Who is the US Fighting in Iraq?
Who exactly is the US fighting in Iraq? Graphed by self-confessed identity of captives, it is largely Sunni Arab Iraqis, often motivated primarily by the opportunity to earn some money from the resistance leaders. 
Source: New York Times, 2007/08/25.
The second largest group is Salafi Takfiris, i.e. fundamentalists who do not consider Shiites to be Muslims and who believe they may be harmed with impunity. The third group is Shiite militiamen (how many of these are non-ideological paid employees is not specified). Self-identified al-Qaeda are only 1800 of the 24000 in captivity, about 7 percent. (Of course, most of these fighters are not really al-Qaeda in the sense of pledging fealty to Usama Bin Laden or being part of his organization; they are using "al-Qaeda" to mean "bogeyman": i.e., 'be afraid of me'.) Foreign fighters at 280 are about 1.1 percent. While it could be argued that it would take bold captives to declare themselves al-Qaeda, there would be no downside to telling the Americans one was a takfiri. There is no reason to think the over 11,000 unspecified Sunni Arabs is fundamentalists. Opinion polling still shows a majority of Sunnis favoring the separation of religion and state.
The odd tendency of the US military and press to refer to all guerrillas in Iraq as "al-Qaeda" is obviously not justified by their own subsequent interrogations of captured suspects. Readers should write and complain when they see al-Qaeda used indiscriminately to describe Sunni Arab fighters.
And when you hear Cheney say we have to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq, you will know that most of the people the US is fighting there are no such thing.
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 8/27/2007 12:23:00 AM
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9 Comments:
Who exactly is the US fighting in Iraq?
What you mean is: who has the US kept in prison?
There are others they would have let go.
what is the y-axis?
Concerning Juan Cole's statement about "the odd tendency of the US military and press to refer to all guerrillas in Iraq as 'al-Qaeda'":
For reference the primary military spokesmen from Iraq is Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, who is the operational commander. He speaks with the media once a month from Iraq, although apparently now he's back in the US.
Odierno's August briefing from Iraq was 2 days after the attack on the Yazidi villages and the press transcript is available online. Yet when I excluded 3 specific press questions about al Qaeda from the transcript, Odierno referred to al Qaeda" 18 times, "extremist" 25 times, and the general term "group" a number of times as well.
Therefore to me the use of such vague generalizations as "the odd tendency of the US military and press to refer to all guerrillas in Iraq as 'al-Qaeda'" belongs in the realm of extremism. What is Juan is going to claim next - that General Odierno actually said "al Qaeda" 43+ times and the Defense Dept. changed the press transcript?
Well,
There are two reasons to doubt of the veracity of what is said concerning US prisonners.
1) It's highly possible that prisonners under investigation don't tell the whole truth, they can arrange things in the hope of being released or in order to diminish their "fault". They can be "cooperative" and tell to the Americans what they think the Americans want to hear.
2) There may be some truth in what the military is claiming, although we all know that the US military has an agenda and may want to push this agenda. The US never stopped spinning and arranging the truth for their needs. Nobody is on the spot, so nobody can really control what the American say.
I'm especially doubtfull concerning the assertion that the primary motive of the insurgent is money and then fear for their folks if they don't comply with what the insurgent ask them to do.
I find these assertion suspicious since this smear the motive of the fighters.
Every one needs money to feed his family. But you can engage either with the government or with the insurgent. So the real question is why the engaged with that specific group rather than another.
Of course it's possible that insurgent are forced to take arms against their will out of fear for their folks. It won't be the first time that nasty things happen during war. However we have to admit that we don't know what is going on in Iraq and we have to take with more suspicion every thing the US says, because she isn't a neutral element in this conflict.
Although it's interesting to see such data on the make-up of the insurgency in Iraq there must be certain caveats to any such analysis.
The primary question has always to be, How accurate is the information the military is receiving from captives given that captivity and interrogation - even within the parameters laid down by the Geneva Conventions - are, by their nature, forms of duress.
