Al-Zarqawi nailed by predator drone, ...see ya, & wouldn't want ta be ya... Options

[USA#1]

General Casey also said this has been in the works for 2 weeks.

Who was the tipoff from, is what I want to know!

Bush and Casey said it was tips, from whom?

But everone else is saying all sorts of stuff !!!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh !!!!!

What took so FRICKING LONG !!!

[DWB04]

General Casey also said this has been in the works for 2 weeks. 

Who was the tipoff from, is what I want to know!

Bush and Casey said it was tips, from whom?

But everone else is saying all sorts of stuff !!!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh  !!!!!

What took so FRICKING LONG !!!

Supposedly it was some men from Zarqawi's own faction????

Anyway one thing we can be sure of this will have a long news cycle

[tomhye]

One account I read (at cnn.com?) said they were getting a mind boggling number of tips the last 2 weeks and they had several verifying sources right before the strike. My best guess at this point is ttips were going to everyone from Iraqis on the street, that would account for the confusing reports of intel sources.

I heard on NPR this morning that Joe Biden (D) Delaware, said Zarqawi controlled about 12% of the insurgency.  So yes, this is good, and at least it's a fricking start --- what took them so damn long? 

NEXT: Bin Laden.

Now I'm confused about some things ... Bush was quoted as saying the Iraqi's (people) tipped off the Military, then on NPR, Analysts were saying that it was a joint effort between Jordan and Iraqi (US) Intel, then another said it was a captured officer of Zarqawi that ratted his safehouse out?

Which is it? 

Who really gets the acolades ???

Anyone getting the $25 Million Bucks???

How did Zarqawi get caught, he walked in a village bought a Coca Cola and some IED's and left and some guy decided to get rich instantly?

Why are there so many accounts of his killing???



It's so conveluted and jumbled !!!  If that's our intelligence agency working ... were up the creek without a paddle, and the boat is leaking.

[tazvil04]

OK --

Zarqawi is gone.

Congratulations to President Bush and to our military.

Hopefully this will make a difference in our efforts in Iraq...

But before we start cheering up and down remember the below --- Bush touted all the Al Qaeda leaders that were killed --- and that has done little or nothing to stop Al Qaeda...

Maybe it will make a difference in Iraq.

At a minimum, a vicious killer who took as many or more innocent lives as he did those of US and Iraqi security forces has been removed from the planet.

This is something positive.

However, I do not believe that this result makes our strategy in Iraq or our effort in the war on terrorism any more effective...

Most of the insrugents are not Al Qaeda affiliates...and this may make the argument stronger --- this was our number one target in Iraq --- and he is gone -- now we'll see if that does anythign to the insurgency which is mostly not Al Qaed aaccording to news sources...

Bush to say more Qaeda leaders killed, captured

In-Depth Coverage WASHINGTON, Aug 31, 2004 (Reuters) - President George W. Bush said on Tuesday he would tell the Republican convention that three-quarters of known al Qaeda leaders have been captured or killed, an increase from an earlier estimate of two-thirds.

For months, the CIA had privately advocated switching to the 75 percent figure, though the White House balked at using it publicly. Critics say the estimate is meaningless as losses by a decentralized al Qaeda are ever harder to estimate.

Bush told conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh that during his speech accepting the Republican nomination on Thursday he would "tell the people that three-quarters of the known al Qaeda leadership has been brought to justice."

"And we're still obviously on the hunt," Bush added.

White House officials said the change took new information about arrests and the al Qaeda network into account, and was not politically timed for the Republican convention, where Bush's war on terror is a central theme.

A CIA spokesman said the 75 percent estimate "is absolutely consistent with our view."

John Pike, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, said recent arrests may have helped prevent attacks against the United States but it was hard, because of the decentralized nature of al Qaeda, to estimate losses.

"That's been a pretty slippery issue right there," he said.

Flynt Leverett, who who was a senior director on Bush's National Security Council and now an informal adviser to Democratic rival John Kerry, called it a "meaningless assertion."

"We don't really know at this point the real map of the al Qaeda network as it has morphed," Leverett said.

A White House fact sheet listing those captured or killed includes: Mohammed Atef, al Qaeda's senior field commander, killed in a bombing raid in Afghanistan; Abu Zubaydah, Osama bin Laden's field commander after the killing of Atef, captured in Pakistan; as well as al Qaeda senior leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was captured in Pakistan.

Bin Laden remains at large.

This post has been edited by tazvil04: Jun 8 2006, 10:42 AM

[NiteOwl]

This is great news! 
As if any is needed, this is further proof that some very good people are doing some very good work in protecting us.

Protecting us ??? We created this Frankenstein... empowered him. So, we are now supposed to view this as protecting us from him.

God help us if this is protection. God protect us from ourselves.

[DWB04]

Father of Beheaded Man Blames Bush, Not Zarqawi

By Jon Hurdle
Reuters

Thursday 08 June 2006

Philadelphia - Michael Berg, whose son Nick was beheaded in Iraq in 2004, said on Thursday he felt no sense of relief at the killing of the al Qaeda leader in Iraq and blamed President Bush for his son's death.

Asked what would give him satisfaction, Berg, an anti-war activist and candidate for U.S. Congress, said, "The end of the war and getting rid of George Bush."

The United States said its aircraft killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the insurgent leader who masterminded the death of hundreds in suicide bombings and was blamed for the videotaped beheading of Nick Berg, a U.S. contractor, and other captives.

"I don't think that Zarqawi is himself responsible for the killings of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq," Berg said in a combative television interview with the U.S. Fox News network. "I think George Bush is.

"George Bush is the one that invaded this country, George Bush is the one that destabilized it so that Zarqawi could get in, so that Zarqawi had a need to get in, to defend his region of the country from American invaders."

Berg said Bush was to blame for the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

"Yeah, like George Bush didn't OK the torture and death and rape of people in the Abu Ghraib prison for which my son was killed in retaliation?" he told his Fox interviewers.

In a telephone interview with Reuters from his home in Wilmington, Delaware, the father said: "I have no sense of relief, just sadness that another human being had to die."

Berg, who is running as a Green Party candidate, has repeatedly blamed Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his 26-year-old son's death.

Nick Berg's videotaped beheading by hooded captors was posted on the Internet, and the father said he could understand what Zarqawi's family was going through.

"I have learned to forgive a long time ago, and I regret mostly that that will bring about another wave of revenge from his cohorts from al Qaeda," he told Fox.

Zarqawi's organization took responsibility for the execution of Nick Berg in May 2004. The video was published with a caption saying: "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi slaughtering an American."

When an Islamist Web site showed the video of a man severing Berg's head, the CIA said Zarqawi was probably the one wielding the knife. The father said he was not convinced.

"I have been lied to by my own government," he told Reuters on Thursday.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060806K.shtml

[Magmak1]

An older story from the WaPo:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0900890_pf.html

Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi
Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 10, 2006; A01

The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

"The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends," said Harvey, who did not return phone calls seeking comment on his remarks.

There has been a running argument among specialists in Iraq about how much significance to assign to Zarqawi, who spent seven years in prison in Jordan for attempting to overthrow the government there. After his release he spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan before moving his base of operations to Iraq. He has been sentenced to death in absentia for planning the 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan. U.S. authorities have said he is responsible for dozens of deaths in Iraq and have placed a $25 million bounty on his head.

