As armed attacks on US troops in Iraq increase and the Pentagon announces that the crack troops of its most experienced infantry division will stay in the country ”indefinitely”, the one certainty about the groups carrying out the assaults is the effect they are having: confusion.
”We’re facing a combination of Ba’athists, fedayeen and ex-intelligence services operating without central control on a loose basis,” the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, told reporters this week.
”None of the people detained by coalition forces for carrying out attacks on US soldiers said they were motivated by religion or money,” the former counter-terrorism expert added. ”The attacks are conducted by professionals. I have confidence that we shall impose our will on these renegades.”
John Abizaid, the new head of US central command, called it ”a classical guerrilla-type campaign” and said: ”I believe there’s mid-level Ba’athist, Iraqi intelligence service people, Special Security Organisation people, Special Republican Guard people that have organised at the regional level in cellular structure. It’s low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms, but it’s war, however you describe it.”
These assertive analyses bear surprisingly little resemblance to the views of other sources, including US army commanders in the field, leading some to speculate that there is more spin than substance to them.
Colonel Eric Wesley, executive officer of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade, believes most of the attackers are motivated by current grievances rather than lost privilege. Many are hired guns, working for profit.
”They are disaffected people from various parts of society,” he said at his base near Falluja. ”They may be impoverished, or somehow afflicted by the war and the coalition, wanting revenge for the loss of a family member. They may be people who’ve been taught their whole life to hate the west and have extremist views.”
Whatever the case, he believes them to be ”ignorant of [US] intentions in Iraq” and thus an ”exploitable group”.
”The question is: who’s paying them, funding them, exploiting them?” he said. ”It could be third-country nationals who want to see Iraq destabilised. We’ve had indications of Islamic fundamentalism, both foreign and domestic. It could be people from the former regime who stand to lose a lot from democracy. I deliberately avoid the term ‘Ba’athist’ because I’m not convinced there’s opposition across the whole of Iraq.”
Col Wesley disagrees with Bremer’s view that these are professional attackers, citing the relatively few soldiers hit compared to the number of attacks. ”Our indications are that the majority are not well trained. Their tactics are relatively crude and elementary. Their marksmanship is poor. The incidence of rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and AK-47s being [on target] is rare.”
Troops in the brigade agree that the ambushes on convoys are usually hasty and disorganised. Staff Sergeant Anthony Joseph said: ”They pop up with an RPG and fire. They know that if they take time to aim, we will spot them and shoot.”
Since May 1, when President Bush declared the war over, the attackers have killed 33 American soldiers. There are currently about 12 attacks a day, nearly all of them on US convoys.
Three soldiers have been shot point blank in operations which have the hallmarks of professionalism, according to Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US ground forces in Iraq. One soldier was killed by a sniper. There have been no suicide attacks, but several remote-controlled bombs.
Ramadi, about 30 kilometres west of Falluja, is one of the tensest towns in Iraq. The 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment’s base, in Saddam Hussein’s former palace by the Euphrates river, has been mortared frequently, as has the mayor’s office on the main street.
US officers report attacks showing some sophistication. One was a daytime strike on the mayor’s office involving three separate elements: first small-arms and Kalashnikovs fire, then a grenade thrown by a man passing on a motorcycle, then a mortar.
Crimes of opportunity
But many attacks are what Captain Michael Calvert, the regiment’s press officer, called ”crimes of opportunity”. ”A man behind a wall sees a convoy coming, fires a shot and runs,” he said.
The regiment’s executive officer, Major Antonio Aguto, gives an analysis that is more like Bremer’s, but said that many of the attackers were paid. The regiment had detained and questioned scores of people, including 20 or 30 foreigners, on suspicion of involvement in the attacks.
”Some were motivated. Some were doing it for money. There’s evidence that Ba’athists are hiring local thugs.”
But none of those detained had pointed conclusively to a paymaster the coalition could arrest and charge. ”There’s a lot of finger-pointing, some good, some bad. No big fish has been caught yet,” he said.
He could not confirm that any of the detainees was linked to al-Qaeda.
One undisputed fact is that at least 80% of the attacks have taken place in the so-called ‘Sunni triangle’ between Tikrit, Baghdad, and Ramadi. Attacks are rare in the mainly Shia south and the Kurdish north. But even in the Sunni triangle the truth is more complex than the simple stereotype that the area has long been pro-Saddam.
Ramadi is a case in point. One of its largest tribes, the Alawani, turned against Saddam in 1995 after he jailed and executed a prominent hero from the war against Iran, Air Force General Mohammed Madhlum. Three hundred people dared to march in the streets after his death, and scores were arrested.
”My brother was arrested by the mukhabarat [the secret police] and spent three months in prison. He then fled abroad,” said Ahmed Rajab. He then pointed angrily at a bullet hole in a shop window. ”The Americans did that because the mojahedin were running about outside last week”.
His use of the word ‘mojahedin’, meaning ”soldiers of God”, carries an ominous echo of other Islamic guerrilla movements, and according to Rajab, the resistance is concentrated in the mosques.
The imam of al-Saleh mosque in Ramadi, Jihad Abed Hussein al-Alawani, says he was no supporter of Saddam, who put him in jail for three years, but he is unsurprised about the attacks. ”It is wrong to put these attacks down only to fedayeen, remnants of the Ba’ath party, or former army officers,” he said. ”They are coming from ordinary people and the Islamic resistance because the Americans haven’t fulfilled their promises.”
The Americans had interrogated him ”very politely” for eight hours, he said, because of the content of his Friday sermons. ”I asked them whether they would not resist if Germans or Fidel Castro occupied Washington, and of course they said yes,” he added.
Comments such as these suggest that though the number of attackers could be small, their actions are supported by a wider pool of Iraqis in the Sunni areas.
After a convoy of lorries was attacked in Baghdad on Wednesday Mansour Badri, a teenager, said he was happy. ”The Americans lied to us when they said they would save us from Saddam. They just want to occupy our country,” he explained.
He and his friends said Ba’ath party supporters had encouraged teenagers to fight US troops and offered them money.
The US army has conducted four big offensives in the Sunni triangle since April. Their objective is to stamp out the insurgents, and officers cite impressive successes in terms of guerrillas detained or killed, though the Iraqis say many were innocent victims. And the intelligence gained does not appear to be particularly valuable, since US troops remain in the dark about their new enemy.
The plethora of theories from senior figures adds to the picture of a force which knows it has a long way to go to solve the problem. The one thing on which army and civilian chiefs seem to agree is that the attacks are low-level, dispersed and coordinated locally — which makes them harder to deal with.
”We cannot find any national command and control structure but we are working hard to find one,” a senior US officer in Baghdad said. ”We are in the process of war-gaming, in which we identify the enemy and look at all the different possibilities. We’re still at war”. – Guardian Unlimited Â