Nov 27 2006
Sunnis Purging Iraq Of Al Qaeda
The most interesting news out of Iraq is that the Sunnis are now taking out the Al Qaeda terrorists and their Iraqi supporters. The ‘sectarian’ violence being reported in the country probably has a lot to do with cleansing the place of Al Qaeda and Islamo-Fascists forces. The truth is Iraq is fighting for its independence and Al Qaeda is reeling from the fact that all three factions in Iraq are now taking up arms against them:
Local people say that this new and increasingly bloody conflict, pitting former Iraqi Baathists against well-armed Islamic groups, may signal the start of a new phase in the country’s three-year-old war.
They believe the conflict is creating divisions within Iraq’s Sunni minority that has the potential to destabilise the region long after the US military has gone home.
The latest fighting began when former members of Saddam’s disbanded Baath party started attacking other Sunnis who were working with Al-Qaeda and foreign Islamists to carry out attacks against the American army, Iraqi police and the country’s majority Shias.
The ex-Baathists’ offensive has been so successful, local people say, that Iraqi groups working with al-Qaeda have been forced to divert their attacks away from the Americans to focus on fighting the al-Awda party, as the new secular Sunni movement is called.
This is both good and bad news. The good news is Al Qaeda is probably facing its toughest time in Iraq and all the predictions of being able to draw down coalition troops next year may have merit. The fighting is always fiercest near its end, and Al Qaeda made a bad move in threatening the Sunnis:
In early November, this growing conflict took a new turn when masked gunmen linked to al-Qaeda distributed flyers and posters throughout al-Anbar province threatening to execute anyone from Al-Awda.
“The Baath secular party will find no quarter in the new principality of the Islamic State of Iraq,” read one flyer.
Since then, several high-ranking officials from the former Iraqi army have been found murdered throughout Anbar province.
By attacking the Sunnis Al Qaeda brought the last of the three major factions in Iraq onto the side of the Democratic government. While this is a good sign, it also means Al Qaeda is going to get desparate for one final push to get the US Democrats to surrender – and ASAP before Al Qaeda is impacted so badly they cannot recover. More on the Sunni-Al Qaeda battle here, and also here. And the US is not doing to badly itself – they captured 10 terrorists planting IEDs the other day.
Sounds like Tamerlane all over again! Hope so!
I suspect that the real question will be whether or not Al Quaeda tries an attack in CONUS.
Strata
Caught in another prevarication.. you said “By attacking the Sunnis Al Qaeda brought the last of the three major factions in Iraq onto the side of the Democratic government.”
the truth from your link says…
“Although both groups are in principle opposed to the US presence in Iraq and the Shia-led government in Baghdad, Anbar residents say a rapprochment between the two is unlikely.”
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I have been reading for many months that the US has been in direct dialogue with some Sunni tribes and have gotten them on board to fight Al Quada. Al Quada killed some of their head tribesman and has gotten on the wrong side of the tribes. I wasn’t sure how well it would go, but seems that they have mobilised to kill the Al Quada guys. The tribes not on board (one of the leaders has an arrest warrant out for him, is hiding in Jordan,) these tribes are hiding Al Quada fighters. So it will be a fierce battle. But the good guys know who the bad guys are. MSM has not reported how the US has been working in the Anabar Provence. Recently alot of US deaths have been in this Provence helping set up military fighters and fighting with them. To bad MSM never reports the context on the situation.
Another thought, have you noticed that after the election, hardly any reporters report US deaths in the same head line fashion?
One other thing, it seems that AP and LA times are using stringers who are feeding them really bad information. Like AP reported that Sunnis were burned alive. No conformation to date, also no correction. The Pentagon can’t keep up with all the bogus stories.
Kathie
You do realize that native Sunni Iraqi insurgents have killed both al Qaeda and US troops, opposing the illegal intrusion into their
country of both equally, do you not?
Ken, yea I do. However things can change, like Sunnis realizing that Al Quada is worse then the US. Any way, so what?
Strata
this pertinent paste from juancole.com today–and he is a professorial expert on all manner of Arab culture and politics.
“(Despite the denials of Bush administration officials such as Condi Rice, the Arab and Islamic opposition to US presence in Iraq has at least something to do with local perceptions that the US invaded Iraq on behalf of Israel, and Iraqis often refer to US troops as “al-Yahud,” “the Jews.” This is conspiracy theory thinking and wrong-headed, but it is the reality on the ground. Even the notorious attack on the four mercenaries in Falluja was done in the name of the murdered Palestinian leader Sheikh Yassin. The deeply unpopular US support for Israel’s depredations against the Palestinians was one of the things that foredoomed a US military occupation of a major Arab country.)
****The idea that al-Anbar tribal forces will pull the US fat from the fire is a non-starter. Some of the tribes are openly agitating on behalf of Saddam Hussein. Any who are fighting the Salafis or Muslim fundamentalists are doing it as a grudge match. Tribes are notoriously factionalized among themselves and seldom unite for very long. The rural tribes just aren’t a big center of power in Iraq any more– it is largely urban and the power centers are urban political parties and their paramilitaries. Those urban forces have vast hinterlands of practical and monetary support in the region– Iran for the Shiites, the Oil Gulf and small-town Jordan and Syria for the Sunni Arabs. They are not going to decline
Ken,
Juan Cole is an idiot. Figures you would look up to him. Cole has been predicting doom and gloom in Iraq unsuccessfully for 4 years now. It is amazing someone could be so consistently wrong. He’s definitely your type.
Ken,
This is your final warning. Keep a civil tongue or you are outta here.
