TIME: The New Rules of
Engagement
Monday, December 12, 2005
As the insurgency rages on, a TIME investigation
reveals a new U.S. push to exploit splits in its
ranks. Can that help lead to an
exit?
By
MICHAEL WARE / BAGHDAD
The secret meeting took place earlier this year on
the outskirts of Baghdad, in a safe house known only
to the insurgents in attendance. One of them, an
Iraqi known by the nom de guerre Abu Marwan, is a
senior commander of the leading Baathist guerrilla
group called the Army of Mohammed. Together with a
representative of an alliance of Iraqi Islamist
insurgent groups, Abu Marwan met aides to Abu Mousab
al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The
purpose was to discuss the idea of uniting under a
joint command the disparate networks fighting U.S.
forces in Iraq. When the conversation turned to
leadership issues, Abu Marwan's companion suggested
that al-Qaeda replace al-Zarqawi with an Iraqi, "as
it would have an enormous impact on the other
groups." But an al-Zarqawi aide rebuffed the notion.
"Who started our organization?" he asked
rhetorically. No one was prepared to ask al-Zarqawi
to step aside.
That episode might seem inconsequential in a long and
bloody war that's growing deadlier on the ground--20
service members died last week, including 10 Marines
killed by a bombing in Fallujah on Thursday--and
increasingly unpopular at home. Yet it reflects a
critical new dimension to the war, a shifting tide
within al-Qaeda and the broader insurgency. The
Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi and his network of
hard-line jihadis have long been the driving force of
the insurgency, transforming it from a nationalist
struggle to one fueled by religious zealotry and
infused with foreign recruits. But a TIME
investigation, based on dozens of interviews with
military and intelligence officials as well as Iraqi
leaders inside and outside the insurgency, reveals
that Iraqis are reclaiming the upper hand, forcing
al-Zarqawi to adjust. Differences between Baathist
insurgent groups and al-Qaeda are driven by
discomfort with al-Zarqawi's extreme tactics and
willingness among some Iraqi commanders to join the
political process. U.S. officials in Baghdad confirm
to TIME that they have stepped up their efforts to
negotiate with nationalist insurgents and the Sunnis
they represent. "We want to deal with their
legitimate concerns," U.S. Ambassador Zalmay
Khalilzad tells TIME. "We will intensify the
engagement, interaction and discussion with them."
That doesn't mean the U.S. is any closer to getting
out of Iraq. In a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy in
Annapolis, Md., last week, President George W. Bush
responded to mounting doubts about the war by
offering a glowing assessment of the mettle and
readiness of fledgling Iraqi troops, which the
Administration hopes will steadily assume security
duties, beginning with next week's national
elections. At the same time, Bush refused to set a
timetable for a pullout, pledging to "settle for
nothing less than complete victory." Yet if that
means staying until the insurgency is defeated by
arms, U.S. troops should expect to remain in Iraq for
a long time, no matter how well the Iraqis perform.
"This insurgency has got roots, it's got money, and
it's got motivation," says a U.S. intelligence
official, in an assessment echoed by military
officers and insurgent leaders alike. "And the life
span of this insurgency could be years."
But it's becoming increasingly doubtful that
Americans are willing to wait that long. In a TIME
poll taken last week, 47% said they supported
withdrawing most troops in a year or so, regardless
of conditions in Iraq, while only 40% said the U.S.
should stay until Iraq has a stable, democratic
government. Half of those surveyed said the U.S. was
wrong to go to war in Iraq, a figure largely
unchanged for the past year. The U.S. doesn't have
many options. Despite White House hopes that local
security forces can relieve U.S. troops, intelligence
officials are not nearly so optimistic that
Iraqification will bring stability. "Will we ever see
Iraqi security forces capable of crushing this
insurgency? Probably not. No," says a high-ranking
military-intelligence officer in Iraq. The dilemma is
that the longer U.S. forces stay, the more the
insurgency is sustained by new recruits, yet
withdrawing now could allow al-Qaeda and Iran to
consolidate their influence in Iraq, dealing a body
blow to U.S. regional interests. Even Washington's
staunchest political ally, former Prime Minister Iyad
Allawi, says the U.S. is not winning and must have
the courage to seek new solutions.
