One of the great pieces of information we got recently is 80 percent of the al Qaeda network in the north has been devastated. And those are not our figures, those came from the last six leaders in Mosul, al Qaeda leaders that we captured; they informed us of that. We also had a letter that was captured from Abu Zaid (sp) going to Zarqawi. We recently killed Zaid (sp) and we had that letter, and it also talked about the desperate situation for the al Qaeda and the insurgents in Mosul and in the north. And then also, sources we have inside the al Qaeda network up here have also informed us of that.
I certainly didn't until I came across that link a couple of days ago. There's some very interesting information there that I certainly haven't seen reported elsewhere and would seem relevant to note amongst this week's bloodbath.
For instance, take these anecdotes on foreign fighters:
There's a significant difference from when we got here last October. Last October, we faced a foreign fighter that was very well-trained. I remember watching attacks out -- we had an attack that involved about 60 foreign fighters in a pretty complex ambush. By complex I mean three or four forms of engagement. They'll hit you with an IED, small arms, mortars -- a very complex attack. We saw that regularly in November and December. We also defeated -- in one of those fights, we killed 40 terrorists, and we did not lose anybody, and we defeated them every time they tried to do that against us. We really worked hard and aggressively at getting out. I mean, we conducted some 2,100 cordon and searches, and thousands of aggressive offensive operations -- 18 attacks a day against the insurgents back in that time period. I remember watching an attack and seeing the insurgents move against us, and I had to look and say, gee, are those our guys or their guys because they're moving very well around buildings. Now, that was November and December. What we saw is that that's faded away very quickly, as we captured and killed. And we killed some 550 enemy and captured over 3,000.
And as we got to February and March, we saw a completely different foreign fighter. We've captured Libyans. We've captured Saudi, Yemenis, Algerians. And many of these -- one Libyan that we captured about a month and a half ago -- he was clearly brainwashed. And he was told that, you know, what was going on here and brainwashed to come and be a -- what he thought was -- he was going to be a foreign fighter against this crusade against the Muslim religion. He got here. He saw that was not correct. They told he was going to be a suicide martyr. He said he didn't want to do that. When we happened to capture him, several other foreign fighters and the cell leader that was orchestrating them, he was very happy to talk to us about what he had seen and what they had done.
And very interesting that younger foreign fighter that we're seeing now -- very poorly trained. We would call them more like RPGs for hire. And we believe it's the -- we know that the leadership is severely disrupted. Again, from -- about 25 percent of the attacks were very complex prior to elections, as I described. Now we're down to five percent are complex. And we're at the lowest number of attacks by far over the last three months. And that is -- clearly the foreign network is disrupted. The leadership is severely disrupted. We captured Abu Talha, the number-two al Qaeda leader in the north of Iraq. And right after that we got Abu Bara, Madhi Musa (sp), Abu Zab (sp), the next six leaders that would step up and take over. Nobody's taken over now. It's not a very popular position because if they step up, they get captured or killed. And so they're really disrupted, totally different.
... We did face well-trained foreign fighters prior to January elections. We have not faced well-trained foreign fighters since. Since February of this year until now, we have not seen any well-trained, in fact, very poorly trained foreign fighters. So whoever was training them before, I don't know, but apparently they've lost their support and they're not able to train them and they've -- you know, now we're getting much younger -- we had 15- to 17-year- olds, very young. You know, we were estimating -- it's kind of hard, you know, when you see the remains of a suicide bomber, there's not much left. But from captured ones, and then reports from these folks, they were very young, 15- to 17-years-old; not well trained. And we have not seen well-trained foreign fighters at all since February. So wherever they were training before, I don't know, but it's sure not -- they're not doing it anymore that I'm aware of because they're not coming here and we have not seem them.
On Zarqawi's location:
You know, we speculate he's in the Euphrates River Valley. We have forces down there, helping, assisting in the north of the Euphrates River, in Rawah and other locations. And that's where we think he is, but I have not gotten directly that any of these high-level leaders we've captured have given us direct information as to where Zarqawi's located.
Given what a gold-mine of information this is, I'm quite surprised more notice hasn't been paid to it, particularly given how potentially volatile an area Mosul is. Wonder why that could be...
UPDATE: More on Tal Afar, including why it was chosen as the Islamists' base, and some sobering stories re: executions of everyone from Sunni imams to local citizens as part of the reign of terror. al-Qaeda's "Hearts & Minds" strategy, at work again....
Yes, I've been reporting these things for months and they are in Google news, but the MSM are ignoring them all. Right now they are ignoring most things because they can't do more than one thing at once and they are all concentrating on Katrina. They have a short attention span and its probably not a bad thing.
