No Sign of U.S. Strategy Vs. Insurgents
By JAMIE TARABAY, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, May 4, 2005
(05-04) 15:47 PDT BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) --
Iraq's insurgency is roaring back to life with a series of deadly attacks aimed at crippling the country's new government and forcing a U.S. pullout. The government, meanwhile, is wracked by infighting, with its security forces still in training and no sign of a strategy to deal with the growing violence.
Militants may have been emboldened by the vacuum left while Iraq's first democratically elected representatives spent three months jockeying for power and struggling to form a government, officials concede.
But even with that government at last in place, top officials say they have neither the forces nor the accurate intelligence necessary to quell the insurgency.
"They are an underground network of people and they are willing to die," said Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. "They hate life. They want to kill as many people as possible."
He added that they don't use identifiable locations. "You can't overrun them by taking over whole sections of the country."
Like many senior Iraqi officials — and much of the citizenry — Zebari believes the insurgents are mostly foreigners like Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other Islamic fundamentalists.
Others, including the U.S. military, believe members of the Sunni Arab minority with ties to the former regime are primarily responsible for recruiting, funding and carrying out the violence.
Shifting the blame on outsiders, though, avoids fanning sectarian hatred in the Shiite-dominated country, which the government claims is one of the insurgents' goals.
Another goal is the withdrawal of U.S. troops and their allies. In an audiotape released Friday, al-Zarqawi warned President Bush that he and his militants would "not rest while your army is here, as long as there is a pulse in our veins." An intelligence official in Washington said the tape appeared genuine.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last month that Iraq's insurgency remained undiminished in its capabilities. "And where they are right now is where they were almost a year ago," he said at a Pentagon news conference.
The Iraqi government could increase its credibility by negotiating a departure date for U.S. and other foreign troops. But Iraqi officials, unable to crush the insurgency on their own, have said the time is not right for the Americans to leave.
"We never hear any official in Iraq make a verbal call to the Americans to declare an end to their presence in Iraq ... It's the duty of the government to assert its independence," said Diaa Rashwan, an expert on radical Islam at Egypt's Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "To keep silent complicates the situation and gives more motivation to the resistance."
Meanwhile the U.S. military has been pushing barely trained Iraqi security forces to the fore, while easing back some of its front-line forces to the cover of heavily fortified military bases.
According to statistics compiled by the Brookings Institution in Washington, insurgents had killed 616 Iraqi police officers this year through Monday.
Militants are using increasingly sophisticated methods of hitting at units when they venture out, and their aim is to hit as hard as they can at the United States to make it impossible for the troops to stay.
But for U.S. troops to pull out, Iraq's government must be able to go it alone. Its leaders will need to put aside their political wrangling to come up with a plan to curb the growing power of the insurgents. That will only make their job easier in the months and years to come.
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Associated Press Writer Jamie
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