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| Author: | Lionel Beehner |
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Updated: July 16, 2007
Large-scale suicide attacks in Iraq are up in recent months, demonstrating that al-Qaeda in Iraq and its homegrown affiliates remain a potent force even as U.S. troops surge into central Iraq. News reports also suggest these groups have altered their tactics to include multi-bomb attacks and the use of chlorine-laden explosives. The escalation of al-Qaeda-led violence in Iraq comes amid reports that high-ranking U.S. officials negotiated directly with insurgent groups such as the Islamic Army of Iraq and the 1920 Revolution Brigades, both closely aligned with al-Qaeda. There are also indicators that by targeting Sunni civilians, al-Qaeda has created a backlash among local tribes and sparked political infighting. In Anbar, long a Sunni insurgent stronghold, local tribal leaders have recently banded together to assist U.S. forces and push out al-Qaeda’s presence in the province.
According to a laptop seized by U.S. forces from a senior al-Qaeda operative in December 2006, the group’s primary mission remains sowing sectarian violence in Iraq. It aims to topple the Shiite-led government in Iraq by attacking Shiites, particularly those who have collaborated with the United States, whether they are civilians, army soldiers, or police officers, primarily in and around Baghdad. Al-Qaeda was responsible for the February 2006 attack against the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a sacred shrine for Shiites, which analysts say set off the latest wave of sectarian violence. Some of the more radical members of al-Qaeda favor the installment of a caliphate—or Islamic government—in Iraq. Short of that, they seek a safe haven from which al-Qaeda can recruit and train terrorists, according to information gleaned from jihadi websites going back to 2003.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq has changed in several ways:
Far from it, experts say. The organization remains highly decentralized and localized—a tangled web of tribal fronts, many with different means and ends. “Some experts described it as a rather loose organization that could be characterized more as school of thought than a defined group,” wrote Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in a September 2006 report. Recent press accounts suggest growing political divisions emerging between al-Qaeda and local Sunni tribes, particularly in places like Ramadi, over the targeting of Sunni civilians. “They hope that if they murder random groups of women and children, the tribes will fall back in line,” write Bing West and Owen West in the Wall Street Journal. “These tactics have locked AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] in a fight to the death against the tribal leaders. It reflects an enemy who has lost popular support for his jihad, clinging to fear alone.” This local backlash is what prompted Sunnis to disclose the whereabouts of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born former leader of the organization, who was killed last June by a U.S. air strike north of Baghdad.
Opinions vary. Some experts say with Zarqawi gone, al-Qaeda in Iraq has grown more disorganized. “It doesn’t have that distinct command-and-control structure it used to,” says Brian Fishman, senior associate at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. “Once you take away that figurehead, no one has been able to come in and wrangle all the pieces together.” There have also been reported fissures developing within al-Qaeda’s various strands. “But that is not to say al-Qaeda is on the run,” says Fishman. If anything, some terrorism analysts say the movement, while increasingly fragmented, has gained strength since last summer. Case in point: Suicide bombings by al-Qaeda militants in late March in Baghdad, Tal Afar, and Khalis left more than three hundred Iraqis killed and over six hundred wounded. At the end of the day, argues Kenneth Katzman of the Congressional Research Service, Zarqawi’s absence does not “affect the social base of the insurgency, which is that Sunnis feel humiliated.”
Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a decentralized movement with various cells, some of which work together and others which operate more independently. Among its main affiliates:
Most of the group’s funding for arms and training comes from sources and supporters in the region, including Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. It also gets financial support from Tehran (despite the fact that al-Qaeda is a Sunni organization), according to documents confiscated last December from Iranian Revolutionary Guards operatives in northern Iraq. But the bulk of al-Qaeda’s financing, says Fishman, comes from internal sources like smuggling and crime. As Bing West and Owen West write in the Wall Street Journal, al-Qaeda operatives shake down truck drivers and divert gasoline shipments to Jordan and Syria, which net them ten thousand dollars per shipment.
“They have all the money,” says Hiltermann. Perhaps more important, however, al-Qaeda and its affiliates rely on intimidation to enforce allegiance among locals, not to mention compliance to their strict Islamic codes. For example, after briefly holding Fallujah in 2004, al-Qaeda militants reportedly whipped insubordinate youngsters, beat women who wore lipstick, and carried out beheadings against “collaborators” (i.e. truck drivers or shop owners). Or more recently, after an imam of a mosque in Habbaniyah, a town in central Iraq, criticized al-Qaeda in his Friday sermon in February 2006, a truck bomb exploded and killed over fifty Iraqis.
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