Recently there have been unconfirmed reports of a possible rift between Zarqawi and the parent al-Qaeda organization that may have resulted in his being demoted or cut loose. Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that it was unclear what was happening between Zarqawi and al-Qaeda. "It may be that he's not being fired at all, but that he is being focused on the military side of the al-Qaeda effort and he's being asked to leave more of a political side possibly to others, because of some disagreements within al-Qaeda," he said.

The military's propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.

That slide, created by Casey's subordinates, does not specifically state that U.S. citizens were being targeted by the effort, but other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.

Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.

Filkins, reached by e-mail, said that he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi, but said he assumed that the military was releasing the letter "because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized." No special conditions were placed upon him in being briefed on its contents, he said. He said he was skeptical about the document's authenticity then, and remains so now, and so at the time tried to confirm its authenticity with officials outside the U.S. military.

"There was no attempt to manipulate the press," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004, said in an interview Friday. "We trusted Dexter to write an accurate story, and we gave him a good scoop."

Another briefing slide states that after U.S. commanders ordered that the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's government be publicized, U.S. psychological operations soldiers produced a video disc that not only was widely disseminated inside Iraq, but also was "seen on Fox News."

U.S. military policy is not to aim psychological operations at Americans, said Army Col. James A. Treadwell, who commanded the U.S. military psyops unit in Iraq in 2003. "It is ingrained in U.S.: You don't psyop Americans. We just don't do it," said Treadwell. He said he left Iraq before the Zarqawi program began but was later told about it.

"When we provided stuff, it was all in Arabic," and aimed at the Iraqi and Arab media, said another military officer familiar with the program, who spoke on background because he is not supposed to speak to reporters.

But this officer said that the Zarqawi campaign "probably raised his profile in the American press's view."

With satellite television, e-mail and the Internet, it is impossible to prevent some carryover from propaganda campaigns overseas into the U.S. media, said Treadwell, who is now director of a new project at the U.S. Special Operations Command that focuses on "trans-regional" media issues. Such carryover is "not blowback, it's bleed-over," he said. "There's always going to be a certain amount of bleed-over with the global information environment."

The Zarqawi program was not related to another effort, led by the Lincoln Group, a U.S. consulting firm, to place pro-U.S. articles in Iraq newspapers, according to the officer familiar with the program who spoke on background.

It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on the Zarqawi campaign, which began two years ago and is believed to be ongoing. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with Zarqawi's face on them, said the officer speaking on background.

The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work.

One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."

See also http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4446084/

See also http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle...ion=focusoniraq

This post has been edited by Magmak1: Jun 8 2006, 11:24 AM

[tazvil04]

The Al Qaeda Myth
Tom Porteous
April 12, 2006

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/04/1..._qaeda_myth.php

Tom Porteous is a syndicated columnist and author who was formerly with the BBC and the British Foreign Office.

We now know that Al Qaeda had nothing to do with the London bombings in July 2005. This is the conclusion of the British government's official inquiry report leaked to the British press on April 9.

We now also know that the U.S. military is deliberately misleading Iraqis, Americans and the rest of the world about the extent of Al Qaeda's involvement in the Iraqi insurgency. This was reported in The Washington Post on April 10, on the basis of internal military documents seen by that newspaper.

What do these revelations tell us about the arguments of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Blair that in Al Qaeda the "Free World" faces a threat comparable to that of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, a world-wide terrorist network which seeks to build a radical Islamist empire over half the world?

That they are threadbare, to say the least. But also that they are cynical, misleading and self serving.

The London bombings, it turns out, were the work of four alienated British Muslims, with no links to "international terrorist networks", who had learned how to make bombs by trawling the Internet. They had been radicalized and motivated, according to the report, by British foreign policies in the Muslim world—a view Tony Blair has consistently sought to undermine and discredit. The role of the alleged "Al Qaeda mastermind in Iraq," Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, we are now told, was cynically misrepresented and exaggerated by the U.S. military's propaganda units in an effort to discredit and divide the Iraqi insurgency and to provide a retrospective justification for the Iraq war by suggesting a link between Iraq and 9/11.

Wherever in the world Al Qaeda crops up, its appearance has often been uncannily convenient for the local authorities—dictators, warlords, occupation forces and elected governments alike. And often the precise nature of the Al Qaeda connection turns out, on close examination, to be tenuous or non-existent. But by that time the message has gone out and sunk in: "Al Qaeda was here".

It's almost certain that as the United States ratchets up the pressure on Iran in the coming months the non-issue of Tehran 's "links" with Al Qaeda will come to the fore. In fact the groundwork is already being laid. Blair, no less, said ominously in a speech last month that although "the conventional view is that Iran is hostile to Al Qaeda: we know from our own history of conflict that, under the pressure of battle, alliances shift and change." So as the confrontation with Iran builds, watch out for leaked reports from anonymous security officials about dastardly Iranian-Al Qaeda conspiracies.

Stripped of exaggeration, romanticism, demonization and myth making, the picture of Al Qaeda which has emerged from the trial in the United States of Zacarias Moussaoui is of a fractious organisation that has been a magnet for bewildered martyrdom-seeking fantasists. At least this has a ring of truth to it.

This is not to say that Al Qaeda is not dangerous. It is a serious security challenge. It may even one day be a strategic threat, especially if it gets hold of some WMD. But it is not the threat Bush and Blair tell us it is.

The recent revelations of the non-existent role of Al Qaeda in the London bombings and of the Pentagon's deliberate exaggeration of Al Qaeda's role in Iraq reinforce the argument that in their response to the threat of Al Qaeda (the so called "war on terror," or "Long War"), the United States and its allies are making strategic errors of monumental proportions.

First, this war, as it is being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not principally fighting "Al Qaeda" but is creating and fighting new enemies: people who don't like being invaded, occupied and kicked around by foreigners and who are prepared to stand up and resist. These people may eventually become terrorists. But it will have been U.S. policies that created them. If Iran is next on the Pentagon's list, the same thing will happen there. To the extent that Israel is seen by the United States as pursuing its own war on terror in the Palestinian territories it occupies, it is happening in Gaza and the West Bank too. Second, the Long War is a distraction from the real issues which need to be addressed as a matter of urgency in order to reduce conflict, violence and injustice in the region and thus to reduce the radicalization of a generation of angry and alienated Muslim youth at home and in the diasporas. These include: ending the Israeli occupation of occupied Palestinian territories through negotiation; pursuing peaceful nuclear reduction throughout the region; and engaging seriously with political Islam. Talk of "democratization" without engaging with political Islam is nonsense.

Third, on the grounds that it is fighting a "just war," the United States and its allies have justified using levels of violence, coercion and repression—including torture, collective punishment and the killing of large numbers of civilians—which are not only of questionable tactical efficacy, but have led to a collapse of U.S. prestige in a part of the world where it has long been seen as a necessary protector, stabilizer and arbiter.

The fact that there was no operational link between the London bombers and Al Qaeda shows that its real danger lies in its ability to inspire terrorist attacks. In this it has no better allies and collaborators at present than the United States and Britain under their current leaders.

[tazvil04]

tomhye:

This may be the reaosn why they played up the importance of Zarqawi in Iraq in April.

They were getting some good intel and they knew they would capture or kill him soon and they wanted to make certain they got out a lot of hype about his role so that when they did get him it would look like that much more of a big deal...

