"This is the wild wild west. This is Qaim, at the western edge of Anbar province, bordering on Syria. It is a dusty, arid and lawless region, with large towns by the Euphrates River, which snakes into Iraq from Syria. Americans are attacked on a daily basis by a recalcitrant community..." - Every time the wind blows, an Asia Times Online series by Nir Rosen, October 2003
About 1,000 US Marines supported by armor and attack helicopters began the major offensive in west-central Iraq on May 7. Since then, the sweep, dubbed Operation Matador, has seen some of the heaviest fighting since US forces took control of Fallujah in November.
US General James Conway told reporters in Washington that three Marines had been killed in western Iraq and fewer than 20 wounded. News reports say that some 110 insurgents have also been killed in the fighting.
Conway said that the operation was intended to rout insurgents from new strongholds they have established in western Anbar province since being pushed out of Fallujah in the east of the majority Sunni province some six months ago.
"Recently, I think, it is fair to say that commanders have evaluated that the center of resistance in Anbar [province] has moved further west since the fall of Fallujah and is now in the Ramadi-Hit corridor, extending westward, as opposed to Ramadi-Fallujah," Conway said.
Intense fighting has taken place in a string of towns toward the Syrian border at the western edge of the province. The area is part of the insurgents' smuggling route for weapons, supplies and foreign fighters believed to be arriving via Syria. The region is also thought to be a safe haven for al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
US forces have encountered well-organized resistance on both sides of the Euphrates River, which runs through the area. In one measure of the scale of the offensive, US forces completed construction of a pontoon bridge across the Euphrates on May 9 to bring heavy armored vehicles over to the south bank. Previously, there had been no easy way to deploy armored vehicles throughout the area.
Conway said that the insurgents were well trained and equipped and had put up fierce resistance. "There are reports that these people [insurgents] are in uniforms, in some cases are wearing protective vests, and there is some suspicion that their training exceeds that of what we have seen with other engagements further east," he said.
News reports say that fighting has taken place in the towns of Obeidi, Rommanah, Karabilah and Qaim as insurgents are reported to have fired at Marines from rooftop positions and bunkers.
Analysts say the level of fighting raises new questions about how much progress Washington and Baghdad are making in the now two-year-old effort to quell the insurgency.
US commanders had hoped that routing the insurgents from their earlier stronghold in Fallujah would knock the insurgency off balance. In that operation, some 1,500 insurgents were killed and another 1,500 captured. But the insurgents have since shown themselves to be highly flexible in moving their operations to other parts of central Iraq.
Jeremy Binnie, Middle East editor of the London-based Jane's Sentinel Security Assessments, says it is still too early to know whether the insurgency is maintaining its strength or gradually waning. He says both sides can point to successes and setbacks. "Whilst clearly the situation isn't great for the Iraqi [government] and the US military in that country, it's not going all that well for the insurgents either," he said.
But Binnie says there are signs that new political initiatives in Baghdad could divide and weaken the insurgency in ways that military pressure alone has yet to do. "There are rumors that some of the Ba'athist factions [in the insurgency] are talking to the government and there might be some possibility of an amnesty, especially now that a Sunni tribal defense minister has been appointed," he said. "He might be able to bring some people in from the insurgency. And the insurgents, in some of their rhetoric and statements they publish on the Internet, seem to be concerned over the possibility of some of these factions going over."
Still, the fight both on the political and military front shows no signs of ending soon. Wednesday, insurgents struck a direct blow against the new government by kidnapping Anbar Governor Raja Nawaf Farhan al-Mahalawi. The governor, who was appointed to his post just a few days ago, was abducted while traveling to view the US assault in the west of the province.
The region has seen sporadic fighting for months, but since late February, insurgents appear to have undertaken a campaign to forcefully engage US forces. Iraqi media in February reported repeated attacks by insurgents aimed at ambushing, then engaging US Marines in and around Qaim. The US military reportedly dropped leaflets over the town asking citizens not to cooperate with the insurgents and to report insurgent hideouts.
The escalation, and a buildup of US forces outside the town, prompted local notables and clerics to form a city council to run the city's affairs in case of an incursion, al-Jazeera reported on March 2. Tanzim Qa'idat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, the al-Qaeda-affiliated group led by Zarqawi, posted at least two statements on jihadi websites on March 3 and 7 claiming successes against US forces in the towns and villages around the border. The bodies of some 30 Iraqis were discovered in Qaim on March 9, and while all of the dead were dressed in civilian clothes, some Iraqi officials claimed the dead were Iraqi soldiers who disappeared some 10 days earlier.
