- "The Ghosts Of Vietnam Are Returning As Baathists,
Zealots, Criminals, Tribal Leaders And Al Qaeda Unite In A Deadly Alliance
Of Hatred..."
-
- Sharp disagreements are emerging between the US and the
UK over the exact nature of the Iraqi resistance, amid warnings that the
US is losing the intelligence war against the rebels.
-
- After eight days in which Iraqi fighters have scored
a series of major blows to the coalition and its Iraqi allies, intelligence
and military officials in Iraq and on both sides of the Atlantic are at
odds over whether they are fighting a Saddam-led movement or a series of
disparate partisan groups. They are just as divided on finding a way to
halt the escalating violence.
-
- The latest violence comes amid increasingly bleak assessments
from Washington, where the latest attacks have been compared in the media
to Vietnam's 1968 Tet Offensive against US forces and described by Sandy
Berger, a former National Security Adviser to President Bill Clinton, as
a 'classic guerrilla war'.
-
- The comments follow leaked assessments by both the US
pro-consul in Iraq, Ambassador Paul Bremer, and US Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld that war against the resistance was going less well than planned,
with the latter describing a 'long, hard slog'.
-
- By last week that long, hard slog had seen attacks on
coalition forces and the Iraqis co-operating with them reaching a level
of 33 a day - more than twice the level in July. Anti-coalition fighters
have ratcheted up the scale of attacks on schools, police and politicians,
while assaults on the US-led forces have become more confident and sophisticated.
-
- US and UK officials admit that at the centre of the worsening
crisis - which has seen the UN and other aid agencies withdraw international
staff from the country following the bombing of the Red Cross headquarters
in Baghdad - is a continuing failure of hard intelligence on exactly who
is behind the resistance.
-
- The urgency of the problem was underlined by comments
by a former CIA director last week that unless the coalition forces get
a grip on the intelligence-gathering problem - in particular building relationships
with ordinary Iraqis - it may be too late.
-
- 'We're at a crossroads,' Stansfield Turner, told the
Christian Science Monitor. 'If in the next few weeks we don't persuade
the Iraqi on the street that we're going to straighten things out... we
won't get that intelligence.'
-
- A mark of that failure, say officials, has been the inability
of coalition forces and the intelligence and policing agencies available
to them to solve any of the major bombings that began in August.
-
- 'The fundamental issue with counter-insurgency warfare
is intelligence. Intelligence is what matters and it is 90 per cent of
the battle,' Gordon Adams, a former associate director for national security,
told the New York Times.
-
- 'It's knowing who they are, where they are and when they
act. If we know anything from Vietnam and the various things that have
gone on in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is that our humint [human intelligence]
is terrible. We know that we were woefully under-prepared in general.'
-
- It is a view shared in part by British officials, who
concede that attempts to infiltrate the resistance have been without success.
-
- Others are sharply critical of how the intelligence war
against the rebels has been handled. They point to a woeful shortage of
Arab linguists and analysts familiar with Arab culture in the US-run sector,
despite being six months into the insurgency.
-
- To counter this, Pentagon officials briefed last week
that some of these specialists working among the 1,400-strong Iraq Survey
Group on the unsuccessful search for stockpiles of unconventional weapons
would be transferred to this effort.
-
- So who exactly is the resistance? In recent days American
officials have briefed US papers for the first time that Saddam Hussein
may be playing a significant role in co-ordinating and directing attacks
by his loyalists, despite conceding such reports could not be corroborated.
-
- The claims are based in part on reports that Saddam met
Izzat Ibrahim, a senior Iraqi general suspected by American officials of
playing a significant role in organising the resistance and co-ordinating
with Ansar al-Islam, linked to al Qaeda.
-
- The depiction by these Pentagon officials of the structure
of the resistance - though tentatively expressed - suggest a hierarchical
organisation, led by former Saddam officials, with Saddam at its head,
and allied to groups of foreign jihadists and al Qaeda under a single command.
-
- Whether true or not, it is a politically convenient description
of the resistance for the Bush regime, suggesting as it does that the rebels
represent no more than the desperate remains of Saddam's regime with no
wider resonance, despite escalating attacks.
-
- It is not, however, recognised by British officials.
The picture that they paint of what is going on in Iraq is a more chaotic
and a far more dangerous one.
-
- 'What we are looking at,' one UK official told The Observer,
'is not some monolithic organisation with a clear command. That would be
far easier for us to deal with and get into. Instead, we are looking at
lots of different groups with different agendas. They are locally organised
with each having its loyalty focused on middle-ranking former commanders.'
-
- What he describes is a network of partisan-type groups
without a central command and links between them based on personal relationships
- an organic rather than monolithic structure.
-
- The groups' communications - based, say Iraqis, on couriers,
often teenage boys, to carry messages - have been equally difficult for
the coalition to penetrate.