Al Qaida Declines in Northern Iraq, Military Officer Says
Terrorist Forces Routed in Mosul Region of Iraq, Colonel Says
I'm working on this, waiting for more information.
Sunni Locals in Al Albar Fighting "al Qaida in Iraq" Terrorists
- They've been fighting them for 5 months, a little before I said it was obvious the war was turning around (June 20th) because Sunni leaders realised they made a mistake in not voting and also that the terrorists were not their friends, as they thought they were.
Its part of this story:
Harrier jets strike safe house and weapons cache
They still seem pretty good at setting off car bombs.
Praktike beat me to it here. The fact that they're "less sophisticated" or whatever doesn't mean much when even crude attacks can still have massive casualties. I'll start believeing they're beaten when the carbombs stop.
#2, #3,
Yes, it's just not that difficult to assemble, transport, and set off car bombs. The converse is perhaps as interesting: why don't most groups-with-grievances use car bombs with as much abandon as al-Qaeda in Iraq and the rest of the insurgency?
Some possibile reasons:
Car bombing of civilians seems to fit Al Qaeda's strategic and ideological framework quite nicely. In the near-term, there's the hope of fomenting civil war. Even if that fails, mass casualty incidents serve as an example to Arabs in other places: this is what democracy and collaboration with infidels will bring to your country.
So it's hard to visualize a "success" that leads to no car bombs any time in the near future. A successful counter-insurgency (increases in the number of tips from Iraqis who have turned against the insurgency, etc.) would bring their frequency way down.
There seem to be a lot fewer car bombs in Ninewah province, though. It's the Baghdad metro area that's still the big problem, something like a combination of Detroit in 1988 and Beirut in 1984.
Zarqawi's declaration of war on all Shi'ites is the surest sign that he's finished. He's desperate for a Sunni uprising. But then, so are a lot of people over here.
"A successful counter-insurgency (increases in the number of tips from Iraqis who have turned against the insurgency, etc.) would bring their frequency way down."
Yes, and the converse suggests that we don't, in fact, have a successful counterinsurgency approach in place. In any case, I doubt the targets are as random as you seem to believe. I'm sure there's a strategic logic at work here.
As for Glen's comment, the latest on Zarqawi is that he's having some success in attracting Iraqi recruits to his organization. I don't consider that a positive development, especially since a key component of an American/Iraqi gov't victory involves pitting Sunni Arab insurgents/tribes and foreign jihadists against one another.
praktike: the latest on Zarqawi is that he's having some success in attracting Iraqi recruits to his organization.
You could have said the same of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA, the day before the LAPD sent them to Terrorist Heaven.
Granted, Zarqawi is a bigger deal than little Patty Hearst, but he's not going to get anywhere with car bombs. Still less by making simultaneous war on Iraq, the US, Shi'a, and the Kurds, too.
In order to have the kind of real "insurgency" that people like Ward Churchill fantasize about, Zarqawi needs to have broad and regular access to a significant portion of the population. He needs to be able to "move among the people like a fish in water" as Mao put it. Unsupported terrorist tactics don't do this - they do the opposite.
The insurgents need to be able to administer "liberated" areas to some extent. This administrative capability can be primitive as hell, but the population has to be given some indication that normal life will still exist when the insurgents win. Zarqawi's so-called insurgents don't even give that minimal reassurance, resorting to incredible brutality instead.
The insurgents need a credible military presence that the population believes will protect them to some extent (protect them, not rape, rob, and kill them). In the face of an opponent like the US, it's impossible for such a force to win battles, go their goal is to survive as a military organization. They fail here as well.
There's no need to go into all the other requirements, like the need for a political program more sophisticated than "kill all the infidels". These so-called insurgents have no future. Zarqawi is no Fidel Castro. He's not even Pancho Villa.
Al Queda is doing exactly the wrong thing, and they probably know it, and its a sign of thier desparation that they are doing it.
If you watch the casualty trends among coalition forces and Iraqi civilians in the past few weeks, you can see that Al Queda has basically decided on giving up fighting Americans - at least for the momment. All there efforts are now focused on killing ordinary moslem men, women, and children. It's hard not to think that this is because they are now finding even reconstituted Iraqi military forces too hard of a target to engage directly.
This is absolutely the most stupid thing that they could do. They are now operating from a clear position of weakness. That matters far more to their Arab observers than it does to the West. They are destroying thier own myth of legitimacy far more effectively than we ever could directly.
