Austin Bay Blog

This story isn’t exactly news, but kudos to the Washington Post for reporting it. Zarqawi began “hijacking” the Iraqi insurgency in the spring of 2004– to stir the Shia-Sunni civil war he mentioned in his infamous letter to his Al Qaeda seniors. January’s successful Iraqi election put the Saddamist holdouts on their heels politically. Many Sunnis regret the January election boycott. Zarqawi, however, still has money, lots of money, most of it we suspect coming from Persian Gulf magnates and other Al Qaeda sources.

The Post’s lede:

The top U.S. military intelligence officer in Iraq said Abu Musab Zarqawi and his foreign and Iraqi associates have essentially commandeered the insurgency, becoming the dominant opposition force and the greatest immediate threat to U.S. objectives in the country.

“I think what you really have here is an insurgency that’s been hijacked by a terrorist campaign,” Army Maj. Gen. Richard Zahner said in an interview. “In part, by Zarqawi becoming the face of this thing, he has certainly gotten the funding, the media and, frankly, has allowed other folks to work along in his draft.”

The remarks underscored a shift in view among senior members of the U.S. military command here since the spring, as violence, especially against civilians, has spiked and as Zarqawi, a radical Sunni Muslim from Jordan, has aggressively promoted himself and his anti-U.S., anti-Shiite campaign. U.S. military leaders say they now see Zarqawi’s group of foreign fighters and Iraqi supporters, known as al Qaeda in Iraq, as having supplanted Iraqis loyal to ousted president Saddam Hussein as the insurgency’s driving element…

Other useful grafs, including a quote from BG Karl Horst (see this column I wrote while in Baghdad this past June):

“While Zarqawi is the overarching bad guy — the one everyone loves to hate — there are a lot of other bad guys operating as well,” said Brig. Gen. Karl R. Horst, deputy commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, which has responsibility for the Baghdad area.

But the Hussein loyalists — including former Baath Party members, onetime military and intelligence officers and other Sunni Arab associates of the ousted Iraqi leader — have clearly receded in the U.S. command’s view. Labeled “Saddamists” in U.S. military reports, they are now considered less an immediate military danger than a longer-term political concern, given their desire to return to power and their potential to infiltrate and subvert efforts to establish democracy. Once the primary names on the list of most-wanted insurgents in Iraq, they now rank behind those identified with al Qaeda in Iraq.

“You’ll see some of the old regime elements on there, mainly just to maintain pressure and, frankly, accountability,” Zahner said. “But when you look at those individuals central to the inflicting of huge amounts of violence, it really is not those folks. The Saddamists, the former regime guys, they’re riding this.”

Here’s Z-Man’s strategy, which Z-Man himself outlined in February 2004:

There has been a steady buildup of U.S. and Iraqi forces along the insurgents’ two main transit corridors — one in northwestern Iraq between the border and Mosul, the other in the far western reaches of the Euphrates River valley. U.S. figures show some success in curbing infiltration. Zahner said the number of foreign fighters entering Iraq, which had started to approach 200 a month in June, appeared to drop to 100 a month or fewer by the end of August. More than 315 foreign fighters have been killed since March and nearly 330 detained. Suicide attacks fell about 50 percent from May to August.

In Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, the 1st Brigade of the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division reported capturing or killing a succession of top al Qaeda figures since the spring. Even with these apparent losses, however, Zarqawi and his associates still appear able to escalate attacks when they want, as they demonstrated in Baghdad on Sept. 14 with at least a dozen bombings that killed or wounded hundreds. The average level of daily attacks across Iraq, including small-arms fire, drive-by shootings, mortar and rocket assaults and roadside bombings, has continued to creep up since spring and stands now at about 90.

U.S. officers here say military operations have disrupted the planning and movement of Zarqawi’s group and weakened its leadership in some areas of the country. But Zarqawi and his supporters have shown an ability to shift to regions where U.S. and Iraqi troops have minimal presence.

Another problematic aspect of Zarqawi’s operation is its absence of an associated political organization. Hoping to incite sectarian conflict and derail the political process, Zarqawi has declared war on Iraqi Shiites and is urging Sunnis not to participate in next month’s vote on a draft constitution or December’s parliamentary elections.

“I think right now he’s taking an extremely high-risk but, in his view, potentially high-payoff strategy, which is to try to force a civil war with the Shia and portray himself as the defender of the Sunni populace,” Zahner said.

Read the entire report.

What’s the context? The US has its fight against jihadists in the heart of the Arab Muslim world– the “fatal attraction” component of US anti-terror strategy (see this column from January, 2003). The Iraqi government also fights a nationalist struggle (Iraqis versus “foreign fighters”). Zarqawi’s jidhadists are clearly at war with the Iraqi people.

UPDATE: See this Fouad Ajami essay in the OnLine Journal. Excellent background on the Shia-Sunni strife.

Ajami’s lede:

The remarkable thing about the terror in Iraq is the silence with which it is greeted in other Arab lands. Grant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi his due: He has been skilled at exposing the pitilessness on the loose in that fabled Arab street and the moral emptiness of so much of official Arab life. The extremist is never just a man of the fringe: He always works at the outer edges of mainstream life, playing out the hidden yearnings and defects of the dominant culture. Zarqawi is a bigot and a killer, but he did not descend from the sky. He emerged out of the Arab world’s sins of omission and commission; in the way he rails against the Shiites (and the Kurds) he expresses that fatal Arab inability to take in “the other.” A terrible condition afflicts the Arabs, and Zarqawi puts it on lethal display: an addiction to failure, and a desire to see this American project in Iraq come to a bloody end.

Zarqawi’s war, it has to be conceded, is not his alone; he kills and maims, he labels the Shiites rafida (rejecters of Islam), he charges them with treason as “collaborators of the occupiers and the crusaders,” but he can be forgiven the sense that he is a holy warrior on behalf of a wider Arab world that has averted its gaze from his crimes, that has given him its silent approval. He and the band of killers arrayed around him must know the meaning of this great Arab silence.

There is a cliché that distinguishes between cultures of shame and cultures of guilt, and by that crude distinction, it has always been said that the Arab world is a “shame culture.” But in truth there is precious little shame in Arab life about the role of the Arabs in the great struggle for and within Iraq. What is one to make of the Damascus-based Union of Arab Writers that has refused to grant membership in its ranks to Iraqi authors? The pretext that Iraqi writers can’t be “accredited” because their country is under American occupation is as good an illustration as it gets of the sordid condition of Arab culture. For more than three decades, Iraq’s life was sheer and limitless terror, and the Union of Arab Writers never uttered a word. Through these terrible decades, Iraqis suffered alone, and still their poetry and literature adorn Arabic letters. They need no acknowledgment of their pain, or of their genius, from a literary union based in a city in the grip of a deadening autocracy.

Read it.