaij said the political wings of Hamas and Hezbollah are recruiting Iraqi youth with seminars that impart their ideology. "Don't the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) or the (occupation) authorities there know about these offices?"
She said the occupation authorities and the CPA should close the offices. "These are not Iraqi groups," she said, and they are not geared to participatory democracy. "We know what their thoughts and ideas are."
Hezbollah is a militant Lebanese Shiite Islamist organization backed by Iran and Syria. Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, is a Palestinian Sunni fundamentalist group concentrated in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
"We need to put some limit, especially now, because the country is just emerging from a very difficult period," Al-Suwaij said. "We need democracy, but also we need to keep our people safe."
Al-Suwaij said Hamas and Hezbollah are taking advantage of the poverty of Iraqi children in the difficult postwar environment, paying the children to do their bidding. "I am worried about the younger generation," she said.
Al-Suwaij was asked how these offices are financed. "They are coming (into Iraq) with their own money," she replied, "because there's no money inside the country. They are trying to buy people."
She said Iraqi youth need to be educated in ways the various Iraqi ethnicities can live in harmony. "Having such groups in Iraq does not help our people, or help the children, emerging from the bad period and facing now a new struggle with these groups. What worries me is that the people won't get an opportunity to enjoy their freedom if groups like that have power."
Something as simple as youth centers can help mute the message of extremists, Al-Suwaij said.
She said Hamas and Hezbollah have been banned in Europe and the United States. The military wing of Hamas is banned in the EU, but efforts to ban its political wing have been resisted. During the war to topple Saddam Hussein last spring, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah called on the people of the Middle East to receive Americans with "rifles, blood, arms, and martyrdom operations."