Glen, do you even read the news? Zarqawi's people essentially control Ramadi right now, through what looks like a combination of intimidation and popular support.
praktike -
Zarqawi tried to expel the Shi'ites from Ramadi, and Sunnis came to their defense. That doesn't speak well for his popular support in a town that boycotted the elections.
If you really think his genocidal program is winning hearts and minds, wait and see if he does any better in Ramadi than he has done in any of his previous "strongholds".
praktike:
The number of car bombs currently going off in Iraq is currently lower than it was late last spring. Zarqawi isn't defeated, but he also is omnipotent in terms of the number of people he can field at any given time.
As far as him attracting more Iraqis to his banner, you have to remember that I've been arguing that sizeable portions of his force were made up of Iraqis for quite some time now. The only difference is that now the media sources are starting to agree with me, as opposed to their position back in 2003 when they were criticizing Cheney for attributing major terrorist attacks inside Iraq to Zarqawi by noting that such things hadn't been proven to the satisfaction of these same media sources yet. If 150 foreign fighters have been coming into the country every month over the last 2 years, that's 3,600 foreign jihadis, which we've almost certainly captured or killed more than over that same period. Recall, per Cordesman, that one of the reasons that the US had to abandon the 5,000 metric as far as the insurgency was concerned because we were capturing or killing so many more than that. Another problem is the knee-jerk assumption that Iraqis fighting the US must be nationalist or Baathists, all the while forgetting that there are indigeneous Iraqi Islamist groups in existence that are allied with Zarqawi, notably Ansar al-Sunnah and that there's a lot more of an overlap between him and the Baathists than many people want to admit.
As for Zarqawi controlling Ramadi, as Glen notes they still haven't been able to convince his allies in the city to help them kick out of the Shi'ites, nor has he retaliated against them in any significant way for their failure to do so. A lot of people seem to enjoy pointing out that the coalition doesn't necessarily control cities x, y, and z, though I'd really wish they'd use those same metrics as far as insurgent control (i.e. Zarqawi's fighters putting up a banner means he's running Qaim) is concerned. Ramadi appears to contested right now by both the US and variety of different insurgent groups, same with a number of other cities in Iraq.
praktike (#7) wrote:
Yeah, sadly, you are right. In the sense that came through Dan Darling's precis of Cordesman's recap, that the post-April-2003 US strategy was a triumph of hope over experience. Why would the Sunni Islamists, the FRE, and the various Iran-sympathetic Shi'ite groups roll over and watch with shock and awe as the US restructured Iraq into a pro-Western free-market democracy underwritten by oil exports? We have the answer, though hindsight probably wasn't necessary for it.
I'm suggesting that if there is a humbler and more durable US trying, now, to institute a 'workable' counterinsurgency, that car-bombings will be a trailing metric.
Sorry for my wording. I meant that, given a decision to attack largely-Shi'ite day laborers, the maiming of one is as good as the maiming of another. It's random to that extent from the victim's family's point of view. Clearly, police, Army, recruiting sites, and the other representatations of Government or Coalition legitimacy or power are chosen by targetting committees with deliberation.
Read Bill Roggio's site the fourth rail. he was active here a little while ago. I do not know what happened.
Question I asked at the fourth rail: What happened to the embed program? I raise this issue because while Bill was reporting on the success in Tal Afar and points N and NW al-Queda intitated at new terror bombing campaign in Baghdad. Al-Queda explicitly stated in was to relieve pressure in the N/NW. The latter was covered in passing while the former had extensive coverage and was shown around the world. This occurs because the press no longer leaves the Green Zone.
This leads to this complaint about Iraq. The lack of support from the MSM in showing any news that does not take place in Baghdad, does not involve US troops(what is going on in Basra or the Kurdish areas) and is positive. This was not the case in the beginning because of the embed program. So again what happened to the embed program?
This is especially important now that Chernkoff is ending his posts at Good News.
I'm not sure how one can reconcile that analysis of the weakness of our counterinsurgency efforts with reports like this which to my mind suggest substantial cooperation from Iraqis i.e. exactly what's necessary for a successful counterinsurgency and exactly what's being denied.
Perhaps the military reports are wrong; perhaps the press reports are wrong; perhaps different conditions prevail in different parts of the country. Perhaps it's a civil war and we've allied ourselves with, well, pretty much everybody except the Sunnis.
If the reports that 80% of “insurgents” are foreigners are true, that's no insurgency that's an invasion.
Sunni tribes really do seem to be sickening of the al qaeda butchers. Funny how leftists cheer up when they think the terrorists are winning.