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Originally Posted by D Rice
the population of iraq is roughly 22 million. I believe i heard the number of terrorists or insurgents (i'm confused to) they estimate to be around 19,000. I have also heard the number of insurgents or terrorists in Iraq that are foreigners (Al-Quaida from Africa) is close to 15,000. I am not 100% sure on the facts but if this is the case then what bush is saying (we are fighting terrorism abroad) is true. Maybe the people of Iraq wanted thier freedom from Saddam. It looked that way when we first "liberated" them. They were tearing down statues, waving American flags, hugging soilders. I guess it took the people who hate America a few months to get there. Just a thought.
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My research results influence me to suspect that we are fighting predominantly
the hornets from the nest that Bush chose to disturb. Bush launched a "war on
terror", attacked a country where he determined that the perpetrators of the
9-11 attack were receiving sanctuary and support, and then, after an unsuccessful hunt for these ringleaders, Bush chose to shift a signifigant portion of our military forces to an elective invasion of a country unrelated to
the 9-11 attack that represented no signifigant threat to it's neighbors or
to us, using multiply inaccurate pretenses to garner the support of the U.S.
press and a majority of Americans. This invasion led to the destabalization of
Iraq and the necessity of Bush keeping a force of nearly one quarter of our
active military personnel on the ground in Iraq to contain the destabilization
from spreading to the rest of the region and endangering the security of
much of the world's oil supply. Bush must distract from his earlier misleading
statements used to justify Iraq's invasion, and the fact that it was unnecessary, costly in terms of U.S. casualties and cash, and has destablized
a country that had been shrewdly marginalized by the policies of the 2 past
presidents' administrations, by deceptively creating an impression that we
are "fighting terrorists there, so we don't have to fight them here", when our
troops are in reality fighting an enemy that is made up of Iraqis who are
only resisting in response to Bush's unnecessary invasion, while those who
Bush identified as the ringleaders of the 9-11 remain at large. Bush had
disguised his failure by not mentioning Osama Bin Laden for the last 2 years,
and by feigning ignorance when he contradicted Kerry in a debate when
Kerry pointed out that Bush went from vowing to kill or capture Bin laden in
late 2001, to telling the press that he did not think about Bin Laden and
that capturing him was not that important, just 6 months later, in spring, 2002. Bush must continue to falsely maintain that Iraq is a place to lure
foreign terrorist to, rather than run the higher risk of having to engage them
here in the U.S., or even his base of support will at some point awake to his
deceptive tactics intended to distract them from his colossal mistakes in Iraq.
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Insurgents Are Mostly Iraqis, U.S. Military Says
Tue Sep 28, 7:55 AM ET
Add to My Yahoo! Top Stories - Los Angeles Times
By Mark Mazzetti Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — The insistence by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and many U.S. officials that foreign fighters are streaming into Iraq (news - web sites) to battle American troops runs counter to the U.S. military's own assessment that the Iraqi insurgency remains primarily a home-grown problem.
In a U.S. visit last week, Allawi spoke of foreign insurgents "flooding" his country, and both President Bush (news - web sites) and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry (news, bio, voting record), have cited these fighters as a major security problem.
But according to top U.S. military officers in Iraq, the threat posed by foreign fighters is far less significant than American and Iraqi politicians portray. Instead, commanders said, loyalists of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime — who have swelled their ranks in recent months as ordinary Iraqis bristle at the U.S. military presence in Iraq — represent the far greater threat to the country's fragile 3-month-old government.
Foreign militants such as Jordanian-born Abu Musab Zarqawi are believed responsible for carrying out videotaped beheadings, suicide car bombings and other high-profile attacks. But U.S. military officials said Iraqi officials tended to exaggerate the number of foreign fighters in Iraq to obscure the fact that large numbers of their countrymen have taken up arms against U.S. troops and the American-backed interim Iraqi government.
"They say these guys are flowing across [the border] and fomenting all this violence. We don't think so," said a senior military official in Baghdad. "What's the main threat? It's internal."
In interviews during his U.S. visit last week, Allawi spoke ominously of foreign jihadists "coming in the hundreds to Iraq." In one interview, he estimated that foreign fighters constituted 30% of insurgent forces.
Allawi's comments echoed a theme in Bush's recent campaign speeches: that foreign fighters streaming into the country are proof that the war in Iraq is inextricably linked to the global war on terrorism.
Kerry has made a similar case, with a different emphasis. In remarks on the stump last week, he said that the "terrorists pouring across the border" were proof that the Bush administration had turned Iraq into a magnet for foreign fighters hoping to kill Americans.
Yet top military officers challenge all these statements. In a TV interview Sunday, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, estimated that the number of foreign fighters in Iraq was below 1,000.
"While the foreign fighters in Iraq are definitely a problem that have to be dealt with, I still think that the primary problem that we're dealing with is former regime elements of the ex-Baath Party that are fighting against the government and trying to do anything possible to upend the election process," he said. Iraqi elections are scheduled for January.
U.S. officials acknowledge that Iraq's porous border — especially its boundary with Syria — allows arms and money to be smuggled in with relative ease. But they say the traffic from Syria is largely Iraqi Baathists who escaped after the U.S.-led invasion and couriers bringing in money from former members of Hussein's government.