There are a couple of points here that we would take issue with on the basis of our ten months of on the ground reporting. The first, of course, is the one of payment. In '03/'04 the story of payment for attacks was a constant "talking point" for military spokesmen in Iraq and sometimes even went so far as to provide a shopping list based on the type of operation to be carried out by the individual. Although we couldn't trace back the veracity of these claims within the military structure we were able to put the question to the active anti-occupation fighters who we were interviewing for Meeting Resistance.
The answers were far more interesting than the shopping lists and really gave us insight into the attitudes and motivations of the people who were doing the killing and dying. Firstly, there was no denial of payment - especially on the part of guys for whom attacking Americans and their armed Iraqi allies was a full time occupation. Sometimes the money would be dispensed on a per operation basis but, for the most part, they were paid a monthly salary that was usually little more than a subsistence allowance for themselves and their families. The idea that anyone was going to get rich on this was laughable to them. Most of the people we were talking to were barely getting by and certainly did not display the trappings of middle class comfort such as mobile phones and motor cars. Additionally, some we spoke to felt soiled by receiving money for Jihad and one told us that the Jihad wasn't so "sweet" if he had been paid. The young man who said this regarded himself as secular and his self description was Fedayeen rather than Mujahideen.
Which brings us to the second main point about the definitions of those in captivity: that is the drawing of lines to say these people are Sunni Arabs and these are Salafist and Takfiri. There is an assumption from this that the Sunni Arab designation is secular. This would represent a continuation of the pre-war misunderstanding that Iraq being a secular state meant that it wasn't a religious nation. Make no mistake, the overwhelming majority within that grouping are committed to the act of Jihad against an occupying force and its allies having reached for the more religious tenets as a supporting justification for their actions as military pressure upon them increased.
The Salafist and Takfiri definitions are not necessarily married to each other, as we have been led to believe. A Salafist is not necessarily a Takfiri and to be a Takfiri in Iraq in 2007 is not limited to the Salafist grouping. To understand this one must go back to the events of 2003/4 when SCIRI's military wing, the Badr Corps, was carrying out executions of former "Ba'athists", particularly in Baghdad. The first targets of these operations from the summer of '03 onwards were almost exclusively members of the Sunni intelligentsia such as lawyers, doctors and academics. This was probably being done for cynical long term political reasons but, within the Sunni community, these assassinations were broadly seen as an act of genocide by vengeful returnees, intent on cutting the head off the Sunni community. Later, as the insurgency developed into a viable threat to US plans, the one effective Iraqi force used by the US military in Fallujah was the then newly formed 36th Battalion, made up of Badr and Peshmerga fighters. That these Muslims (Sunni and Shi'a) would so readily shed the blood of other believers on behalf of "Jews and Crusaders" was, for many young Sunni's, evidence enough of their apostasy. These were the circumstances that drove thousands of ordinary Sunni Arabs - some Salafist but mostly of a Sufi persuasion - into the ideological arms of a small and marginal Takfiri substructure that previously had managed to acquire very little traction in Iraq.
We're at a really exciting time now with Meeting Resistance. This fall we're doing a limited theatrical release and will soon have a DVD available for sale. To stay up to date on where we'll be showing, you can go to www.meetingresistance.com.
Juan, sorry for the shameful plug but, given the intense interest of yourself and your readers in this topic, we're sure you won't mind a bit:)
Considering that the US just rounds people up on occasion, all this tells us is that they have rounded up more Sunnis.
"The odd tendency of the US military and press to refer to all guerrillas in Iraq as "al-Qaeda"..."
The "odd tendency" by the media to refer to "all guerrillas in Iraq as" insurgents....
