| -Caveat Lector-
Rebel war spirals out of control as US intelligence loses the plot The ghosts of Vietnam are returning as Baathists, zealots, criminals, tribal leaders and al Qaeda unite in a deadly alliance of hatred. Special report by Peter Beaumont in London and Patrick Graham in Baghdad Peter Beaumont in London and
Patrick Graham in Baghdad Sharp disagreements are emerging
between the US and the UK over the exact nature of the Iraqi resistance, amid
warnings that the US is losing the intelligence war against the rebels.
After eight days in which Iraqi fighters have scored a series of major blows
to the coalition and its Iraqi allies, intelligence and military officials in
Iraq and on both sides of the Atlantic are at odds over whether they are
fighting a Saddam-led movement or a series of disparate partisan groups. They
are just as divided on finding a way to halt the escalating violence.
The latest violence comes amid increasingly bleak assessments from
Washington, where the latest attacks have been compared in the media to
Vietnam's 1968 Tet Offensive against US forces and described by Sandy Berger, a
former National Security Adviser to President Bill Clinton, as a 'classic
guerrilla war'.
The comments follow leaked assessments by both the US pro-consul in Iraq,
Ambassador Paul Bremer, and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that war
against the resistance was going less well than planned, with the latter
describing a 'long, hard slog'.
By last week that long, hard slog had seen attacks on coalition forces and
the Iraqis co-operating with them reaching a level of 33 a day - more than twice
the level in July. Anti-coalition fighters have ratcheted up the scale of
attacks on schools, police and politicians, while assaults on the US-led forces
have become more confident and sophisticated.
US and UK officials admit that at the centre of the worsening crisis - which
has seen the UN and other aid agencies withdraw international staff from the
country following the bombing of the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad - is a
continuing failure of hard intelligence on exactly who is behind the resistance.
The urgency of the problem was underlined by comments by a former CIA
director last week that unless the coalition forces get a grip on the
intelligence-gathering problem - in particular building relationships with
ordinary Iraqis - it may be too late.
'We're at a crossroads,' Stansfield Turner, told the Christian Science
Monitor. 'If in the next few weeks we don't persuade the Iraqi on the street
that we're going to straighten things out... we won't get that intelligence.'
A mark of that failure, say officials, has been the inability of coalition
forces and the intelligence and policing agencies available to them to solve any
of the major bombings that began in August.
'The fundamental issue with counter-insurgency warfare is intelligence.
Intelligence is what matters and it is 90 per cent of the battle,' Gordon Adams,
a former associate director for national security, told the New York Times.
'It's knowing who they are, where they are and when they act. If we know
anything from Vietnam and the various things that have gone on in Afghanistan
and Iraq, it is that our humint [human intelligence] is terrible. We know that
we were woefully under-prepared in general.'
It is a view shared in part by British officials, who concede that attempts
to infiltrate the resistance have been without success.
Others are sharply critical of how the intelligence war against the rebels
has been handled. They point to a woeful shortage of Arab linguists and analysts
familiar with Arab culture in the US-run sector, despite being six months into
the insurgency.
To counter this, Pentagon officials briefed last week that some of these
specialists working among the 1,400-strong Iraq Survey Group on the unsuccessful
search for stockpiles of unconventional weapons would be transferred to this
effort.
So who exactly is the resistance? In recent days American officials have
briefed US papers for the first time that Saddam Hussein may be playing a
significant role in co-ordinating and directing attacks by his loyalists,
despite conceding such reports could not be corroborated.
The claims are based in part on reports that Saddam met Izzat Ibrahim, a
senior Iraqi general suspected by American officials of playing a significant
role in organising the resistance and co-ordinating with Ansar al-Islam, linked
to al Qaeda.
The depiction by these Pentagon officials of the structure of the resistance
- though tentatively expressed - suggest a hierarchical organisation, led by
former Saddam officials, with Saddam at its head, and allied to groups of
foreign jihadists and al Qaeda under a single command.
Whether true or not, it is a politically convenient description of the
resistance for the Bush regime, suggesting as it does that the rebels represent
no more than the desperate remains of Saddam's regime with no wider resonance,
despite escalating attacks.
It is not, however, recognised by British officials. The picture that they
paint of what is going on in Iraq is a more chaotic and a far more dangerous
one.
'What we are looking at,' one UK official told The Observer, 'is not some
monolithic organisation with a clear command. That would be far easier for us to
deal with and get into. Instead, we are looking at lots of different groups with
different agendas. They are locally organised with each having its loyalty
focused on middle-ranking former commanders.'
