Insurgency in Iraq - a dangerous development

by Michael Jansen

After more than 14 months in Iraq, the US military cannot effectively counter either local resistance groups or foreign Islamists operating there.

One of the reasons for the US failure is its ideological approach to violent opposition to the occupation. Refusing to admit that there could be a home-grown Iraqi nationalist insurgency, senior members of the Bush administration and the military have stubbornly blamed "Saddam loyalists", "dead enders" of the Baath party, and foreign militants for attacks on US forces, Iraqis employed by the US-occupation administration and Iraqis in US-appointed governing bodies. This approach has proved to be as rooted in fiction as the administration’s insistence that ousted President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, had close connections with Al Qaeda and posed a direct threat to the US.

Iraqis dismiss the notion that "Saddam loyalists" and bitter Baathists form the cadres of local resistance groups and argue that they have more than the 5,000 members the administration claimed belong to these organisations. The US military now estimates that the number of resistants could double or treble that figure. They come from the officer class and ranks of the disbanded army, disaffected tribes, the jobless, young men out to make names for themselves and Iraqis seeking revenge against the US and its allies for the killing and abuse of family members and the destruction of the repressive but stable Iraq under the Baath.

The myth of large numbers of foreign fighters spun by the administration has been exploded by figures released by the US on the number such militants captured in Iraq since the invasion. The US claims that 42,000 people have been detained and 31,000 released; it says it now holds 11,000-13,000 detainees (Iraqi human rights organisations put that number at 18,000). Of the thousands of detainees, only 159 are foreigners, a tiny percentage of the total. The nationalities of those arrested have been given for 99: 26 Syrians, 14 Saudis, 14 Iranians, 12 Egyptians, 9 Sudanese, 5 Palestinians, 5 Yemenis, 5 Jordanians, 5 Tunisians, 1 each from Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey and Afghanistan. Nothing has been said about the other 60 who are said to be incarcerated at Bucca prison, near Umm Qasr, in the south of Iraq, where the US planned to relocate 2,500-3,000 security prisoners after the "hand-over" to the interim Iraqi government at the end of last month when prisons were supposed to turned over to the Iraqis.

Since the beginning of this year, the US has blamed sensational atrocities - car bombings which killed Iraqis and beheadings of foreigners - on the Islamist Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi. US aircraft have targeted sites in the town of Fallujah where he is, allegedly, based. While Zarqawi may well be in Iraq and could be responsible for some operations and the killing of foreign contractors and lorry drivers, he is not the sole practitioner of Islamist opposition to the ongoing occupation. Demonising him may focus the attention of ignorant US voters on a single, identifiable individual, but it will not help Iraqi and US forces on the ground in Iraq identify and deal with violent Islamist or nationalist elements.

Indeed, by focusing on Zarqawi rather than the whole range of opponents, the US and Iraqi security personnel may, once again, fail to tackle the insurgency and its causes.

Meanwhile, there are some interesting developments within the insurgency and between the Iraqi resistance and foreign Islamists. On the one hand, foreign Islamists have had a religio-ideological impact on essentially Iraqi nationalist resistance groups, transforming these formations into committed members of the violent pan-Islamist front standing against the US in the Muslim world. On the other hand, having accepted the message of foreign Islamists, Iraqi resistants are becoming increasingly critical of their operational approach, particularly the targeting of Iraq’s infrastructure and police and civil defence units.

Islamist militants, whose aim is to punish the US for its policies and actions in the Muslim world rather than liberate Iraq, claim they are striking at Iraqi "collaborators" with the US occupation. But neither Iraqi resistants nor citizens accept this line. Iraqis say opponents of the occupation should confine their attacks to US and allied troops and security contractors, and permit the country to emerge from the anarchy and chaos created by the war and the breakdown of order. The Iraqi resistance, whose goal is the withdrawal of US forces, is well aware that it must not alienate the populace by destroying power plants, disrupting oil exports and killing policemen, because local insurgents rely on ordinary Iraqis to provide shelter and protection.

There also seems to be a two-way traffic of Islamist elements, with some flowing into Iraq across its long borders with Iran, Turkey and its Arab neighbours, and others returning home, particularly to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, with the object of carrying on the struggle against the US and its friends in their home countries.

Thus, veterans of the Iraq campaign, "Iraqis", are now joining underground resistance groups mounting attacks against their own governments and Western targets in their home countries, taking over from an earlier generation of Afghanistan-returned militants, the "Afghans", who fought in the US-sponsored war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

This malign development is far more threatening to the stability of the region than the return of the Arab "Afghans", because Iraq is the geographical core of the Mashreq, the Eastern Arab world. Afghanistan always was a distant side-show. By using Iraq as both a battleground against the US and a training ground for young fighters, Arab Islamist movements are preparing the way for full-blown insurgencies similar to the Islamist rising against the Algerian government, which began in 1991 and continues today with sporadic outbreaks of violence. Furthermore, the danger posed by Iraq-returned militants will increase if the Iraqi government manages to step up its drive to capture foreign Islamists and to isolate them from the nationalist resistance by granting amnesty to Iraqi fighters.

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