At the behest of the interim government, U.S. forces last month cracked down on traffic along the 375-mile Syrian border. During Operation Phantom Linebacker, U.S. troops picked up small numbers of foreign fighters attempting to cross into Iraq, officials say.
Yet the bulk of the traffic they detected was the kind that has existed for hundreds of years: smugglers and Syrian tribesmen with close ties to sheiks on Iraq's side of the border.
Top military officers said there was little evidence that the dynamics in Iraq were similar to those in Afghanistan (news - web sites) in the 1980s, when thousands of Arabs waged war alongside Afghans to drive out the Soviet Union.
Instead, U.S. military officials said the core of the insurgency in Iraq was — and always had been — Hussein's fiercest loyalists, who melted into Iraq's urban landscape when the war began in March 2003. During the succeeding months, they say, the insurgents' ranks have been bolstered by Iraqis who grew disillusioned with the U.S. failure to deliver basic services, jobs and reconstruction projects.
It is this expanding group, they say, that has given the insurgency its deadly power and which represents the biggest challenge to an Iraqi government trying to establish legitimacy countrywide.
"People try to turn this into the mujahedin, jihad war. It's not that," said one U.S. intelligence official. "How many foreign fighters have been captured and processed? Very few." <a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/latimests/20040928/ts_latimes/insurgentsaremostlyiraqisusmilitarysays">http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/latimests/20040928/ts_latimes/insurgentsaremostlyiraqisusmilitarysays</a>
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Most Fallujah insurgents are Iraqis: US
Apr 26 07:50
AFP
Most insurgents battling the US-led coalition in Iraq are Iraqis, not foreigners, according to a US marine intelligence officer at the forefront of the battle to control the hottest part of the Sunni triangle.
"The vast majority of the insurgents in Iraq are local and not foreign fighters," said Captain Ben Connable, the intelligence deputy for the US 1st Marine Division, in charge of the western al-Anbar province.
Al-Anbar, a scorched desert province of more than 1 million people, encompasses the flashpoint town of Fallujah which has been under a US marine siege for three weeks.
It boasts a high concentration of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's military and intelligence service veterans. Its long borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia serve as gateways for foreign fighters.
A burgeoning population of criminals dabbles in weapons-running, drug trafficking and car smuggling in a province notorious for smuggling, Connable said.
But all three groups collaborate and wrap themselves in the cloak of mujahideen or Islamic holy warriors, he added.
"There are very few actual mujahideen and jihadists. There is a tendency to wrap yourself in a flag, so to speak, and use it as a cover for operations," Connable said.
The cells are usually run by a military or intelligence veteran, with access to funding from abroad, including neighbouring Syria, he added. "The former regime elements have connections with other countries."
A cadre of professional fighters led by Jordanian-born Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the alleged mastermind of al-Qaeda operations in Iraq, work alongside the Iraqis, the US intelligence officer said.
But most foreign fighters are thought to be raw recruits with nothing more to offer than zeal and a willingness to die. "They're cannon fodder," he added.
Marine officers have speculated that the combatants firmly ensconced in besieged Fallujah are now only foot soldiers, both foreign and Iraqi, while the masterminds of the insurgency have skipped town.
The Zarqawi network often recruits the disaffected unemployed youths in Anbar with the promise of jihad (holy war).
"What they try to do is get local and disaffected youth and pound their heads with jihad. They are roving the street (looking) for your classic 16- to 24-year-old," the intelligence officer said.
"They themselves rarely get shot or killed. They take these kids and run them out into firefights. It's a cynical approach," said Colonel Buck Connor of the US Army's 1st Infantry Division, in charge of the Anbar town of Ramadi.
Zarqawi also can smuggle in fighters, weapons and cash to the various constituencies in the ramshackle insurgency, Connor said.
"What we are seeing is a melding of former regime elements, Ba'athists, Fedayeen, and crime syndicates," he said.
"Zarqawi uses these groups. He arranges money for heavy weaponry, smuggles people. He arranges financing... It's more like a loose spider web."
Criminals, many of them freed under a general amnesty by Saddam in October 2002, sometimes encompass the bulk of a cell. The running of drugs, weapons and other smuggling also help finance attacks, according to Connable.
He believes the unskilled foreigner with a zeal for 'holy war', combined with Iraqi criminals, are the greatest short-term threat in Iraq, while the former Saddam security professionals pose a danger in the long-run.
But he said some elements of Saddam's security services could still be redeemed.
US overseer Paul Bremer announced plans last week to recruit former high-ranking military officers for Iraq's security services.
Still, the insurgency defies categorisation.
Cells vary in size and multiply, with old structures dying off and rapidly giving birth to new ones.
"The guy is an insurgent one day and the next he is not," Connor said.
US military officials are confident they will eventually drain out the insurgency, but know that even a victory in Fallujah won't spell the end of violence.
"There are no overnight solutions," Connor said.
But for many Iraqis, Fallujah has become a symbol of the insurgency directed against the US-led coalition since the start of the occupation a year ago.
"The Americans are deluding themselves if they think they can subdue Iraqis by force or through bribery. When an Iraqi is humiliated, he rebels," said Mohammad Hamadani, a Sunni nationalist from Fallujah. <a href="http://afr.com/articles/2004/04/26/1082831466486.html">http://afr.com/articles/2004/04/26/1082831466486.html</a>
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