Just a thought.

Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi
Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 10, 2006; A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0900890_pf.html

The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

"The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends," said Harvey, who did not return phone calls seeking comment on his remarks.

There has been a running argument among specialists in Iraq about how much significance to assign to Zarqawi, who spent seven years in prison in Jordan for attempting to overthrow the government there. After his release he spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan before moving his base of operations to Iraq. He has been sentenced to death in absentia for planning the 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan. U.S. authorities have said he is responsible for dozens of deaths in Iraq and have placed a $25 million bounty on his head.

Recently there have been unconfirmed reports of a possible rift between Zarqawi and the parent al-Qaeda organization that may have resulted in his being demoted or cut loose. Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that it was unclear what was happening between Zarqawi and al-Qaeda. "It may be that he's not being fired at all, but that he is being focused on the military side of the al-Qaeda effort and he's being asked to leave more of a political side possibly to others, because of some disagreements within al-Qaeda," he said.

The military's propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.

That slide, created by Casey's subordinates, does not specifically state that U.S. citizens were being targeted by the effort, but other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.

Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.

Filkins, reached by e-mail, said that he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi, but said he assumed that the military was releasing the letter "because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized." No special conditions were placed upon him in being briefed on its contents, he said. He said he was skeptical about the document's authenticity then, and remains so now, and so at the time tried to confirm its authenticity with officials outside the U.S. military.

"There was no attempt to manipulate the press," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004, said in an interview Friday. "We trusted Dexter to write an accurate story, and we gave him a good scoop."

Another briefing slide states that after U.S. commanders ordered that the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's government be publicized, U.S. psychological operations soldiers produced a video disc that not only was widely disseminated inside Iraq, but also was "seen on Fox News."

U.S. military policy is not to aim psychological operations at Americans, said Army Col. James A. Treadwell, who commanded the U.S. military psyops unit in Iraq in 2003. "It is ingrained in U.S.: You don't psyop Americans. We just don't do it," said Treadwell. He said he left Iraq before the Zarqawi program began but was later told about it.

"When we provided stuff, it was all in Arabic," and aimed at the Iraqi and Arab media, said another military officer familiar with the program, who spoke on background because he is not supposed to speak to reporters.

But this officer said that the Zarqawi campaign "probably raised his profile in the American press's view."

With satellite television, e-mail and the Internet, it is impossible to prevent some carryover from propaganda campaigns overseas into the U.S. media, said Treadwell, who is now director of a new project at the U.S. Special Operations Command that focuses on "trans-regional" media issues. Such carryover is "not blowback, it's bleed-over," he said. "There's always going to be a certain amount of bleed-over with the global information environment."

The Zarqawi program was not related to another effort, led by the Lincoln Group, a U.S. consulting firm, to place pro-U.S. articles in Iraq newspapers, according to the officer familiar with the program who spoke on background.

It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on the Zarqawi campaign, which began two years ago and is believed to be ongoing. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with Zarqawi's face on them, said the officer speaking on background.

The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work.

One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."

Kimmitt is now the senior planner on the staff of the Central Command that directs operations in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.

In 2003 and 2004, he coordinated public affairs, information operations and psychological operations in Iraq -- though he said in an interview the internal briefing must be mistaken because he did not actually run the psychological operations and could not speak for them.

Kimmitt said, "There was clearly an information campaign to raise the public awareness of who Zarqawi was, primarily for the Iraqi audience but also with the international audience."

A goal of the campaign was to drive a wedge into the insurgency by emphasizing Zarqawi's terrorist acts and foreign origin, said officers familiar with the program.

"Through aggressive Strategic Communications, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi now represents: Terrorism in Iraq/Foreign Fighters in Iraq/Suffering of Iraqi People (Infrastructure Attacks)/Denial of Iraqi Aspirations," the same briefing asserts.

Officials said one indication that the campaign worked is that over the past several months, there have been reports that Iraqi tribal insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists, especially in the culturally conservative province of Anbar. "What we're finding is indeed the people of al-Anbar -- Fallujah and Ramadi, specifically -- have decided to turn against terrorists and foreign fighters," Maj. Gen Rick Lynch, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said in February.

This post has been edited by tazvil04: Jun 8 2006, 11:38 AM

[tazvil04]

Zarqawi 'not leading Iraq unrest'

Jordanian al-Qaeda militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been forced to step down as leader of a coalition of Iraqi militants, a leading Islamist claims.
Huthaifa Azzam, whose father was a mentor of Osama Bin Laden, said Zarqawi was replaced by an Iraqi two weeks ago.

Mr Azzam claimed some were unhappy about Zarqawi's tactics and tendency to speak for the insurgency as a whole.

However, experts say choosing an Iraqi as political leader is a tactic aimed at giving the insurgency an Iraqi face.

'Embarrassment'

The new political leader of the coalition of insurgent groups - of which Zarqawi is part - is Abdullah al-Baghdadi, Mr Azzam said.

He said that the move was in part prompted by embarrassment at Zarqawi's attacks on other countries, such as last year's hotel bombings in Jordan, and his use of brutal tactics, such as videotaped beheadings.

The claims cannot be independently verified and it is not clear how Mr Azzam came by the information.

He claims close contacts with the insurgents and is the son of Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic Palestinian who was one of the seminal figures in the modern jihadi movement in the Muslim world.

Influence on Bin Laden

Abdullah Azzam encouraged Muslims, including the young Osama Bin Laden, to go to fight in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s.

As a result, the son speaks with a certain authority about the jihadi groups in Iraq, the BBC's Middle East analyst, Roger Hardy, says.

As head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi has become the country's most notorious insurgent - a shadowy figure associated with the bloodiest bombings, assassinations and the beheading of foreign hostages.

In January this year al-Qaeda in Iraq posted a statement on a website saying that it had joined five other insurgent groups in Iraq to form the Mujahideen Shura Council, or the Consultative Council of Holy Warriors.

Even if the claims of him adopting a lower profile turn out to be true, our Middle East analyst says that there can be little doubt that as a military leader - responsible for some of the most ruthless acts of violence in Iraq - Zarqawi remains a force to be reckoned with.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/midd...ast/4872236.stm

Published: 2006/04/03 13:05:10 GMT

[tazvil04]

Maybe now we can get to the real story in Iraq --- that Al Qaeda's peripheral at best...a nd that much or most of the insurgency is Iraqis unaffiliated with Al Qaeda.

Insurgents and Al Qaeda clash in Iraq
By Sabrina Tavernise and Dexter Filkins The New York Times

THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 2006

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/12/afr...eb.0112iraq.php

BAGHDAD The story told by the two Iraqi guerrillas cut to the heart of the war that Iraqi and American officials now believe is raging inside the Iraqi insurgency. In October, the two insurgents said in interviews, a group of local fighters from the Islamic Army gathered for an open-air meeting on a street corner in Taji, a city north of Baghdad.

Across from the Iraqis stood the men from Al Qaeda, mostly Arabs from outside Iraq. Some of them wore suicide belts. The men from the Islamic Army accused the Qaeda fighters of murdering their comrades.

"Al Qaeda killed two people from our group," said an Islamic Army fighter who uses the nom de guerre Abu Lil and who claimed that he attended the meeting. "They repeatedly kill our people."

The encounter ended angrily. A few days later, the insurgents said, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the Islamic Army fought a bloody battle on the outskirts of town.

