Friday, April 02, 2004

Polling found anti-coalition sentiment around Fallujah far higher than Iraq generally

(I posted about this poll below; 71 percent vs. 17 percent makes this a highly atypical case)

By The Associated Press

Anti-American sentiment in the region of Iraq where four U.S. civilian contractors were killed and their bodies burned and mutilated is far higher than in the country as a whole, according to a nationwide poll of Iraqis.

In the province that includes Fallujah, seven in 10, or 71 percent, said attacks on coalition forces are acceptable political action. Among all Iraqis, just 17 percent held that view, according to the poll, conducted before the attack on the contractors, by Oxford Research International for ABC News and several European networks.

More than half in the Anbar province, which is heavily populated with Sunni Arabs, said that attacks on foreigners who work with the coalition are acceptable, while 10 percent of all Iraqis felt that way.

Four of five in Anbar say the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was wrong, compared with about half that many Iraqis in general. And by a 2-1 margin, residents of Anbar were more likely than Iraqis generally to say the invasion humiliated rather than liberated Iraq.

The poll was done for ABC, the BBC, the German broadcasting network ARD and the Japanese network NHK. The survey of 2,737 Iraqis age 15 and older was conducted from Feb. 9-28 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points, larger for subgroups.