The little serpent has left and the great serpent has come.

The big serpent was Saddam Hussein and the Americans are the small serpent.

It is the opposite, my friend.

The Americans are the big serpent.

The Americans got rid of your enemy.

Saddam Hussein isn't the enemy of your enemy, your friend.

Just because we're rid of Saddam and the evil bathists doesn't mean the occupation is a good thing.

Our salvation from Saddam was only with the grace of God.

All praises to Allah, He works in mysterious ways, ways.

Welcome to Blowback, a podcast about the Iraq War.

I'm Noah Colwyn.

I'm Brendan James.

And this is Episode 7, Hashtag Resistance.

This episode today is mostly going to be about the end of 2003 into 2004.

Last episode, Episode 6, we talked about the first year of the American occupation

through the lens of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the CPA, and policies like debatification.

And today we're going to talk about what all of that provoked and what evil and ugly shit we resorted to.

The first part of today's episode is going to be about a really important opponent of the American occupation,

the Shia leader, Maktada Al-Satir.

And the second part is going to be about the rise of the Sunni Insurgency and some of the myths that the Americans created to deal with it.

And the last part of today's episode will be about Abu Ghraib and the revelations about the horrible things we did there.

In April, the people of Majaz swiftly replaced the picture of Saddam Hussein with a man he killed, their hero Ayatollah Sadar.

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