The battle, which the insurgents said was fought on Oct. 23, was one of several clashes between Al Qaeda and local Iraqi guerrilla groups that have broken out in recent months across the Sunni Triangle.

American and Iraqi officials believe that the conflicts present them with one of the biggest opportunities since the insurgency burst upon Iraq nearly three years ago. They have begun talking with local insurgents, hoping to enlist them to cooperate against Al Qaeda, said Western diplomats, Iraqi officials and an insurgent leader.

It is impossible to say just how far the split extends within the insurgency, which remains a lethal force with a shared goal of driving the Americans out of Iraq. Indeed, the best the Americans can hope for may be a grudging passivity from the Iraqi insurgents when the Americans zero in on Al Qaeda's forces.

But the split within the insurgency is coinciding with Sunni Arabs' new desire to participate in Iraq's political process, and a growing resentment of the militants. Iraqis are increasingly saying that they regard Al Qaeda as a foreign-led force, whose extreme religious goals and desires for sectarian war against Iraq's Shiite majority override Iraqi tribal and nationalist traditions.

While American and Iraqi officials have talked of a split for months, detailed accounts of clashes were provided by men claiming to be local insurgents.

Abu Lil was one of four Iraqi men interviewed for this article who said they were fighters for the Islamic Army, one of the main insurgent groups. Despite its name, its members have nationalist and largely secular motivations. While their membership in the insurgency could not be independently verified, the descriptions the four men offered of themselves and their exploits were lengthy, detailed and credible.

The four men interviewed are, by all accounts, ordinary Iraqis. One worked as a trash collector. Another was a part-time mechanic in an ice factory. All of them said they had children. While they claimed to be members of the same group, different members provided lengthy accounts of operations in an array of cities in the Sunni Triangle. The men gave Iraqi nicknames and noms de guerre. Some of their assertions, including specific examples about clashes with Al Qaeda's forces, were confirmed by American and Iraqi officials.

According to an American and an Iraqi intelligence official, as well as Iraqi insurgents, clashes between Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Iraqi insurgent groups like the Islamic Army and Muhammad's Army have broken out in Ramadi, Husayba, Yusifiya, Dhuluiya and Karmah.

In town after town, Iraqis and Americans say, local Iraqi insurgents and tribal groups have begun trying to expel Al Qaeda's fighters, and, in some cases, kill them. It is unclear how deeply the split pervades Iraqi society. Iraqi leaders say that in some Iraqi cities, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and local insurgent groups continue to cooperate with one another.

American and Iraqi officials believe that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is largely made up of Iraqis, with its highest leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian. Even so, among Iraqis, the group is still perceived as a largely foreign force. Evidence of the split is still largely anecdotal, and from most available evidence, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia remains the most virulent and well-financed group fighting in Iraq. But in most Sunni cities, Iraqis defied Al Qaeda's threats and turned out to vote in large numbers on Dec. 15.

"The tribes are fed up with Al Qaeda and they will not tolerate any more," said a senior Iraqi intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The intelligence official confirmed reports that a Sunni tribe in Samarra had tried and executed Qaeda members for their role in assassinating a local sheik. "It was a beautiful mistake," the intelligence official said of the sheik's assassination by Al Qaeda. "Now the tribes will kill Al Qaeda. Now they have the courage."

An Attack's Repercussions

Samarra, north of Baghdad, had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda's fighters. In desperation, a local sheik, Hekmat Mumtaz al-Baz, traveled to Baghdad in September to meet with Iraq's defense minister and ask for help, said one of the sheik's aides, Waleed al-Samarrai. A few weeks after the visit, the sheik was shot dead by Qaeda gunmen in his yard.

The account was confirmed by a member of the tribe, and a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Baghdad. Samarrai spoke in an interview in Al Wasat Hospital in Baghdad, where his brother, Salim, the sheik's bodyguard, who was wounded in a fight with Al Qaeda, was convalescing.

The tribe was furious, and its members tracked down the three men who carried out the killing. Elders from the tribe held a trial in a local farmhouse and interrogated the men for days. They said they worked for a fighter from Saudi Arabia who bankrolled the attacks, Samarrai said.

The Samarrai brothers said Al Qaeda's appeal was based less on religion than on money. The Iraqis who killed the sheik were believed to have received $500 to $1,000 for the job, and the same amount for dozens of other similar killings, Waleed al-Samarrai said. He said local insurgents had changed allegiances, lured away by Al Qaeda's money.

Members of the tribe swept the town and arrested 17 people they suspected were associated with the sheik's killing. In one house raid, the tribe found men from Sudan, Morocco, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, a member of the tribe said.

Al Qaeda's fighters struck back during the tribe's offensive. A foreign Arab believed to be a Saudi wearing in a suicide belt blew himself up at the sheik's funeral, killing one guest and wounding two, said Salim al-Samarrai, who said he witnessed the attack.

As a lesson to all those associated with the sheik's death, the tribe staged a public killing. While the sheik's father watched, men with machine guns shot the three men who carried out the assassination, the Samarrai brothers said. "Someone from outside the tribe should not tell us what to do," said Waleed al-Samarrai, standing next to Salim's hospital bed. "It is unacceptable for us."

Tactical Disputes

Disagreements over Al Qaeda's bloody tactics between local insurgents and Al Qaeda's fighters are as old as the war. Abu Lil, who fought in Taji in October, for example, claimed to have met with Qaeda fighters in late 2003. The militant group had just claimed responsibility for a double car bombing in Baghdad, and insurgents from the 20th Revolutionary Brigade, a nationalist group that Abu Lil belonged to at that time, were angry about the high civilian death toll.

Abu Lil, an elfin man with a cotton scarf tied around his head, talked in detail about the meeting as he sat on a couch in a house in Baghdad. The meeting was held in a farmhouse in Mosul, he said. About 25 men from Al Qaeda attended. Several appeared to be from Pakistan. Some spoke Arabic so poorly that they had to speak through a translator.

The discussion dragged on for seven hours, he said, but did not go well. The local insurgents demanded that the foreigners from Al Qaeda leave Iraq. "They said, 'Jihad needs its victims,' " Abu Lil said. " 'Iraqis should be willing to pay the price.' "

"We said, 'It's very expensive.' "

The meeting ended abruptly, and Abu Lil and his associates walked out, feeling powerless and angry.

"I wished I had a nuclear bomb to attack them," he said. "We told them, 'You are not Iraqis. Who gave you the power to do this?' "

It took two more years for Sunni Arab sentiment to turn against the militants.

As the Iraqi democratic political process began, including elections and the drafting of a new constitution, there was a widespread feeling among Sunnis that they were being left behind. Last January, Sunnis boycotted an election, giving them few seats in the new Parliament, and leaving them out of the drafting of a new constitution.

In the predominantly Sunni town of Dhuluiya, north of Baghdad, local residents blamed insurgents for their isolation. In the days leading up to a vote on the constitution, they went to the resistance and demanded they let people vote.

"All of the Sunnis were angry at the resistance," said a resident of Dhuluiya. "People realized, if we do not take part it, then we will lose the government. So the resistance agreed. They said, 'We will protect you from anyone who tries to attack you.' "

Emboldened by the promise of protection by the resistance, clerics from five local mosques encouraged their congregations to vote, even sending out people to put up posters about the election.

