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| Author: | Lionel Beehner |
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September 13, 2005
Despite some political progress, Iraq’s insurgency shows few signs of waning, experts say. The most recent attack—a series of explosions in Baghdad that began with a suicide car bomb and left at least 152 dead and hundreds wounded—marks the worst day of violence in the capital since March 4, 2004, when coordinated suicide bombs outside Shiite mosques killed 181 and wounded 573. Over the past few months, the number of attacks by insurgents, on average, has held steady at around seventy per day, down from their peak of nearly 150 per day just before the January 30 elections but still slightly higher than during the relative calm that followed the election, when attacks averaged around forty per day. Car bombs and suicide attacks also remain high.
With important political milestones ahead—including an October 15 referendum on Iraq’s constitution and parliamentary elections slated for December—some experts expect an upturn in violence in the coming months. “ Certainly the pattern the past two years has always been for the insurgency to increase its attacks during these critical milestones,” says Peter Khalil, former director of national-security policy for the Coalition Provisional Authority. The U.S. military, along with Iraqi security forces, have stepped up their efforts to drive the insurgents from strongholds such as Tal Afar, where nearly 400 rebels were arrested in a recent sweep.
Probably not, experts say. “Under any circumstance, the core element of the insurgency will continue,” says Jeffrey White, Berrie defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “[The constitution] may weaken their hold on Sunnis, but the insurgency is embedded in the Sunni community, and entrenched elements will continue to fight.” A lot also depends on the Sunni voter turnout in October’s referendum on the constitution, White says. “If large numbers of Sunnis come out and vote in large numbers, and vote yes, then that’s a signal there are lots of Sunnis ready to join the political transformation process legitimately.”
More than two years after the inception of the insurgency, experts remain divided on what the principal force is fueling it. Experts agree the insurgency comprises two main groups of fighters—former Baathists and foreign jihadis—united by their desire to disrupt the political process and drive U.S. forces out of Iraq. But within the insurgency are various ethnic and ideological strands driven by their own unique motivations.
Iraq specialists and counterinsurgency scholars have floated a variety of theories about the goals galvanizing the various insurgent groups. Among them:
According to June 23 Senate testimony by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. strategy has shifted “from conducting security operations to a heavier focus on training, equipping, and assisting the Iraqi forces.” But, he added, the 140,000 U.S. forces based in Iraq will continue “disrupting terrorist sanctuaries, such as Fallujah, and keeping [the insurgents] on the run.” The most recent counterinsurgency sweep occurred September 10-11 in Tal Afar, a heavily Sunni-Turkmen city sixty miles east of the Syrian border, which was believed to have held around 500 insurgents. Although 156 rebels were reported killed, many of the insurgents were able to flee the city via underground tunnels. After a similar strike by U.S. forces in Tal Afar last year, insurgents melted away, only to later reclaim the city once the U.S. military pulled out.
Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, compares such counterinsurgency campaigns to attacking water with one’s fist. The trouble, he says, is the city only remains “secure as long as large numbers of coalition forces are there, but then you have this return of the insurgents. The net effect over time is really minimal, if anything.” Juan Cole, a University of Michigan history professor, worries this style of attack will only exacerbate tensions among ethnic Iraqis as well as tensions with the United States. “The U.S.-Iraqi government policy now appears to be to de-urbanize the Sunni Arab heartland by destroying Sunni cities one after another,” he writes in his blog on Middle Eastern politics. “The problem with such a tactic is that it will not actually reduce attacks on the U.S. military or the Iraqi police. It will just seed ethnic hatred for decades to come.” Khalil adds that the U.S. military strategy must be backed up by an economic strategy to defeat the insurgency. “In a lot of those towns, if you don’t follow up with lots of money for economic reconstruction, you’re doomed to failure,” he says. Khalil points to recent successes by U.S. forces in Sadr City and Najaf, where military campaigns were followed by infusions of capital to rebuild the regions.
There have been a number of alternative strategies tabled in recent months. Among the most widely discussed:
Some experts say attacks by insurgents are increasingly motivated by sectarian tensions, as highlighted by a stampede killing nearly 1,000 Shiite pilgrims in late August, reportedly set off by rumors of a Sunni suicide bomber within the crowd. Further, insurgents, particularly foreign jihadis, appear to be increasingly striking soft targets like Iraqi civilians and security forces instead of U.S. forces. July saw the most fatalities of Iraqi police and soldiers since the start of the war. Insurgents have also increasingly employed so-called swarm tactics, rapidly converging from several directions on a single target. These swarms often begin with a series of car bombs, followed by a rush of fighters armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.
In addition, news reports suggest a trend by insurgents toward suicide attacks and car bombs. The frequency of such suicide attacks has picked up since the end of April, when Iraq’s new government was formed. The number of car bombs (which are mostly suicide attacks) in Iraq has increased from roughly twenty per month last summer to 135 per month in April and May this year, according to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index. Khalil, however, warns against reading too much into short-term trends and numbers. “You can’t give metrics to the insurgency because it’s so fluid,” he says.
Experts point to several factors. The obvious answer is their effectiveness, says Mia Bloom, author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror. “[A suicide attack] kills six times as many people as regular terrorist tactics. It wounds twelve times as many. And it really gets a lot more press,” she said in a CNN interview July 18. There’s also a clear linkage between the suicide bombings and the strategic success of Iraq’s insurgency, says Peter Bergen, Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden. Suicide attacks have hobbled reconstruction efforts in Iraq, as exemplified in 2003, when bombings of the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations prompted both organizations to pull most of their personnel out of Baghdad. Suicide bombers are also efficient. “It doesn’t take as much training as, for example, putting a bomb on a subway car in such a way that nobody will notice,” says Jessica Stern, a terrorism expert at Harvard University. A secondary explanation, says Scott Atran, director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, is that kidnappings and beheadings, both commonplace last year, have fallen somewhat out of favor. “Suicide bombings have a religious and ideological aura that beheadings never did,” he says, adding that beheadings were “not seen as a legitimate means of slaughter or sacrifice for God.”
It still may be too soon to tell. Insurgencies, after all, are generally fought over years, not months, so their evolution cannot be measured in such a short time period, experts say. “In modern military history they have lasted, on average, ten to fifteen years, and many—Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam—have gone more than a quarter-century,” wrote Thomas X. Hammes, a former Marine colonel, in an April 21 New York Times op-ed. Insurgencies generally undergo three phases: the first is the organizational and recruiting phase, which is largely nonviolent; the second phase entails guerilla-style, hit-and-run attacks, as well as attempts by insurgents to grab and hold territory; and phase three involves larger, more conventional force-on-force attacks against the government in charge. Experts disagree over whether the Iraqi insurgency is following a similar pattern, and if so, which phase the insurgency has entered. “It’s not proceeding along the classical lines of what people consider a Maoist insurgency,” White says.
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