"Iraqi Insurgents" Neither Iraqi nor Insurgent
Mary Madigan over at Dean's World points us to a study done by the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Israel. As an Israeli group, the opponents of the War on Terrorism will heavily discount the report, but it is fascinating to know just how many of the terrorists we've killed in Iraq aren't Iraqi:
...the paper analyzes the origins of 154 Arab jihadists killed in Iraq in the last six months, whose names have been posted on Islamist websites.
The sample does not account for all jihadists in Iraq, but provides a useful and eye-opening profile of them. Saudi Arabia accounted for 94 jihadists, or 61 percent of the sample, followed by Syria with 16 (10 percent), Iraq itself with only 13 (8 percent), and Kuwait with 11 (7 percent.) The rest included small numbers from Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Morocco (of which one was a resident in Spain), Yemen, Tunisia, the Palestinian territories (only 1), Dubai, and Sudan.
This information is pulled from the Islamist websites. Obviously, a lot of the terrorists killed in Iraq by American, Iraqi and Coalition forces have been Iraqi nationals; but the fact that the Islamist websites have only posted the names of 13 Iraqi's over the past six months out of 154 names indicates the level of foreign involvement in the anti-Iraqi/American terrorist campaign in Iraq.
Ms. Madigan goes on to point out the anti-Shia nature of the so-called "Iraqi Insurgency"; as is common in these sorts of situations, the people who have sectarian differences with the main group are hated even more than outsiders (such as Christian Americans and Israeli Jews). Regardless of what you may have heard about Islamic tolerance of different religions and ethnicities in the past as opposed to a supposedly inherent religious/ethnic bigotry in the Christian West, the fact of the matter is that Moslems are as fully capable of vile acts as anyone else.
As it turns out, I've been doing a bit of reading up on the Shia/Sunni split in the Moslem world; the orgins of this split are more than 1,000 years in the past, centering on a dispute over who is the proper "Caliph" (ie, "successor") of Mohammed. To nutshell it, the Sunnis hold to one view, the Shia's to another and the feelings on both sides are rather intense about this. Shia's constitute a decided minority of all Moslems and are considered by at least a large amount of Sunni's as God-cursed heretics out to destroy Islam from within.
While the split is 1,000 years old, the legacy of hatred and violence really only goes back to the 16th and 17th centuries. This was during the time that Shia Islam rose to political power in what is today Iran. Called Safavid Persia after the founder of the Shia monarchy which first took control, it fought many long, bloody wars with the Sunni Moslems (at the time led by the Ottoman Turks). Persecutions of a quite vile nature were common on both sides; both sides believing they had absolute, God-ordained truth on their side and had to kill the others for their own good.
At the end of the day, Sunni Islam was generally triumphant, though it was never able to bring Iran under control. Shia's remaining under Sunni rule suffered varied political, social and economic disabilities as well as the occasional brutal suppression. And this, I think, is very important as it regards Iraq; with 60% of Iraqi's being Shia and 20% being Kurds (even while being Sunni in creed), the pool of Iraqi's willing to fight against Iraq is small; and the whole point of the fight, on religious grounds, is to once again suppress the despised Shiite's.
Thus I think there are two complementary strands in the terrorist campaign in Iraq. It is, of course, anti-American in nature but there is the addition of their being an anti-Shia element and this is why we see so many foreigners, and so few Iraqi's, involved in the terrorist campaign. What Shia, after all, would want to fight against the rise of his own people to power?
The question then becomes one of how long the Sunni radicals can sustain a fight against American/Shia forces in Iraq; is there a bottomless well of recruits, or is the steam likely to run out as thousands of dead later the Americans and Shia are still in control and not looking like collapsing any time soon? I think we're starting to see the bottom of the well; reports last year put the number of "insurgents" in Iraq at about 20,000, but during the Iraqi elections it was estimated that only about 3,500 "insurgents" were active. This explains why the security forces were able to maintain a fairly calm election atmosphere and it goes on to explain why the attacks in the past two months have invariably been of the car bomb/suicide bomb variety. The last time a full-scale attack was made on a police/military post (as far as I can recall) was back in November in Mosul.
What is happening in Iraq is far more important than we ever imagined. It is not only the emergence of a democratic regime in a despotic area of the world, but it is also the chance for Moslems of different creeds to show they can live together in peace. The varied attempts by the Shia majority to respect the desires of the Sunni minority in Iraq are probably doing more to deflate the terrorist campaign than anything else. If you've been force-fed a bunch of propaganda about how the enemy will treat you horribly if they get on top but then you see in practice that things are ok, you're likely to change your mind. Why fight for Sunni domination when democracy with Shia's leads to peace and prosperity for Sunni's?
All in all, a highly encouraging thing, this report. |