The excitement over the vote spurred Al Qaeda into action. At night, men put up their own posters threatening, "He who votes will be beheaded." Then, two days before the Oct. 15 referendum, a group of Qaeda fighters confronted an imam in one of the local Sunni mosques and lectured him about how voting contradicted the Koran. According to the imam, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for his safety, two of the men appeared from their accents to be from Algeria and Syria. They vowed to kill anyone who removed their posters.

"Why are you driving the troubles into our town?" the Sunni cleric said he asked the men. "If you want jihad, the U.S. military is there."

Imams from five Sunni mosques tore down the Qaeda posters wherever they could find them.

"I myself tore those into pieces," the Sunni cleric said. Al Qaeda got the message. On election day, Dhuluiya's voters streamed into polling places. The streets were quiet, with only a single attack on a polling center.

"All of them voted," the resident said. "All of Dhuluiya. There was no one sitting in his house."

Invisible Boundaries

Two and a half years into the American occupation, the towns and villages south of Baghdad are divided among the insurgent groups like gang territory in big American cities. The arrangement is largely invisible to American troops who patrol the towns, the insurgents said in interviews. But guerrillas themselves say they must seek permission to travel through towns their groups do not control.

Abu Marwa, a 32-year-old guerrilla leader from Yusifiya, a city south of Baghdad, told of a blood feud with Al Qaeda in a village the group controlled called Karagol, south of Baghdad.

Bookish and soft-spoken, wearing jeans and a button-down shirt, Marwa told of life inside the insurgency during two days of interviews in Baghdad. He said he might never have clashed with Al Qaeda, but the group's sectarian war against Shiites clashed with his loyalty to a Shiite relative of his the group had kidnapped and tortured.

"It's more than crazy when you want to hit Al Qaeda," said Marwa, who said he was a fighter for a local cell called Thunder. "Even the network of the resistance couldn't think of doing such an act."

According to Marwa's story, the feud with Al Qaeda began on Oct. 13, when a car full of gunmen he said appeared to be Syrian kidnapped his relative and took him to Karagol, which is in territory he said was controlled by Al Qaeda.

"Karagol is the place where Al Qaeda is based in the region," said an Iraqi Army lieutenant based in the area. He spoke on the condition of anonymity, because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

"There has not been a command to go into Karagol," he said. "There are no government forces there. Now it's fully under control of the terrorists."

For the next three days, Marwa searched through miles of lush farmland before he got to Karagol. When he was prevented from driving through the town by Qaeda gunmen, who shot at him on the road, he walked through orchards after dark.

He said a guide had led him to the house of a man who was known as a paid killer for Al Qaeda. The man consulted a notebook fat with names, but Marwa's relative's was not among them.

As he drew closer, a local insurgent warned him to stay away from Karagol, even if he was sure his relative was there.

" 'I advise you, if you know he's with Al Qaeda, don't go there,' " Marwa recalled the man saying.

Marwa finally found his relative in the local morgue. His legs bore drill holes revealing bone. His jaw had slid off to one side of his head, and his nose was broken. Burns marked his body. His knees were raw, as if he had been dragged. "I was totally crazy," Marwa recalled. "A mad man was more rational than me."

Enlisting the most trusted members of his cell, Marwa set out to take revenge. They tracked down two Syrian members of Al Qaeda, and in late October laid out an intricate plan for an ambush. They killed them on a country road as they drove out of town, and took their kaffiyeh, or headdresses, to the dead relative's wife, Marwa said.

"After many meetings, we decided to terminate them," he said.

Despite such tensions, the Americans face significant challenges in trying to exploit the split. "It is against my beliefs to put my hand with the Americans," said an Iraqi member of the Islamic Army who uses the nom de guerre Abu Omar. Still, he said in an interview in a house in Baghdad, he allowed himself a small celebration whenever a member of Al Qaeda fell to an American bullet. "I feel happy when the Americans kill them," he said.

BAGHDAD The story told by the two Iraqi guerrillas cut to the heart of the war that Iraqi and American officials now believe is raging inside the Iraqi insurgency. In October, the two insurgents said in interviews, a group of local fighters from the Islamic Army gathered for an open-air meeting on a street corner in Taji, a city north of Baghdad.

Across from the Iraqis stood the men from Al Qaeda, mostly Arabs from outside Iraq. Some of them wore suicide belts. The men from the Islamic Army accused the Qaeda fighters of murdering their comrades.

"Al Qaeda killed two people from our group," said an Islamic Army fighter who uses the nom de guerre Abu Lil and who claimed that he attended the meeting. "They repeatedly kill our people."

The encounter ended angrily. A few days later, the insurgents said, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the Islamic Army fought a bloody battle on the outskirts of town.

The battle, which the insurgents said was fought on Oct. 23, was one of several clashes between Al Qaeda and local Iraqi guerrilla groups that have broken out in recent months across the Sunni Triangle.

American and Iraqi officials believe that the conflicts present them with one of the biggest opportunities since the insurgency burst upon Iraq nearly three years ago. They have begun talking with local insurgents, hoping to enlist them to cooperate against Al Qaeda, said Western diplomats, Iraqi officials and an insurgent leader.

It is impossible to say just how far the split extends within the insurgency, which remains a lethal force with a shared goal of driving the Americans out of Iraq. Indeed, the best the Americans can hope for may be a grudging passivity from the Iraqi insurgents when the Americans zero in on Al Qaeda's forces.

But the split within the insurgency is coinciding with Sunni Arabs' new desire to participate in Iraq's political process, and a growing resentment of the militants. Iraqis are increasingly saying that they regard Al Qaeda as a foreign-led force, whose extreme religious goals and desires for sectarian war against Iraq's Shiite majority override Iraqi tribal and nationalist traditions.

While American and Iraqi officials have talked of a split for months, detailed accounts of clashes were provided by men claiming to be local insurgents.

Abu Lil was one of four Iraqi men interviewed for this article who said they were fighters for the Islamic Army, one of the main insurgent groups. Despite its name, its members have nationalist and largely secular motivations. While their membership in the insurgency could not be independently verified, the descriptions the four men offered of themselves and their exploits were lengthy, detailed and credible.

The four men interviewed are, by all accounts, ordinary Iraqis. One worked as a trash collector. Another was a part-time mechanic in an ice factory. All of them said they had children. While they claimed to be members of the same group, different members provided lengthy accounts of operations in an array of cities in the Sunni Triangle. The men gave Iraqi nicknames and noms de guerre. Some of their assertions, including specific examples about clashes with Al Qaeda's forces, were confirmed by American and Iraqi officials.

According to an American and an Iraqi intelligence official, as well as Iraqi insurgents, clashes between Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Iraqi insurgent groups like the Islamic Army and Muhammad's Army have broken out in Ramadi, Husayba, Yusifiya, Dhuluiya and Karmah.

In town after town, Iraqis and Americans say, local Iraqi insurgents and tribal groups have begun trying to expel Al Qaeda's fighters, and, in some cases, kill them. It is unclear how deeply the split pervades Iraqi society. Iraqi leaders say that in some Iraqi cities, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and local insurgent groups continue to cooperate with one another.

American and Iraqi officials believe that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is largely made up of Iraqis, with its highest leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian. Even so, among Iraqis, the group is still perceived as a largely foreign force. Evidence of the split is still largely anecdotal, and from most available evidence, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia remains the most virulent and well-financed group fighting in Iraq. But in most Sunni cities, Iraqis defied Al Qaeda's threats and turned out to vote in large numbers on Dec. 15.