That's why U.S. officials in Iraq are reaching out to
the Sunnis, the insurgents and former Baath Party
members as part of a program to quell the violence by
peeling them away from al-Zarqawi. "The fault line
between al-Qaeda and the nationalists seems to have
increased," says Ambassador Khalilzad. Here's an
inside look at how those splits have started to
emerge, how they are redefining the shape of the
insurgency in Iraq--and why the U.S. is now turning
to some of its old enemies.
INSIDE THE RESISTANCE
After 31 months of fighting in Iraq, the U.S. still
can't say for sure whom it is up against. Each week
coalition forces kill hundreds of insurgents, but
there is no end of replacements. U.S. commanders
believe that as many as 20,000 fighters are in the
field on any given day, a figure that has remained
constant for almost two years. Many insurgent groups
have become more tactically sophisticated and more
lethal, and around 2,000 attacks are launched each
month. Training facilities are dotted across Iraq;
videos obtained by TIME show classes in infantry
techniques and handling weapons. Abu Baqr, a former
emir, or commander, of a nationalist militia in
Baghdad who was recently released from a U.S.
military prison and is rebuilding his team, tells
TIME that "in the beginning, even I didn't know how
to use most of the weapons, but I learned. We give
out weapons from the old army, and the money that
funds us comes from wealthy individuals."
Part of the insurgents' resilience comes from their
fluidity. "The U.S. is not fighting an army," says
Abu Mohammed, a strategist for a prominent Islamic
nationalist group. "We hit and move. We're more like
groups of gangs that can't be pinned down and can't
be stamped out." The vast majority of those groups
fall into a category the military dubiously refers to
as Sunni "rejectionists." Mostly Baathists,
nationalists and Iraqi Islamists, they oppose the
occupation and any Baghdad government dominated by
Iraqis sheltered from Saddam by foreign-intelligence
agencies, such as Iran's or the U.S.'s. But they
don't oppose democracy in Iraq. Many voted in the
Oct. 15 constitutional referendum and have plans to
participate in the Dec. 15 election. Few see a
contradiction between voting and continuing to battle
U.S. forces. "I voted in the referendum, and I'm
still fighting, and everybody in my organization did
the same," says Abu Marwan, the Army of Mohammed
commander. "This is two-track war--bullets and the
ballot. They are not mutually exclusive."
U.S. military intelligence believes that were it not
for al-Zarqawi, the nationalists would have developed
a political identity by now. Differences in means and
ends have long caused friction among the odd
bedfellows of the resistance. From the beginning
there have been two wars fought in Iraq, one of
liberation and one of global holy war. "Insurgency
and terror are two different things," says Khalilzad.
The divide was evident in Fallujah last year, when
al-Zarqawi's foreign fighters dominated the city and
the insurgency at large. They took over local
militias' checkpoints and neighborhoods, even
"arresting" leading Sunni insurgent figures. When the
local clerical body, the Association of Muslim
Scholars, refused to endorse his suicide bombings and
beheadings of Western hostages, al-Zarqawi branded
the association's leader, Harith al-Dhari, a coward.
"In Fallujah [al-Zarqawi's] leaders were foreigners
who'd come to be martyred," says Abu Marwan. "What
did they care about the political process? Nothing."
Though al-Zarqawi's shadow still looms over the
broader insurgency, the battle of Fallujah last
November forced him to give his organization an Iraqi
face. "Among the foreign fighters some dispersed,
some were killed, some were captured," says Abu
Marwan. And over the past year, U.S. operations
against al-Zarqawi's organization have chipped away
at its leadership structure and squeezed its
sanctuaries. As a result, Iraqis who joined as
low-level cell members have risen up the leadership
chain. Abu Marwan says al-Zarqawi's aides told him
their boss's three top lieutenants are all Iraqis.