With a valid estimate of over a million Iraqis dead in a nation of 25 million circa March 2003, the majority innocent in the wrong places at the wrong times, four million more displaced, heaven knows how many more maimed as well as the malnourished and ill, its understandable why there are insurgents. During the Olympics in Greece, an Iraqi player commented openly about how he would be fighting the occupiers of his nation. I recall how the Iraqi delegate to the UN was horrified to learn that our soldiers casually murdered his nephew, a 21 year old student in his house. The Arabs never forget or forgive when evil is done to them.
Molly and Steve have made some excellent points and their work in Iraq was really a good piece of serious journalism. I look forward to their film (which I am sure is not playing in Baghdad) ... Juan makes a strong argument about the make up of the insurgency using the capture data from the military but even those data are suspiciosly accurate ... too accurate. Having been personally involved in performing and training soldiers to perform this process (and the analytical break down of captured insurgent/prisoner identities) I can say its really a matter of how the Army decides to classify prisoners during the initial capture and then refine the categories during interrogation.
Since we are shamelessly plugging great works, in my book The Terrorists of Iraq-Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Insurgency (of which Juan has a copy) I detailed the several phases of mis-identification and re-naming the insurgency (according to my calculations 85% of who are simply Sunni nationalists/neo-Ba’athists). It started with first calling the very organized Saddam Fedayeen 'dead enders', went onto the accusation in June 2003 of the latent resistance being all Ansar al-Islam (and they were mistakenly being called Zarqawis group at the time), then into a phase of denial where we weren't fighting anyone but 'foreign fighters'(Sep-Dec 2003). By Jan 2004 the army came to the correct analysis that it was a mix of Sunnis nationalists/former regime rejectionists, Sunni religious extremists, foreign fighters aligned with Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)and opportunistic criminals -somehow they thought these forces were a mere 5,000 men. That image lasted until the carbomb wave in 2005 and then it was 80% Zarqawi 10% Sunni and 10% Mehdi Army.
In January 2007, the insurgency miraculously became all AQI. I wrote an article to the effect that this was misguided on Small Wars Journal and was thoroughly raked over the coals by war-supporters who never spent a day in Iraq much less carried a gun.
The error here is the NYT seems to have inadvertently identified what appears to be a clerical misidentification that has carried through to the processing of prisoners. If this is the correct data then someone wants us to believe the insurgents are confessing in captivity in mass numbers ... how was that done? I have processed my fair share of captives and its staggering to get these statistics from relatively few cooperative prisoners even using inducements. Was it by show of hands? Perhaps someone said to them during processing "We know you’re innocent so just pick a category or stay here forever." Maybe all those who didn't choose were just boxed as AQI?
At present there are over 24,000 prisoners (PWs). For the last three years Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca averaged between 14-16,000 PWs, with as many as 90% reported by the government of Iraq as being innocent of any crime. Now its suddenly 100% all insurgents and all are suddenly proven guilty? That does not pass the laugh test. More astounding is that these PWs have all admitted they have a specific association. If this data is being presented as true then I believe it is horribly corrupt. I think the numbers given are the only PW categories that the processing teams have decided upon for everyone who passes through their doors. I am pretty sure there are no “Innocent Civilian,” “Lived in Same Street as Insurgents” or “My Did This for Vengeance” boxes on the capture card. Clearly every PW was given a category or they were asked and classified based on push-poll type questionnaires (e.g. Do you best sympathize with the honorable Sunni resistance or the murderous Takfiris or the child-killing terrorists Al Qaeda? Do you view Shiites as apostates? Do you think Zarqawi really hurt the American effort? What is your opinion of Muqtadah al-Sadr? etc)
Rarely do 24,000 people, in captivity, with Guantanamo waiting for them just blurt out to a pollster and say they are in the Sunni insurgency, or Al Qaeda or the Jaysh al Mehdi ... especially AQI because only 135 out of 24,000 are foreigners.
This report validates someone’s narrative of the captive population but most likely not those of the captives. If I were the commander of that facility reporting up the chain-of-command as to who was in my custodianship I would make damn sure I knew EXACTLY who I was holding based on intelligence.
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