"The tribes are fed up with Al Qaeda and they will not tolerate any more," said a senior Iraqi intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The intelligence official confirmed reports that a Sunni tribe in Samarra had tried and executed Qaeda members for their role in assassinating a local sheik. "It was a beautiful mistake," the intelligence official said of the sheik's assassination by Al Qaeda. "Now the tribes will kill Al Qaeda. Now they have the courage."

An Attack's Repercussions

Samarra, north of Baghdad, had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda's fighters. In desperation, a local sheik, Hekmat Mumtaz al-Baz, traveled to Baghdad in September to meet with Iraq's defense minister and ask for help, said one of the sheik's aides, Waleed al-Samarrai. A few weeks after the visit, the sheik was shot dead by Qaeda gunmen in his yard.

The account was confirmed by a member of the tribe, and a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Baghdad. Samarrai spoke in an interview in Al Wasat Hospital in Baghdad, where his brother, Salim, the sheik's bodyguard, who was wounded in a fight with Al Qaeda, was convalescing.

The tribe was furious, and its members tracked down the three men who carried out the killing. Elders from the tribe held a trial in a local farmhouse and interrogated the men for days. They said they worked for a fighter from Saudi Arabia who bankrolled the attacks, Samarrai said.

The Samarrai brothers said Al Qaeda's appeal was based less on religion than on money. The Iraqis who killed the sheik were believed to have received $500 to $1,000 for the job, and the same amount for dozens of other similar killings, Waleed al-Samarrai said. He said local insurgents had changed allegiances, lured away by Al Qaeda's money.

Members of the tribe swept the town and arrested 17 people they suspected were associated with the sheik's killing. In one house raid, the tribe found men from Sudan, Morocco, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, a member of the tribe said.

Al Qaeda's fighters struck back during the tribe's offensive. A foreign Arab believed to be a Saudi wearing in a suicide belt blew himself up at the sheik's funeral, killing one guest and wounding two, said Salim al-Samarrai, who said he witnessed the attack.

As a lesson to all those associated with the sheik's death, the tribe staged a public killing. While the sheik's father watched, men with machine guns shot the three men who carried out the assassination, the Samarrai brothers said. "Someone from outside the tribe should not tell us what to do," said Waleed al-Samarrai, standing next to Salim's hospital bed. "It is unacceptable for us."

Tactical Disputes

Disagreements over Al Qaeda's bloody tactics between local insurgents and Al Qaeda's fighters are as old as the war. Abu Lil, who fought in Taji in October, for example, claimed to have met with Qaeda fighters in late 2003. The militant group had just claimed responsibility for a double car bombing in Baghdad, and insurgents from the 20th Revolutionary Brigade, a nationalist group that Abu Lil belonged to at that time, were angry about the high civilian death toll.

Abu Lil, an elfin man with a cotton scarf tied around his head, talked in detail about the meeting as he sat on a couch in a house in Baghdad. The meeting was held in a farmhouse in Mosul, he said. About 25 men from Al Qaeda attended. Several appeared to be from Pakistan. Some spoke Arabic so poorly that they had to speak through a translator.

The discussion dragged on for seven hours, he said, but did not go well. The local insurgents demanded that the foreigners from Al Qaeda leave Iraq. "They said, 'Jihad needs its victims,' " Abu Lil said. " 'Iraqis should be willing to pay the price.' "

"We said, 'It's very expensive.' "

The meeting ended abruptly, and Abu Lil and his associates walked out, feeling powerless and angry.

"I wished I had a nuclear bomb to attack them," he said. "We told them, 'You are not Iraqis. Who gave you the power to do this?' "

It took two more years for Sunni Arab sentiment to turn against the militants.

As the Iraqi democratic political process began, including elections and the drafting of a new constitution, there was a widespread feeling among Sunnis that they were being left behind. Last January, Sunnis boycotted an election, giving them few seats in the new Parliament, and leaving them out of the drafting of a new constitution.

In the predominantly Sunni town of Dhuluiya, north of Baghdad, local residents blamed insurgents for their isolation. In the days leading up to a vote on the constitution, they went to the resistance and demanded they let people vote.

"All of the Sunnis were angry at the resistance," said a resident of Dhuluiya. "People realized, if we do not take part it, then we will lose the government. So the resistance agreed. They said, 'We will protect you from anyone who tries to attack you.' "

Emboldened by the promise of protection by the resistance, clerics from five local mosques encouraged their congregations to vote, even sending out people to put up posters about the election.

The excitement over the vote spurred Al Qaeda into action. At night, men put up their own posters threatening, "He who votes will be beheaded." Then, two days before the Oct. 15 referendum, a group of Qaeda fighters confronted an imam in one of the local Sunni mosques and lectured him about how voting contradicted the Koran. According to the imam, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for his safety, two of the men appeared from their accents to be from Algeria and Syria. They vowed to kill anyone who removed their posters.

"Why are you driving the troubles into our town?" the Sunni cleric said he asked the men. "If you want jihad, the U.S. military is there."

Imams from five Sunni mosques tore down the Qaeda posters wherever they could find them.

"I myself tore those into pieces," the Sunni cleric said. Al Qaeda got the message. On election day, Dhuluiya's voters streamed into polling places. The streets were quiet, with only a single attack on a polling center.

"All of them voted," the resident said. "All of Dhuluiya. There was no one sitting in his house."

Invisible Boundaries

Two and a half years into the American occupation, the towns and villages south of Baghdad are divided among the insurgent groups like gang territory in big American cities. The arrangement is largely invisible to American troops who patrol the towns, the insurgents said in interviews. But guerrillas themselves say they must seek permission to travel through towns their groups do not control.

Abu Marwa, a 32-year-old guerrilla leader from Yusifiya, a city south of Baghdad, told of a blood feud with Al Qaeda in a village the group controlled called Karagol, south of Baghdad.

Bookish and soft-spoken, wearing jeans and a button-down shirt, Marwa told of life inside the insurgency during two days of interviews in Baghdad. He said he might never have clashed with Al Qaeda, but the group's sectarian war against Shiites clashed with his loyalty to a Shiite relative of his the group had kidnapped and tortured.

"It's more than crazy when you want to hit Al Qaeda," said Marwa, who said he was a fighter for a local cell called Thunder. "Even the network of the resistance couldn't think of doing such an act."

According to Marwa's story, the feud with Al Qaeda began on Oct. 13, when a car full of gunmen he said appeared to be Syrian kidnapped his relative and took him to Karagol, which is in territory he said was controlled by Al Qaeda.

"Karagol is the place where Al Qaeda is based in the region," said an Iraqi Army lieutenant based in the area. He spoke on the condition of anonymity, because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

"There has not been a command to go into Karagol," he said. "There are no government forces there. Now it's fully under control of the terrorists."

For the next three days, Marwa searched through miles of lush farmland before he got to Karagol. When he was prevented from driving through the town by Qaeda gunmen, who shot at him on the road, he walked through orchards after dark.

He said a guide had led him to the house of a man who was known as a paid killer for Al Qaeda. The man consulted a notebook fat with names, but Marwa's relative's was not among them.

As he drew closer, a local insurgent warned him to stay away from Karagol, even if he was sure his relative was there.