Insurgent attacks on US Marines continued throughout March, but US Marines appeared to be cutting off insurgent lines, as alluded to in a series of mid-March statements by Zarqawi followers to jihadi websites. A March 15 statement by Zarqawi's group posted on the ekhlaas.com jihadi website sent a message to the "besieged mujahideen" in Anbar province. The message attempted to reinvigorate the besieged insurgents by drawing on Koranic stories and verses about noble fighters, saying, "When the infidel parties besiege you all around, fight you with tanks, planes, and all they have, you, lions of Islam, have only God, in whom you put your trust and upon whom you completely rely."
Iraq's Sunni resistance leaders also touted the strength of the resistance in Qaim. Muhammad Ayyash al-Kubaysi, the representative of the Muslim Scholars Association abroad, claimed in an April 8 interview with al-Jazeera television that the fighters in Qaim had managed to prevent US forces from entering the town. Al-Kubaysi, much like supporters of insurgent fighters in Fallujah, appeared to believe that the insurgents possessed some God-given supernatural powers that would enable them to drive US forces from Iraq. Jihadis in an April 18 Internet statement dedicated that day's attack on a US base to al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and reminded supporters to "not forget to mention us in your prayers".
By early May, the US military was closing off Qaim, Haqlaniyah and Hadithah, towns farther east along the road to Ramadi, Meanwhile, the insurgency issued sharp denials to US claims of success in the fighting.
Town lawless since invasion Insurgents established a stronghold in Qaim in the early days following the US-led invasion of Iraq. International media reported the infiltration of foreign fighters across the Iraq-Syria border in the spring and summer 2003, and the US military acknowledged the existence of "rat lines" for insurgent fighters in Husaybah, just north of Qaim, in December 2003 when they launched a series of house-to-house sweeps in the town in an effort to crush the insurgency.
"The insurgents have a series of small cells, and the small cells know what their own are doing," The Washington Times quoted Lieutenant Colonel Joe Buche as saying in a December 3, 2003, report. "If we can get to the guys in the center, then the whole network could fall apart." That goal was apparently not realized at the time.
A February 2004 report published in the Iraqi daily al-Mu'tamar described the resistance that began in Qaim after the war as a mix of local resistance and foreign mujahideen fighters who saw themselves as part of the jihad to establish an Islamic state in Iraq. Much like the state of other cities in Iraq in the weeks and months after the war, Qaim was overrun with criminal gangs and a general absence of law ensued. Police in the town said that they had difficulty recruiting new members to the police force. Resentment against the US military also built among at least some members of the community, where tribal law reportedly supersedes everything else. The subsequent detention of hundreds of local residents by US forces only fueled the insurgency.
The US military has long noted the difficulty in securing the 725 kilometer Syrian-Iraqi border. Despite the placement of sand berms on either side of the border and Syria's supposed commitment to preventing the illegal crossing of insurgents, the insurgents continue to penetrate the border area, providing a plethora of fighters to replace those detained or killed. Until the border is truly secure, the insurgency will continue. As a group of men on the Syrian side of the border contended to the US TV news program Frontline for an article published on April 26, it is the duty of Muslims to wage jihad against invaders.
Copyright (c) 2005, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20036
A force of 1,000 U.S. Marines, supported by helicopters and jet fighters, swept this week through Iraq's North-West province of Anbar, on Syria's border, in a bid to destroy foreign jihadis and their safe havens. It is the largest U.S. military operation for several months.
The main target of the assault seems to be the town of Ubaydi and a string of villages on the north bank of the Euphrates, which are being given the Falluja treatment - that is to say air strikes and tank fire against residential quarters followed by house-to-house searches to flush out the 'rebels' from the ruins. There is no estimate yet of Iraqi civilian casualties.
The thinking behind the operation is that foreign fighters, together with their weapons, explosives and funds, are continuing to infiltrate across the porous Syrian border; in other words, that Syria constitutes a 'rear base' for the insurrection.
The trouble with this theory is that there is little evidence to support it. Living in fear of an American attack, Syria has done its best to seal its border with Iraq. Moreover, the insurgency seems to be an overwhelmingly Iraqi enterprise, of which the major elements are Sunni officers and men of Saddam Hussein's former armed forces and praetorian guard, Baath party activists, and small radical Islamist groups, such as that led by the murderous Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.
Foreign fighter involvement, numbered in the dozens rather than the thousands, would seem to be minimal. Of the rebels captured at the battle of Fallujah, only six percent were foreigners. And, as with that battle, the fighters at Ubaydi and its surrounding villages seem to have been professional, well-trained and determined - clearly composed of former military personnel - before melting away into the desert in the face of superior American firepower.
The strong suggestion is that the insurgents had prior warning of the American attack, raising the possibility that some members of the new Iraqi forces being trained by the U.S. may also be in touch with the rebels.