Another Iraqi operative is Abu Abdullah, who had
worked on the security detail for one of Saddam's
inner circle and joined an insurgent group formed
from the Republican Guard following the U.S. invasion
in 2003. After he was captured by the U.S. and sent
to Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Abdullah enrolled in a
prison-yard madrasah, or religious school; by the
time he was released, he identified himself as a holy
warrior for Islam. Today he is what the military
calls a tier-two al-Qaeda leader, commanding cells in
and around Baghdad.
It's through midlevel al-Qaeda operatives like Abu
Abdullah, who retains ties to some of his former
Baathist comrades, that nationalist groups have
newfound influence with al-Zarqawi. "What he's now
having to do is balance the hard-line ideology with
the softer line of the Iraqis within his group," says
Abu Marwan. Sunni insurgent leaders say it was their
insistence on voting in the October referendum that
discouraged al-Zarqawi from disrupting the poll. For
now, the nationalists say they will be voting again
on Dec. 15, and they expect al-Qaeda to once more
hold its fire. But so far no announcements have been
made, and nationalist commanders are worried that
al-Zarqawi may decide to go for broke this time. "The
debate is being had," says Abu Baqr, the Baghdad
insurgent commander. "But soon the orders have to be
given."
TALKING WITH THE ENEMY
What does that mean for the U.S.? Ambassador
Khalilzad says, "There is a reaching out to
noncriminal Baathists." Evidence of shifts within the
insurgency in some ways presents the U.S. with its
best opportunity since the occupation began to
counter parts of the Sunni resistance. Adopting the
long-standing attitudes of secular Baathists, some
Sunni leaders tell TIME they have lost patience with
al-Zarqawi and would consider cutting a political
deal with the U.S. to isolate the jihadis. "If the
Americans evidenced good intent and a timetable for
withdrawal we feel is genuine, we will stand up
against al-Zarqawi," says Abdul Salam al-Qubaisi,
spokesman for the Association of Muslim Scholars. "We
already stood up against him on the Shi'ite issue,
and if he doesn't follow us, it will be a bad path
for him." Baathist insurgent leader Abu Yousif, who
has met with U.S. intelligence officers, says, "The
insurgency is looking for a political outlet--once we
have that, we could control al-Qaeda."
U.S. officials are actively exploring political
bargains that might induce nationalists to split with
al-Qaeda, including an easing of restrictions on
former Baathists' involvement in the new government.
Khalilzad says it's time for the "excesses" in the
de-Baathification process to be reversed, a call
echoed by military-intelligence officials. According
to Khalilzad, the U.S. believes that Baathists who
committed crimes under the former regime should be
tried and senior regime members barred from political
office. "As far as the rest are concerned, the time
has come to reintegrate them into the political
process," he says. Moves have already begun to bring
back the guts of Saddam's army, disbanded in the
first months of the occupation. "We're reaching out
to officers and noncommissioned officers that we're
going to put in place in the new Iraqi army," says a
U.S. military-intelligence officer, although he adds
that the new army will be more "reflective" of Iraqi
society than Saddam's was. Having the men they are
fighting enter the government will be hard for some
U.S. battle commanders to accept, the officer says.
"But we're trying to shape an end state."
That's still a long way off. The willingness of
moderate Sunnis to pursue a political solution could
easily crumble if the next government in Baghdad
fails to improve conditions in Sunni areas and clamp
down on sectarian excesses by Shi'ite militias. And
even if the U.S. can lure some guerrillas to the
negotiating table, it still faces a seemingly
inescapable quandary: so long as U.S. troops are
involved in combat in Iraq, there's every reason to
believe the insurgency will be able to recruit
sufficient numbers of motivated new fighters to do
battle with them. Rhode Island Democratic Senator
Jack Reed, a former Army paratrooper who was briefed
privately by military officials during a visit to
Iraq in October, says U.S. commanders are striving
for what some describe as "minimal compliance":
establishing just enough stability so that "the
country is not going to collapse [and] you're not
going to have areas that are havens for terrorists"
if U.S. troops begin to leave in large numbers. But
merely getting to that point may require the
sacrifice of more U.S. lives than most Americans are
willing to bear. Says Reed: "One of the problems with
an insurgency is that every time you turn a corner,
there's another corner." The U.S. will have to turn a
whole lot more enemies into friends before it begins
to see the way out.