" 'I advise you, if you know he's with Al Qaeda, don't go there,' " Marwa recalled the man saying.

Marwa finally found his relative in the local morgue. His legs bore drill holes revealing bone. His jaw had slid off to one side of his head, and his nose was broken. Burns marked his body. His knees were raw, as if he had been dragged. "I was totally crazy," Marwa recalled. "A mad man was more rational than me."

Enlisting the most trusted members of his cell, Marwa set out to take revenge. They tracked down two Syrian members of Al Qaeda, and in late October laid out an intricate plan for an ambush. They killed them on a country road as they drove out of town, and took their kaffiyeh, or headdresses, to the dead relative's wife, Marwa said.

"After many meetings, we decided to terminate them," he said.

Despite such tensions, the Americans face significant challenges in trying to exploit the split. "It is against my beliefs to put my hand with the Americans," said an Iraqi member of the Islamic Army who uses the nom de guerre Abu Omar. Still, he said in an interview in a house in Baghdad, he allowed himself a small celebration whenever a member of Al Qaeda fell to an American bullet. "I feel happy when the Americans kill them," he said.

[tazvil04]

Insurgent Alliance Is Fraying In Fallujah
Locals, Fearing Invasion, Turn Against Foreign Arabs
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 13, 2004; Page A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer

BAGHDAD, Oct. 12 -- Local insurgents in the city of Fallujah are turning against the foreign fighters who have been their allies in the rebellion that has held the U.S. military at bay in parts of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, according to Fallujah residents, insurgent leaders and Iraqi and U.S. officials.

Relations are deteriorating as local fighters negotiate to avoid a U.S.-led military offensive against Fallujah, while foreign fighters press to attack Americans and their Iraqi supporters. The disputes have spilled over into harsh words and sporadic violence, with Fallujans killing at least five foreign Arabs in recent weeks, according to witnesses.

"If the Arabs will not leave willingly, we will make them leave by force," said Jamal Adnan, a taxi driver who left his house in Fallujah's Shurta neighborhood a month ago after the house next door was bombed by U.S. aircraft targeting foreign insurgents.

Located 35 miles west of Baghdad in Iraq's Sunni Triangle, Fallujah has been outside the control of Iraqi authorities and U.S. military forces since April, when a siege by U.S. Marines was lifted and Iraqi security forces were given responsibility for the city's security. Local and foreign insurgents gradually gained control, and Iraqi and U.S. officials say Fallujah has become a principal source of instability in the country.

U.S. and Iraqi authorities together have insisted that if Fallujah is to avoid an all-out assault aimed at regaining control of the city, foreign fighters must be ejected. Several local leaders of the insurgency say they, too, want to expel the foreigners, whom they scorn as terrorists. They heap particular contempt on Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose Monotheism and Jihad group has asserted responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks across Iraq, including videotaped beheadings.

"He is mentally deranged, has distorted the image of the resistance and defamed it. I believe his end is near," Abu Abdalla Dulaimy, military commander of the First Army of Mohammad, said.

One of the foreign guerrillas killed by local fighters was Abu Abdallah Suri, a Syrian and a prominent member of Zarqawi's group. Suri's body was discovered Sunday. He was shot in the head and chest while being chased by a carload of tribesmen, according to a security guard who said he witnessed the killing.

Residents say foreign fighters recently have taken to gathering in Fallujah's grimy commercial district after being denied shelter in residential neighborhoods because their presence so often attracts U.S. warplanes. The airstrikes and the turmoil in the streets have spurred perhaps half of the city's 300,000 residents to flee, residents and officials said.

U.S. aircraft hit Fallujah twice on Tuesday. An airstrike just after midnight destroyed the city's best-known restaurant, a kebab house that a military statement said was used as an arms depot, citing "numerous secondary explosions." A second strike at 4 a.m. destroyed "a known terrorist safe house" in the northeast of the city, the statement said.

Adnan, the taxi driver who moved his panicked wife and four children to another town, said attitudes toward the foreign fighters have changed dramatically since they poured into Fallujah after the Marines' siege ended in April. "We were deceived by them," he said. "We welcomed them first because we thought they came to support us, but now everything is clear."

Among the tensions dividing the locals and the foreigners is religion. People in Fallujah, known as the city of mosques, have chafed at the stern brand of Islam that the newcomers brought with them. The non-Iraqi Arabs berated women who did not cover themselves head-to-toe in black -- very rare in Iraq -- and violently opposed local customs rooted in the town's more mystical religious tradition. One Fallujah man killed a Kuwaiti who said he could not pray at the grave of an ancestor.

Residents said the overwhelming majority of Fallujah's people also have been repulsed by the atrocities that Zarqawi and other extremists have made commonplace in Iraq. The foreign militants are thought to produce the car bombs that now explode around Iraq several times a day, and Zarqawi's organization has asserted responsibility for the slayings of several Westerners, some of which were shown in videos posted on the Internet.

There was another digital display of a beheading on Tuesday. The victim apparently was a Shiite Muslim Arab, and the group that said it posted the video identified itself as the Ansar al-Sunna Army.

Abu Barra, commander of a group of native insurgents called the Allahu Akbar Battalions, said: "Please do not mix the cards. There is an Iraqi resistance, a genuine resistance, and there are other groups trying to settle accounts. There is also terror targeting Iraqis.

President Bush, he said, "knows that and so does the government, but they purposely group all three under the tag of 'terrorism.' "

Barra and other insurgent leaders said the "genuine resistance" is a disciplined force that restricts its attacks to military targets, chiefly U.S. forces. It is motivated, they say, by Iraqi nationalism and humiliation over what it regards as a foreign occupation.

"The others," Barra said, "are Arab Salafis who claim that any Iraqi or Muslim not willing to carry arms is an infidel. They are the crux of our ailment. Most of them are Saudis, Syrians" and North Africans. Salafism is a strain of Islam that seeks to restore the faith to the way it was in the days of the prophet Muhammad, 14 centuries ago.

"It is the Zarqawis and his Salafi group who are going to lead Fallujah, Samarra, Baqubah, Mosul and even some parts of Baghdad to disaster and death," Barra said.

Such worries are encouraged by U.S. and Iraqi officials, who together have mounted offensives in recent weeks to reclaim areas held by insurgents. U.S. forces have led battles to take Najaf, Tall Afar, Samarra and, last week, a string of towns southwest of Baghdad. The operations are intended to establish government control over the entire country before nationwide elections promised for January.

But they also serve, officials say, as a psychological lever on Fallujah, long considered the toughest insurgent outpost.

"The pressure is certainly going up, both as a result of our airstrikes and as a result of their seeing Najaf, Tall Afar, Samarra giving a sense this whole thing is serious," a senior U.S. official in Baghdad said. "There's a lot of fear in Fallujah."

Many residents say the same. A delegation of six prominent Fallujans began negotiating with Iraq's interim government late last month. But senior government officials said it was only after the Oct. 1 assault on Samarra that the Fallujah delegation approached the task with new zeal.

The proposal the delegation took back to Fallujah calls for surrendering control of the city to the Iraqi National Guard. U.S. forces would remain outside the city unless the lightly armed government forces were attacked.

But first, all foreign fighters must leave the city, and the foreigners are adamantly and publicly opposing the plan. Their representative voted against it in a meeting last week of the city's ruling mujaheddin shura, or council of holy warriors, which supported the peace proposal, 10 to 2. The local insurgent who cast the other negative vote was later persuaded to change his mind, residents say.