What he describes is a network of partisan-type groups without a central
command and links between them based on personal relationships - an organic
rather than monolithic structure.
The groups' communications - based, say Iraqis, on couriers, often teenage
boys, to carry messages - have been equally difficult for the coalition to
penetrate.
And they have very little difficulty in getting materiel for attacks or the
money to finance the operations. Iraqi military doctrine under Saddam,
especially after the first Gulf war, long envisaged the risk of a second US-led
invasion that would attempt to depose the regime. The consequence was the
placement across the country of hidden caches of weapons, explosives, fuel and
cash, all in vast amounts - everything required to run a guerrilla war.
'We are looking at three categories of group involved in the resistance,'
said one official. 'There are ex-Baathists, especially in the Sunni triangle
[where the majority of Special Republican guard and members of Saddam's security
organisations were traditionally recruited from]. Then there are groups like
Ansar al-Islam and groups that may be affiliated to al Qaeda or sympathetic to
them. Finally, there are foreign jihadists who have been drawn to Iraq to fight
Americans.'
It is a view endorsed by a former colonel in the Iraqi security services
interviewed by The Observer. 'It is a mixture of different groups - former
Mukhabarat [security services], religious groups and Baath party members. If
Saddam is involved in the resistance, as some at the Pentagon are claiming, then
he believes he is just one leader among many.
'Saddam is playing some role but he is not the only one. Some groups may not
even know he is leading them. I think that he is moving around meeting as many
of these groups as possible.
'These groups are separate, but work together more and more as the various
leaders are contacting each other. Most people are not doing it because of
Saddam, but for religious or nationalist reasons. Some are criminals, who under
other circumstances few people would have anything to do with. Some are paid,
but not many.'
He suggested that last Sunday's rocket attack on the Al Rashid Hotel showed a
level of sophistication that was new for the resistance. An underground cell
working with staff at the hotel, which was once virtually run by the Iraqi
secret service, watched the arrival of guests while street cleaners worked with
an underground cell to position the rocket launcher.
After the arrival of Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, the launcher,
disguised as a generator, was remotely activated.
Most worrying of all is the emergence of a broad, post-Saddam ideology across
the groups. And if recent polling in Baghdad is to be believed, it is rapidly
gaining currency with ordinary Iraqis. It is crudely simple, insisting that the
US-led occupation is an assault against both Islam and the wider Arab nation,
that Iraqis must resist and that anyone who assists the occupiers is an enemy as
much as US troops.
But it is not only the home-grown resistance that is concerning the
coalition. It has also been struggling to prevent a wave of devastating suicide
bombings against a variety of targets which Western intelligence officials
increasingly believe may be being carried out by foreigners coming to fight the
Americans in Iraq.
Two officials have told The Observer that they do not believe the suicide
bombings are 'Iraqi style'. 'It does not feel to us like their way of doing
things,' said one.
The comments follow warnings from intelligence officials across Europe,
reported in yesterday's New York Times, that since the summer hundreds of young
militants have left Europe to join the resistance in Iraq, a trend which is also
in evidence across the Arab world.
The paper quotes Jean-Louis Brugui�re, France's leading investigative judge
on terrorism, who said that dozens of young Muslim men had left France for Iraq
since the summer, inspired by the exhortations of al Qaeda leaders, even if they
were not trained by the movement.
According to the Iraqi colonel interviewed by The Observer: 'There is no
specific information on these car bombs.' He believes that the attacks are
'probably organised by religious Iraqi groups but carried out by foreigners who
want to become martyrs during Ramadan.'
But a question that is also worrying coalition and other officials is
precisely who is organising these would-be foreign fighters and putting them in
touch with resistance groups.
One disturbing theory being investigated is that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a
former Afghan jihadist of Jordanian-Palestinian extraction who knows the al
Qaeda leadership, may have recently entered Iraq and be organising foreign
fighters the way he once organised them in Afghanistan.
According to the former Iraqi security services colonel, 'These Saudis,
Yemenis, Algerians, Syrians and Jordanians were trained for these kinds of
operations and want to die. They are now working with various resistance groups
whether they are religious or not.'
The bloody toll
US troops 563 wounded
UK troops 53 wounded
Iraqi forces Iraqi civilians Journalists and media workers
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Title: Guardian | Rebel war spirals out of control as US intelligence loses the plot
