The Economist, 08 July 2004
TRYING to make good on his robust start in office, Iraq’s new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, this week announced a new security law to give his fledgling security forces, aided by the American-led multinational force, wider powers to clobber the insurgents and their suspected helpers. Under a new “national safety law”, his government can impose curfews, allow searches and detain suspects for up to 60 days. Mr Allawi’s hope is that ordinary Iraqis, desperate for security, will turn against the insurgents, especially foreign ones, and deprive them of succour. It is too soon to see signs of this happening already. But divisions among the insurgents may be emerging for Mr Allawi to exploit.
The insurgency is still going strong. The shaky truce between the Americans and the rebels that has prevailed in their Fallujah stronghold, to the west of Baghdad, has enabled them to divert their energies elsewhere in the Sunni triangle west, east and north of Baghdad. This week insurgents battled with American and Iraqi troops in the heart of Baghdad. Masked men took control of Samarra, north of the capital, after American commanders pulled the last of their troops out of the town—and promptly banned the wearing of jeans. Insurgents claimed to hold another town, Qaim, on the Syrian border. Last week, wearing jihadi bandannas, they briefly occupied the centre of Baquba, north-east of Baghdad.
The new government stresses two factors that it hopes will work against the rebels. The first is the growing revulsion of many Iraqis towards the rebels’ penchant for targeting all compatriots who are alleged to “collaborate” with the new regime and its foreign backers. This week, for instance, restaurants in Baghdad’s poshest district, Mansour, shut down in protest against the killing of three waiters at one of Baghdad’s best eateries, apparently for serving American troops. A barber in the same area was killed for similar reasons.
The second factor is the rebels’ links with foreign jihadis, seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the country’s agony for a dubious cause. This week the new justice minister, Malik Dohan al-Hassan, waved a list of 25 non-Iraqi names, blaming Syria and Iran, among others, for egging on outsiders to keep Iraq on the boil. A couple of days earlier, two Iranians were said to have been caught wiring up a car-bomb.
The degree of foreign involvement in Iraq’s insurgency is uncertain. The interior ministry says that infiltrators have come from as far afield as Morocco and Chechnya. Some 8,000 volunteers came through Jordan and Syria to defend Iraq before the Americans attacked in March last year, but it is unclear how many stayed behind after Saddam Hussein was toppled.
What is clear is that many more jihadis did pour in after the conventional phase of the war. One early decree of the (now departed) American proconsul, Paul Bremer, abolished Iraq’s border guard. Even today, only three of 36 former checkpoints on the long and porous border with Saudi Arabia are manned. Adnan Karim, a former admiral whose think-tank now analyses the rebel groups for Mr Allawi, reckons that Fallujah alone has 1,000 foreign jihadis.
Plainly, estimating the numbers is tricky. The justice minister admits that only 29 out of several thousand detainees suspected of rebel activity are foreign Arabs. American defence officials say that of 6,000-odd detainees held under their regime, some 90 were foreigners, of whom about half were Syrian. Judging by their accents on jihadi videos recorded before they go to their deaths, almost all the suicide-bombers in Iraq have been foreign.
But the biggest pool of rebels was almost certainly provided by Mr Bremer’s dissolution of the 3m-strong Baath party and the 700,000-strong army and security forces. The Republican Guard, at the heart of Mr Hussein’s forces, melted away during the war only to regroup after the conventional phase was over. The mainly Sunni officer class provide cash, training and arms for the rank-and-file.
With an eye to such people, Mr Allawi is offering an amnesty to “resistance fighters” provided they hand in their weapons. At the same time, he is trying to call back some six army divisions, totalling more than 50,000 men, who served under Mr Hussein. Once again, it is too soon to say whether such plans will bear fruit.
It is clear, in any event, that a portion of Iraqi rebels who started off as disgruntled demobilised soldiers have been converted to the Islamist cause. Mr Karim, Mr Allawi’s admiral-turned-analyst, counts some 36 different Sunni insurgent groups, inspired by the beliefs of puritanical Salafis, Sufi mystics and Muslim Brothers. Others owe allegiance to tribal sheikhs. There is a powerful crew of jihadi Kurds. A further half-dozen Shia rebel groups, the largest led by an angry young cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, operate in Baghdad and the south, says Mr Karim. It is not yet clear whether Mr Allawi will succeed in bringing the turbulent Mr Sadr peacefully on side.
The Salafis are the most dedicated, a shade more so than the Sufis. Originally a Saudi movement, their Iraqi branch dates back to the 1960s but stayed on the fringe for decades. Only in the 1990s, when the UN’s economic sanctions made many Iraqis poor, bitter and prey to outside influence and cash, especially from Saudi Arabia, did the movement spread. After Mr Hussein’s fall, its fundamentalist preachers seized the capital’s biggest mosques and filled them with their followers.
“Iraqis who collaborate with Americans are apostates,” says their Baghdad mullah, Mehdi Sumeidi, using a term which in Islam carries a death penalty. Policemen who fight alongside unbelievers are unbelievers too, says another prominent Salafi, a dentist called Fakhri al-Qaissi, when asked about the killing of seven national guardsmen near Baghdad shortly after Mr Allawi took office. Mr Karim says that a Salafi jurists’ council issues such fatwas for the rebels to implement.
Mr Fakhri says it has yet to be decided whether Mr Allawi himself is an infidel. But there is no doubt that the jihadis, who vaunt their record of fighting against western-backed dictators elsewhere in the Arab world, think they will gain strength as a result of Mr Allawi’s much-heralded martial laws. Within hours of his declaration of them, missiles were fired at his party headquarters in Baghdad, rebels skirmished with nearby American forces, and a suicide-bomber blew himself up at a memorial service near Baquba attended by officials of the new government.
Nationalists versus the new caliphate
An early straw of hope for Mr Allawi is reported discord in jihadi ranks between Iraqi nationalists and the more zealous internationalists, apparently led by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian with a reputation for damning colleagues with whom he disagrees as infidels. Even Osama bin Laden is said to have found him too extreme when they were together in Afghanistan.
A growing number of Iraqi insurgents are fed up with the car-bombings apparently organised by Mr Zarqawi’s group and often set off by foreign jihadis. Iraq’s Salafi preachers say that the rebels have no need of foreign help.
It may not be clear for a month or so whether Mr Allawi’s efforts to divide the rebels, offer some of them an amnesty and tar their leaders with the brush of friendship with the likes of Mr Zarqawi have begun to work. Meanwhile, he and his new team are bracing themselves for more violence, some of it aimed at themselves, as infidels and American puppets.
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Citation: “Who are the insurgents — and can they be defeated?” The Economist, 08 July 2004.
Original URL: http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2908831
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