The conclusion reached by most military experts, whether American, European or Israeli, is that there is no prospect of a quick U.S. military victory in Iraq. One informed British view is that it will take the Americans at least five years to train an Iraqi force strong enough to take on the insurgents. Another view, by a former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, is that the U.S. will have to maintain a strong military presence in Iraq and the region for at least a decade.
Will the American public accept to bear such a long-term burden? The war is proving very expensive and increasingly unpopular. Fatal U.S. military casualties are edging steadily toward the 1,700 mark, with perhaps ten times that number of wounded, while Congress this week approved a further $82 billion dollars for the war effort, pushing the cost to well over $250 billion.
The possibility of a strategic disaster
In spite of this colossal effort, there is still no clear way forward for the United States. Either course -whether to stay in Iraq in the hope of an uncertain victory, or to cut its losses and quit - carries great risks. Meanwhile the coalition is unravelling. The Bulgarians and Italians are leaving in the coming months, while the Japanese and the British are likely to withdraw next year. At this month's general election, the British electorate told Prime Minister Tony Blair very clearly that it opposed the war and wanted the troops brought home.
It is no exaggeration to say that the U.S. is facing a possible strategic disaster in Iraq. The army is overstretched; recruitment is down; stocks of weapons, including precision-guided munitions, are depleted; the 140,000 troops tied down in Iraq are insufficient to provide security yet numerous enough to reduce America's ability to fight a war elsewhere, should an emergency arise.
Above all, there is the indefinable yet vital question of America's reputation and credibility. In this area, the destruction of Iraq - a country which posed no conceivable threat to the United States - together with the scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, have proved extremely damaging.
The one way the United States could repair the damage, and regain some credibility, especially in the Arab and Muslim world, would be for it to compel Israel to allow the emergence of a viable and independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza.
This would bring the Arab world cheering to its feet! President George W Bush says he wants a two-state solution, yet so far he has behaved more like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's 'poodle', rather than his superpower patron.
The paradox is that, if Bush were, by some miracle, to exercise his authority over Israel, the outcome would be exactly the opposite of what the pro-Israeli neoconservatives in Washington had plotted and planned when they pressed for war against Iraq. Hostile to the very idea of a Palestinian state, their vision was of Israel dominating a defeated Arab world and imposing its terms on the hapless Palestinians.
There is another striking paradox at the heart of America's wars. By overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq - both bitter enemies of Iran - the U.S. has done the Mullahs' regime in Tehran an immense service. Deliberately or not, the U.S. has installed a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. Yet the United States and the Shiite Islamic Republic of Iran regularly hurl threats and insults at each other. Such are the unpredictable consequences of war!
Meanwhile, the Iraqi insurgency shows no sign of dying down. It seems able to call on a well-nigh inexhaustible pool of well-armed fighters and suicide bombers. Whenever U.S. forces expose themselves, they are attacked.
In many parts of the country, total insecurity remains the rule rather than the exception, to the great distress of the population. Shootings and car bombs - several of them a day - take their dreadful toll. Some 350 people have been killed in the past two weeks. The numbers are uncertain because no one has time to count them. Oil pipelines are sabotaged on a regular basis, destroying the hopes of the new oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr Al Ulum, of restoring pre-war levels of production.
Hostage-taking of different nationalities continues unabated. There are currently French, Romanian, Australian and Japanese captives in the hands of shadowy groups, as well as numerous Iraqis, including, it would appear, the governor of Anbar who was seized this week to trade against an American withdrawal from the province.
A surreal political process
Behind the barricades, razor wire and formidable defences of the Green Zone in central Baghdad, Prime Minister Ibrahim Al Jaafari this week completed, at long last, the formation of his government. This followed more than three months of squabbling over cabinet posts between the various Shiite factions groups and the Kurds. The under-represented Sunnis remain sullen and disgruntled.
The new government has been sworn in, but the United States remains in control of all the levers of power, including the slowly emerging Iraqi army, police forces and intelligence service.
A 55-member committee has been formed to draft a Constitution by mid-August - a very tall order in view of the unresolved differences between the various ethnic and religious groups. New elections are due to be held before the end of the year. Will this timetable be kept, or will the security situation be such that ministers and deputies will be more concerned with their personal survival than with the future of the country?
What is clear is that America's armed intervention has sharpened sectarian antagonisms in Iraq, preparing the way for civil war - some would say it was already raging -- or for a de facto dismemberment of the country. A strong, unitary, democratic Iraq, able to play its full role in the Arab family and serve as a model for others, remains a pipedream.
