The recent capture of a top al-Qaeda man in Iraq does not mean that the Americans and their Iraqi allies are winning the war
The Economist, 06 September 2006.
SOUNDING unusually perky, the Iraqi government has presented the recent capture of the supposed deputy commander of al-Qaeda in Iraq as evidence that the authorities may at last, albeit gradually, be starting to win the war against the insurgency. This follows the killing by American forces in June of al-Qaeda’s long-time leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Iraq’s government has been making other optimistic noises. The deputy prime minister said this week that half of Iraq’s 18 provinces would come under the direct control of Iraqi forces, rather than those of the American-led coalition, by the end of this year.
The implication is that the Iraqi regular forces, which officially number some 300,000, are increasingly proving able to stand on their own feet—and should be able eventually to contain and wear down the mainly Sunni insurgents, who are thought to number at least 20,000. In the past month, an American and a British general have said that security has improved.
However, in the Sunni-inhabited swathe of Iraq around Baghdad and to the west and immediate north of the capital the situation still looks bleak and bloody. Since the bombing in February of one of the Shias’ holiest shrines, in Samarra, north of Baghdad, the insurgency has shifted from being chiefly directed against the Americans and their allies to something close to a sectarian war between Sunni and Shia Arabs. Though Baghdad has not yet been physically divided by barricades into separate zones, as Beirut was during its 15-year civil war from 1975, sectarian cleansing is still taking place and tens of thousands of people living in mixed areas have been displaced.
Fear of a complete division of Baghdad is still strong. Since March the death rate among Iraqis has risen, by some estimates, to 3,000 a month, mostly in the capital, though it may have dropped again in the past few weeks. In addition, large areas to the west and north of Baghdad remain completely insecure. While Iraqi and American security forces sweep through one area, apparently flushing out the insurgents, the latter often simply move to another.
The notion that southern Iraq is fairly peaceful is misleading too. In fact an array of militias, many of them nominally loyal to the Mahdi Army of the firebrand Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, holds sway over the area. These pay little heed either to the central government in Baghdad or to the British forces which are supposed to oversee law and order in the south but which often turn a blind eye to the militias’ excesses.
Against the backdrop of the recent success in capturing the senior al-Qaeda man (and killing or seizing some 20 of his comrades), several new features of the war have appeared. One is that many Sunnis, especially in beleaguered parts of Baghdad where they are surrounded by Shia areas, may begin to look to the emerging Iraqi army in a more friendly light than in the past. This is because the police, by contrast, have been heavily infiltrated by the Shia militias, which have been widely accused by Sunni Arabs of carrying out sectarian murders, especially since the Samarra bombings.
At the same time, in a bloody new twist, the Iraqi army has in the past few weeks attacked the militias, especially those who claim to follow Mr Sadr. Since Mr Sadr’s followers in parliament are an important pillar of the government, this fighting, if it continues, risks pulling the coalition government apart.
In any event, the killing of top al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq is unlikely to make much difference to the wider insurgency, though it may reduce the number of spectacular suicide-bombings. It is still generally reckoned that less than 5% of insurgents in Iraq owe allegiance to al-Qaeda and its global leader, Osama bin Laden. Iraq’s insurgency is essentially homegrown and nationalist, though it has taken on a more Islamist flavour as the war has persisted and spread.
Citation: "Some Rare Good News from Iraq?," The Economist, 06 September 2006.
Original URL: http://www.economist.com/agenda/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=7879327