-
- And they have very little difficulty in getting materiel
for attacks or the money to finance the operations. Iraqi military doctrine
under Saddam, especially after the first Gulf war, long envisaged the risk
of a second US-led invasion that would attempt to depose the regime. The
consequence was the placement across the country of hidden caches of weapons,
explosives, fuel and cash, all in vast amounts - everything required to
run a guerrilla war.
-
- 'We are looking at three categories of group involved
in the resistance,' said one official. 'There are ex-Baathists, especially
in the Sunni triangle [where the majority of Special Republican guard and
members of Saddam's security organisations were traditionally recruited
from]. Then there are groups like Ansar al-Islam and groups that may be
affiliated to al Qaeda or sympathetic to them. Finally, there are foreign
jihadists who have been drawn to Iraq to fight Americans.'
-
- It is a view endorsed by a former colonel in the Iraqi
security services interviewed by The Observer. 'It is a mixture of different
groups - former Mukhabarat [security services], religious groups and Baath
party members. If Saddam is involved in the resistance, as some at the
Pentagon are claiming, then he believes he is just one leader among many.
-
- 'Saddam is playing some role but he is not the only one.
Some groups may not even know he is leading them. I think that he is moving
around meeting as many of these groups as possible.
-
- 'These groups are separate, but work together more and
more as the various leaders are contacting each other. Most people are
not doing it because of Saddam, but for religious or nationalist reasons.
Some are criminals, who under other circumstances few people would have
anything to do with. Some are paid, but not many.'
-
- He suggested that last Sunday's rocket attack on the
Al Rashid Hotel showed a level of sophistication that was new for the resistance.
An underground cell working with staff at the hotel, which was once virtually
run by the Iraqi secret service, watched the arrival of guests while street
cleaners worked with an underground cell to position the rocket launcher.
-
- After the arrival of Under-Secretary of Defence Paul
Wolfowitz, the launcher, disguised as a generator, was remotely activated.
-
- Most worrying of all is the emergence of a broad, post-Saddam
ideology across the groups. And if recent polling in Baghdad is to be believed,
it is rapidly gaining currency with ordinary Iraqis. It is crudely simple,
insisting that the US-led occupation is an assault against both Islam and
the wider Arab nation, that Iraqis must resist and that anyone who assists
the occupiers is an enemy as much as US troops.
-
- But it is not only the home-grown resistance that is
concerning the coalition. It has also been struggling to prevent a wave
of devastating suicide bombings against a variety of targets which Western
intelligence officials increasingly believe may be being carried out by
foreigners coming to fight the Americans in Iraq.
-
- Two officials have told The Observer that they do not
believe the suicide bombings are 'Iraqi style'. 'It does not feel to us
like their way of doing things,' said one.
-
- The comments follow warnings from intelligence officials
across Europe, reported in yesterday's New York Times, that since the summer
hundreds of young militants have left Europe to join the resistance in
Iraq, a trend which is also in evidence across the Arab world.
-
- The paper quotes Jean-Louis BruguiËre, France's
leading investigative judge on terrorism, who said that dozens of young
Muslim men had left France for Iraq since the summer, inspired by the exhortations
of al Qaeda leaders, even if they were not trained by the movement.
-
- According to the Iraqi colonel interviewed by The Observer:
'There is no specific information on these car bombs.' He believes that
the attacks are 'probably organised by religious Iraqi groups but carried
out by foreigners who want to become martyrs during Ramadan.'
-
- But a question that is also worrying coalition and other
officials is precisely who is organising these would-be foreign fighters
and putting them in touch with resistance groups.
-
- One disturbing theory being investigated is that Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, a former Afghan jihadist of Jordanian-Palestinian extraction
who knows the al Qaeda leadership, may have recently entered Iraq and be
organising foreign fighters the way he once organised them in Afghanistan.
-
- According to the former Iraqi security services colonel,
'These Saudis, Yemenis, Algerians, Syrians and Jordanians were trained
for these kinds of operations and want to die. They are now working with
various resistance groups whether they are religious or not.'
-
- The Bloody Toll
-
- US troops
- 359 dead - of which 234 died in combat (119 since end
- of the war) and 125 in non-combat (102 since end of
- the war)
- 563 wounded
-
- UK troops
- 51 dead - of which 19 died in combat (11 since end of
- the war) and 32 in non-combat (seven since end of the
- war)
- 53 wounded
-
- Iraqi forces
- Estimates of between 4,895 and 6,370 (unofficial
- thinktank estimates) total deaths during the war.
-
- Iraqi civilians
- Estimates range from 7,784 to 20,000
- (www.iraqbodycount.net)
-
- Journalists and media workers
- 19 dead (Non-combat - accidents and friendly fire)
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1076100,00.html
|