News Analysis: Iraqi rebels breaking all the insurgent rules
By James Bennet The New York Times
MONDAY, MAY 16, 2005
WASHINGTON U.S. forces in Iraq have often been accused of being slow to apply hard lessons from Vietnam and elsewhere about how to fight an insurgency. Yet it seems from the outside that no one has shrugged off the lessons of history more decisively than the insurgents themselves.
The insurgents in Iraq are showing little interest in winning hearts and minds among the majority of Iraqis, in building international legitimacy, or in articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology or cause beyond expelling the Americans.
They have put forward no single charismatic leader, developed no alternative government or political wing, and have displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern now.
Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, they are cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately themselves - in addition to more predictable targets like officials of the new government.
Bombings have escalated in the last two weeks. This surge in the killing of civilians reflects how mysterious the long-term strategy remains - and how the rebels' seeming indifference to the past patterns of insurgency is not necessarily good news for anyone.
It is not surprising that reporters, and evidently U.S. intelligence agents, have had great difficulty penetrating this insurgency. What is surprising is that the fighters have made so little effort to advertise unified goals.
Counterinsurgency experts are baffled, wondering if the world is seeing the birth of a new kind of insurgency; if, as in China in the 1930s or Vietnam in the 1940s, it is taking insurgents a few years to organize themselves; or if, as some suspect, there is a simpler explanation.
"Instead of saying, 'What's the logic here, we don't see it,' you could speculate there is no logic here," said Anthony James Joes, a professor of political science at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia and the author of several books on the history of guerrilla warfare.
The attacks now look like "wanton violence," he said. "The insurgents are doing everything wrong now," he added. "Or, anyway, I don't understand why they're doing what they're doing."
Steven Metz, of the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, said the insurgency could still be sorting itself out. "It really is significant that even two years in there hasn't been anything like any kind of political ideology or political spokesman or political wing emerging," he said. "It really is a nihilistic insurgency."
He warned that this hydra-headed quality could make the insurgency hard to crush, even as the lack of unity makes it unlikely its members will rule Iraq.
A clear cause - one with broad support - is usually taken for granted by experts as a prerequisite for successful insurgency. But insurgents in Iraq appear to be fighting for varying causes: Baath Party members are fighting for some sort of restoration of the old regime; Sunni Muslims are presumably fighting to prevent domination by the Shiite majority; nationalists are fighting to drive out the Americans; and foreign fighters want to turn Iraq into a battlefield of a global religious struggle.
Some men are said to fight for money; organized crime may play a role. This incoherence is something new. "If you look at 20th-century insurgencies, they all tend to be fairly coherent in terms of their ideology," Metz said. "Most of the serious insurgencies, you could sit down and say, 'Here's what they want."'
In Iraq, insurgent groups appear to share a common immediate goal of ridding Iraq of an American presence, an objective that may find sympathy among Iraqis angry about poor electricity and water service and high unemployment.
Average Iraqis may distinguish among the groups within the insurgency and their tactics. Still, the insurgents have not publicly proposed a governmental alternative, and their anti-American message has been muddied by their attacks on civilians and by the election of an Iraqi government that has not asked the Americans to leave.
If the insurgency is trying to overthrow this regime, it is contending with a formidable obstacle that successful rebels of the 20th century generally did not face: A democratically elected government. One of the last century's most celebrated theorists and practitioners of revolution, Che Guevara, called that obstacle insurmountable.
The insurgents' choice of adversary is unusual. But the recent surge in violence, at least, follows a time-tested pattern. The insurgents are apparently trying to swamp any progress toward stability with evidence and images of chaos.
The killing in that time of at least 250 police officers, soldiers and recruits also fits a pattern, since insurgents have customarily targeted accused collaborators to isolate a regime. Less obvious is the goal in the killing of about 150 civilians.
What is curious about the Iraqi tactic is that it appears aimed at creating active opposition. The insurgency is powered by Sunnis; the civilians they have killed have been overwhelmingly Shiites and Kurds.
The goal appears to be to split apart the fragile governing coalition and foment sectarian strife. Yet if the insurgents achieve all-out civil conflict, the likely losers are the Sunnis themselves, since they are a minority.
Among Iraq's insurgents, the jihadists are one group that has suggested a sweeping goal. They want to establish a new religious caliphate with expansive boundaries. For them, the destruction and chaos in Iraq may represent creative forces, means of heightening the contrasts among sects, religions and whole civilizations.
Yet it may prove to be one of history's humbling lessons that history itself fails to illuminate the conflict under way in Iraq. No one really knows what the insurgents are up to.
"It clearly makes sense to the people who are doing it," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute. "And that, more than anything else, tells us how little we understand the region."
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