AJStrata
http://abcnews.go.com/
current ABC NEWS front page, by the way agrees with expert Cole, calling Iraq “a new phase of horror.”
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2021233.ece
Juan Cole has been CORRECT for four years, as Iraq descended into the horror which Pulitzer Prize war reporter Patrick Cockburn depicts in today’s Independent.
But my censored point to you was, it is easy for an anonymous blogger who has no family or close friends in Iraq and one without ties or sympathy for native Iraqis to pretend that Iraq is anything but
a horror show and to disparage a professional academic married to
a Mideasterner who puts his reputation on the line in his commnetary.
No comment on Matt Lauer’s hopeful “Cronkite moment”
acknowledging at least six months too late, Iraq is in civil war?
enuff said! classified Marine report says Anbar Province
Lost to Insurgency
Anbar Picture Grows Clearer, and Bleaker
By Dafna Linzer and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, November 28, 2006; A01
The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda’s rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate in recent months about the military’s mission in Anbar province.
The Marines recently filed an updated version of that assessment that stood by its conclusions and stated that, as of mid-November, the problems in troubled Anbar province have not improved, a senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday. “The fundamental questions of lack of control, growth of the insurgency and criminality” remain the same, the official said.
The Marines’ August memo, a copy of which was shared with The Washington Post, is far bleaker than some officials suggested when they described it in late summer. The report describes Iraq’s Sunni minority as “embroiled in a daily fight for survival,” fearful of “pogroms” by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on al-Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital.
True or not, the memo says, “from the Sunni perspective, their greatest fears have been realized: Iran controls Baghdad and Anbaris have been marginalized.” Moreover, most Sunnis now believe it would be unwise to count on or help U.S. forces because they are seen as likely to leave the country before imposing stability.
Between al-Qaeda’s violence, Iran’s influence and an expected U.S. drawdown, “the social and political situation has deteriorated to a point” that U.S. and Iraqi troops “are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar,” the assessment found. In Anbar province alone, at least 90 U.S. troops have died since Sept. 1.
The Post first reported on the memo’s existence in September, as it was being circulated among military and national security officials. Several officials who read the report described its conclusions as grim.
But the contents have not previously been made public. Read as a complete assessment, it paints a stark portrait of a failed province and of the country’s Sunnis — once dominant under Saddam Hussein — now desperate, fearful and impoverished. They have been increasingly abandoned by religious and political leaders who have fled to neighboring countries, and other leaders have been assassinated. And unlike Iraq’s Shiite majority, or Kurdish groups in the north, the Sunnis are without oil and other natural resources. The report notes that illicit oil trading is providing millions of dollars to al-Qaeda while “official profits appear to feed Shiite cronyism in Baghdad.”
As a result, “the potential for economic revival appears to be nonexistent” in Anbar, the report says. The Iraqi government, dominated by Iranian-backed Shiites, has not paid salaries for Anbar officials and Iraqi forces stationed there. Anbar’s resources and its ability to impose order are depicted as limited at best.
“Despite the success of the December elections, nearly all government institutions from the village to provincial levels have disintegrated or have been thoroughly corrupted and infiltrated by Al Qaeda in Iraq,” or a smattering of other insurgent groups, the report says.
The five-page report — written by Col. Peter Devlin, a senior and seasoned military intelligence officer with the Marine Expeditionary Force — is marked secret, for dissemination to U.S. and allied troops in Iraq only. It does not appear to have been made available to Iraqi national forces fighting alongside Americans.
The report, “State of the Insurgency in Al-Anbar,” focuses on conditions in the province that is home to 1.25 million Iraqis, most of whom live in violence-ridden towns such as Fallujah, Haditha, Hit, Qaim and Ramadi.
Devlin wrote that attacks on civilians rose 57 percent between February and August of this year. “Although it is likely that attack levels have peaked, the steady rise in attacks from mid-2003 to 2006 indicates a clear failure to defeat the insurgency in al-Anbar.”
Devlin suggested that without the deployment of an additional U.S. military division — 15,000 to 20,000 troops — plus billions of dollars in aid to the province, “there is nothing” U.S. troops “can do to influence” the insurgency.
He described al-Qaeda in Iraq as the “dominate organization of influence in al-Anbar,” surpassing all other groups, the Iraqi government and U.S. troops “in its ability to control the day-to-day life of the average Sunni.”
Al-Qaeda itself, now an “integral part of the social fabric of western Iraq,” has become so entrenched, autonomous and financially independent that U.S. forces no longer have the option “for a decapitating strike that would cripple the organization,” the report says. That is why, it says, the death of al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June “had so little impact on the structure and capabilities of al-Qaeda,” especially in Anbar province.
The senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his work, said yesterday that he largely agrees with Devlin’s assessment, except that he thinks it overstates the role of al-Qaeda in the province. “We argue that it is a major element in Anbar, but it is not the largest or most dominant group,” he said.
In a final section of the report, titled “Way Ahead,” Devlin outlined several possibilities for bringing stability to the area, including establishing a Sunni state in Anbar, creating a local paramilitary force to protect Sunnis and to offset Iranian influence, shifting local budget controls, and strengthening a committed Iraqi police force that has “proven remarkably resilient in most areas.”
Devlin ended the assessment by saying that while violence has surged, the presence of U.S. troops in Anbar has had “a real suppressive effect on the insurgency.” He said the suffering of “Anbar’s citizens undoubtedly would be far worse now if it was not for the very effective efforts” of U.S. forces.
The Marine Corps headquarters had no comment on the August report or the updated assessment, Lt. Col. Scott J. Fazekas, a spokesman, said yesterday.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.