Among the True Believers -

Among the True Believers - The Fraters beat me to yesterday's Pioneer Press cover story, a report from inside an Iraqi guerrilla group, and did a great job commenting on it. Read their piece; it's a good one.

My first question was "why did the "guerrillas" allow an American correspondent (Knight-Ridder's Hannah Allam) to talk with them in the first place?

In neither instance did the fighters attempt to prevent the journalists, an accompanying translator or their driver from seeing the route along which they were taken. But during the trip to the camp, the journalists' satellite telephones were confiscated and turned off, out of concern, the intermediary said, that U.S. forces would trace the phones' signals to pinpoint the camp's location.

Both cell leaders said they were willing to talk because they didn't want the story of what was going on in Iraq to be told only from the American military's standpoint. Abu Abdullah said he wanted to tell people he didn't consider himself a terrorist, but the enemy of "U.S. imperialism."

Of course, it's not the journalist's place to note that the men were fighting on behalf of a regime that behaved vastly worse than "imperialistically" to its own people.

But in a conflict that seems to be striated on sectarian (Sunni versus Shi'a) and ideological (foreign pan-Arabist and Ismlamofascist, versus native Iraqi) lines, it is her job to give us some background on her interview subjects. Are these typical Iraqis in the street? Sunnis with a vested interest in Ba'athist control? Foreigners?

Allam hints at some answers [with my comments in brackets]:

The two cell leaders said their fighters primarily were former Iraqi army officers [who were overwhelmingly "reliable" Sunnis and predominantly Ba'athist] and young Iraqis who had joined because they were angry over the deaths or arrests of family members during U.S. raids in the hunt for Saddam Hussein and his supporters [which might tend to imply the guerrillas are Sunni].

The group also shelters remnants of a non-Iraqi Arab unit of Saddam's elite Fedayeen militia force [Foreign zealots] as well as foreigners who slipped across the country's long and porous borders to battle American troops, they said. Abu Abdullah, who directs the camp near Baquba, said he came to Iraq shortly before the United States invaded it last spring.

The anti-American forces appear to be more organized than some U.S. intelligence and military officials thought. Cells receive orders and intelligence from Diyala, which lies within the northern "Sunni Triangle" of danger. According to the fighters, the Diyala leadership oversees about 100 guerrillas, including an all-women's unit, and is backed by private donations as well as Syrian funding, according to the two cell leaders.

Ms. Allam doesn't specify exactly how organized the US intel and military officials thought they were in the first place, of course. What she describes is pretty much "Guerrilla Warfare 101" - small cells that operate in isolation of one another, with knowledge strictly compartmented to avoid losing too many people if one is compromised.

It'd appear the war's not going that well for the "guerrillas":

His thin frame slumped under the weight of a Kalashnikov and a military-style vest packed with hand grenades and ammunition. His hands shook, and he explained that he was nervous because U.S. raids were growing closer to the Diyala leadership. Raids in recent weeks had resulted in the arrest of one member, he said, and two others had narrowly escaped capture.

Fear of informants restricts recruiting to family members, close neighborhood friends and military buddies, he said.

Earlier in the piece, the reporter tells us that the interview subject, "Abu", went from being a raw recruit to leader of a 20-person cell within a matter of scant weeks. Unstated: was this because "Abu" is a brilliant guerrilla commander, or because of casualties in the cell? Given the nerves shown above - not inconsistent with someone who's been on the wrong end of a few ambushes - it's worth asking.

Here's the big question; is this group of "guerrillas" on the level? If these people are serious resistance fighters, then for what reason are they talking with reporters? Is it a sign of some grossly undisciplined troops? Or that someone up the foodchain from "Abu" and his group is savvy enough to want to get the guerrillas into the international spin market?

Ms. Allam is at least honest enough to answer - she's not sure, and can't really confirm or deny what they are:

It is impossible to verify the claims of the two men. But Abu Mohammed described two fatal ambushes of U.S. convoys that matched times, dates and locations of recent incidents recorded in American military accounts. And an explosion nearby lent credibility to Abu Abdullah's claims after he hurriedly broke off an interview, saying his men had been ordered to ambush a U.S. convoy that had moved within range. A security report by international agencies later listed an attack on U.S. troops at about the same time and place as the explosion. One American soldier was reported injured.

The paper disclaimed the story in an afterword:

The interviews for this story were conducted in clandestine meetings in Baghdad and at a camp in a rural area north of the city. They provide a chilling insight into a shadowy organization responsible for at least some of the attacks that have killed 70 Americans since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1. The story may disturb some readers who will believe that American journalists should not talk with the enemy and that American newspapers should not publish anything they say. But the story provides important information to help the public understand something of the nature of the enemy that U.S. troops are facing.

True - and kudos to Ms. Allam for what must have been quite a piece of reporting work.

But the "...important information ...of the nature of the enemy that U.S. troops are facing" that the Knight-Ridder editor appended is all between the lines. And while it's not Ms. Allam's job to spell this out, it is mine.

Watch for the left-wing blogosphere to latch onto this - especially the parts that could be, by accident or design, labelled "Sympathetic" - as a sign that the liberation of Iraq is a going badly.

I think that's the wrong interpretation, of course. My speculation (and I'm clearly labeling it exactly that): If we extrapolate this report into a cross-section of the Iraqi guerrilla/terrorist movement, they are:

• Sunni
• Either Ba'athist, or with close personal Ba'athist ties, or
• foreign Islamofascists or Pan-Arabists (or both)
• under enough US pressure to make them nervous at the very least

It would also seem (by inferring between the lines) that the "flypaper" school of US strategy - using Iraq as a lure to draw Moslem terrorists from around the world to their eventual destruction - might be working.

Conjecture? Sure. Got another thought on it? Let me know.

Posted by Mitch at September 15, 2003 11:00 AM