I. IRAQI INSURGENTS' FIREPOWER, TIME, DEC 7
I. IRAQ INSURGENTS SHOW OFF FIREPOWER TO TIME
TIME Interviews Dozens of Insurgents and Disgruntled Iraqis, Attends Resistance Meetings and Views Videotape of Attacks Against Coalition Forces
Guerillas Trying to Drive U.S. Casualties So High That American Public Turns Against The War – ‘They Could Succeed,’ Pentagon Official Says
Time Magazine
Sunday, Dec. 07, 2003
New York -- U.S. intelligence experts now believe the Iraq insurgents are a volatile mix of groups and free-lancers who include loyalists of the former ruling Baath Party, Fedayeen militiamen, former Republican Guard and intelligence agents, foreign jihadis, professional terrorists, paid common criminals and disaffected Iraqis, TIME's Brian Bennett and Michael Ware report from Iraq.
Over the past three months, TIME has interviewed dozens of insurgents and disgruntled Iraqis, attended resistance meetings and viewed videotape of attacks against coalition forces. Often reporters have been required to submit to blindfolds, circuitous drives by night, vehicle switching, meetings that rarely occurred in the same place and, of course, frequent personal searches for phones and tracking devices. (At no time did TIME reporters have prior information about attacks.) As seen from the inside, the insurgency looks as complex and diverse an enemy as the U.S. could possibly face.
Showing Firepower: Inside Attack on Baghdad Airport: At the modest farmhouse of a fellow member of his network of insurgents one recent evening, Abu Ali—the nom de guerre he has chosen—welcomes seven fighters into a room lined with worn sofas. Checking his watch, he abruptly rises from a sofa, throws on a woolen overcoat and orders everyone, including the reporter, to move out. The men pile into three cars and tear off in different directions. For more than an hour they cruise near the launch site until all looks clear. Then a small team walks into a flat field to aim a rack of homemade launching tubes toward the lights of the Baghdad airport, home to U.S. chopper squadrons, supply units and the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, less than two miles away. The insurgents load three air-to-air rockets they have modified to launch from the ground, flash a signal with car headlights and disappear. A second team creeps in to fire the volley, while a security detail armed with assault rifles and machine guns forms a perimeter. Beyond these fighters, according to the cell’s security chief, a ring of men with shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and rocket-propelled grenades is watching for U.S. helicopters that might try to stop them, TIME reports.
Bolder, Better Organized -- “They Could Succeed”: Attacks against coalition forces have grown bolder, better organized and broader based. A double ambush last week in Samarra “was the biggest, most sophisticated so far,” says a senior intelligence official in Washington. As a Pentagon official sees it: “They know they can’t beat us militarily, but they think they might be able to defeat us politically.” The guerrillas are trying to drive U.S. casualties so high that the American public turns against the war, he says, adding, "They could succeed."
"Bring Back Saddam": Under the apparent leadership of experienced former Saddam loyalists, the resistance network is growing more organized. Leaders of small cells that once acted independently now share intelligence and tactics and divide up targets. "They’re colonels, lieutenant colonels and majors who are really the hard-core loyalists," U.S. Major General Raymond Ordierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, tells TIME.
"Allah is Great": Not all the rank-and-file fighters are die-hard Saddam supporters. Many are thought to be devout Iraqi Muslims who believe that fighting “infidel” occupiers is a Koranic imperative. Tensions exist between former military officers and paid militia, called fedayeen in insurgent circles, and the Muslim fighters who label themselves mujahedin, or holy warrior.
U.S. officials believe most of them then carry out missions under the orders of Saddam loyalists. "They use the fundamentalists as cannon fodder," especially for lethal attacks on soft targets involving car bombs, say the officials. "Suicide bombers are generally not Iraqis or former regime types." Abu Abdullah, who earns his living building houses along the Euphrates River , says, "Islam tells us that no one should occupy our land. The Koran allows us to kill anyone to defend our country."
Mock Funerals for Soldiers Training to be Suicide Bombers: Some intelligence officials point a finger at Ansar al-Islam, a small Kurdish terror group that operated out of the northern mountains of Iraq against local Kurd rulers before the U.S. invasion. Intelligence officials say some of the highly trained men slipped away to regroup in Iran. Before the war, Ansar soldiers training to be suicide bombers were given elaborate mock funerals to prepare them mentally for their martyrdom.
How Bush Administration Portrays Insurgency: The Bush Administration, for its part, wants to portray the insurgency as mainly homegrown. That allows Washington to claim, as it repeatedly does, that when the die-hards run out of men and munitions the insurgency will dissipate. It also allows Bush to avoid the charge that the war actually increased danger to the U.S. by stirring up a hornet’s nest of terrorism. Yet the Administration’s greatest fear is that the rebellion will get too local if the general population turns on the occupiers. "We minimize their impact at our peril," says a Pentagon official.
New Effort to Blunt Insurgency: In a new effort to blunt the insurgency, the U.S. Central Command plans to form an Iraqi quick-reaction force that can identify and counter the guerillas better than the U.S. can.
What Really Happened in Samarra? In a companion story about the Nov. 30 battle near Samarra, where U.S. officials reported they had killed 54 Iraqi fighters, Bennett reports the dispute over the battle’s body count bears echoes of Vietnam, where casualty figures were routinely inflated. The U.S. has not been giving out such numbers in Iraq, but seemed eager to publicize this battle’s hefty total. Samarra hospital officials still insist that only eight Iraqis were killed, and last Monday afternoon TIME saw just two bodies lying in the hospital morgue: an elderly man and a middle-aged woman, both with Iranian identity cards. U.S. commanders stand by numbers they say were tallied from precise after-battle reports. Besides, says Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the Army’s deputy operations director, "I can’t imagine why the enemy would want to bring a dead body to the hospital."
The full story will be on TIME.com Sunday morning.