Foreign fighters already are blamed for violating a cease-fire in April and prompting a Marine offensive that killed hundreds. Dulaimy said a Syrian was slain by local insurgents "after he fired on American forces during the last truce." In remarks broadcast from one of the city's main mosques on Thursday, an insurgent negotiator, Khalid Hamoud Jumaili, said a city of several hundred thousand should not be sacrificed for a handful of foreign fighters.

Meanwhile, U.S. forces kept up military pressure Tuesday in several nearby cities. Marines raided eight mosques allegedly used as armed bases in Ramadi, a provincial capital about 25 miles west of Fallujah, and called in airstrikes in the town of Hit, about 60 miles to the northwest.

"I think there is unquestionably a fissure and there are probably several different splits based on different groups," said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his remarks were not cleared by Washington. But "whether any of the townspeople have enough force to make this fissure into something that changes the complexion of things" remains to be seen, the official said.

The assault on Samarra was mounted after a more unified local establishment headed by tribal leaders failed in a similar bid to eject a far smaller band of insurgents and foreign fighters than are holding Fallujah, the official noted.

Maki Nazzal, a Fallujah native who travels into the city frequently as an aid worker, said substantial support remains for the foreigners, especially given the number of civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes.

"Not all the people in Fallujah want these people to leave," Nazzal said. "They always have the explanation of Americans bringing people from Spain, Salvador, Poland and over the world to help them and why can't our brothers help us?"

Some foreign fighters already have left, at least for now. The fighting Tuesday in Hit erupted as Marines pursued insurgents who had recently arrived in the city from Fallujah, residents said.

"There are Arab fighters and Iraqis too," said Omar Jabbawi, 23, an engineering student at Anbar University. "They are supplied with modern weapons which even the modern army didn't have. They killed some of the people the moment they came, saying that they were spies for the Americans."

The blend of insurgents held the town, some patrolling a street of shuttered stores, others praying on the sidewalk.

"Most of the people of the city knew that after Fallujah, the fighters will come to Hit because it is an open city and has many wide woods in which maneuvering is easy," said Abeer Fadhill, 32, a traffic policeman.

A woman in Hit said one fighter had said they had come to liberate Hit as they had Fallujah.

"We don't want to be another Fallujah," said the woman, 45, who gave her name as Umm Hussein. "Ramadan is coming, and we don't have any will to lose a father, a son, a relative or even a friend. Let them leave in peace and fight in a desert away from houses and people."

[rox63]

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/IraqCoverage/sto...=2052737&page=1

Ex-Terror Czar: al-Zarqawi Death Won't Speed End of Iraq War
'Symbol of Terror' in Iraq Controlled Only Small Percentage of Insurgents

June 8, 2006 — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a vicious killer and the most prominent face of terrorism in Iraq, but his death will not hasten the end of the war in Iraq, according to former White House terror czar Richard Clarke.

"Unfortunately for the loved ones of troops over in Iraq, this is not going to mean a big difference," said Clarke, who is now an ABC News consultant.

This morning President Bush hailed the death of al-Zarqawi as a "severe blow to al Qaeda" and "significant victory in the war on terror."

Clarke said the modest size of the terrorist leader's organization and his minimal involvement in the daily bomb attacks on coalition forces made that claim unlikely.

Though al-Zarqawi was a symbol of terrorism, he commanded only a few hundred people out of tens of thousands involved in the insurgency, Clarke told "Good Morning America."

The Jordanian-born terror leader was behind many high profile attacks and beheadings, Clarke said, but was not involved in most of the roadside bombings that have made Iraq so dangerous for coalition troops.

"Al Qaeda in Iraq was probably the smallest of the 14 major insurgent groups," Clarke said.

Despite the name of his group, al-Zarqawi acted independently of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terror network, Clarke noted.

"He had his own group that he was making a network in Europe and the Middle East."

Clarke doubted, however, that al-Zarqawi's death would be an effective recruitment tool to lure new terrorist and insurgent recruits.

"He doesn't have the kind of potential martyrdom people that bin Laden does," he said. "This man was really a thug. He had been arrested at age 18 for rape and drug use. He personally was involved in a lot of street fighting."

'A Circuit Breaker for the American People'

White House officials hope al-Zarqawi's death will provide new momentum to coalition operations in Iraq and to the Iraqi government itself, ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent George Stephanopoulos said.

"They said Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had more American blood on his hands than even Osama bin Laden and, as they say, it doesn't get any better than this," Stephanopoulos said.

"No. 1, they think it could be a real booster shot for the Iraqi government, that new Iraqi government, which is now expected to also announce new defense and interior ministers, a crucial move," Stephanopoulos said.

"Secondly, they hope this is going to be what they describe as a circuit breaker for the American people, allow them to look at Iraq with new eyes and start to look for the progress in Iraq."

[tazvil04]

Al Qaeda is a small portion of the insurgent membership in Iraq despute what the Bush Administration would have you believe...(of course they also said Zarqawi was alligned with Al Qaeda long before he actually was...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_insurgency

The Iraqi insurgency is composed of at least a dozen major guerilla organizations and perhaps as many as 40 distinct groups. These groups are subdivided into countless smaller cells. Due to its clandestine nature, the exact composition of the Iraqi insurgency is difficult to determine. Because most of these insurgents are civilians fighting against an organized domestic army and a foreign occupying army, many consider them to be guerrillas. :

Ba'athists, the armed supporters of Saddam Hussein's former nomenclatura, e.g. army or intelligence officers;
Nationalists, mostly Sunni Muslims, who fight for Iraqi self-determination;
anti-Shi'a Sunni Muslims who fight to regain the prestige they held under the previous regime (these three categories are often undistinguishable in practice);
Sunni Islamists, the indigenous armed followers of the Salafi movement, as well as any remnants of the Kurdish Ansar al-Islam;
Foreign Islamist volunteers, including those often linked to al Qaeda and largely driven by the Sunni Wahabi doctrine (the two preceding categories are often lumped as "Jihadists");
Patriotic Communists (who have split from the official Iraqi Communist Party) and other leftists;
Militant followers of Shi'a Islamist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr;
Criminal insurgents who are fighting simply for money; and
Nonviolent resistance groups and political parties (not technically part of the insurgency).

[Marine]

One account I read (at cnn.com?) said they were getting a mind boggling number of tips the last 2 weeks and they had several verifying sources right before the strike. My best guess at this point is ttips were going to everyone from Iraqis on the street, that would account for the confusing reports of intel sources.

It's true; since January people I've spoke to just back from Iraq says the average Iraqi is fed up with al Qaeda, Saddam thugs, and foreign terrorist. The average Iraqi wants to live in peace and they can't inform on these people fast enough.

The insurgency is doomed, without popular support they can't win.

[USA#1]

Anybody ever see this damning peice of information???

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4431601

Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind
Abu Musab Zarqawi blamed for more than 700 killings in Iraq

By Jim Miklaszewski
Pentagon Correspondent
NBC News
Updated: 7:14 p.m. ET March 2, 2004
With Tuesday’s attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq.

But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger.

In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.

The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.

“Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn’t do it,” said Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution.

Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.

The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.

“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.

In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.

The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.

Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

The United States did attack the camp at Kirma at the beginning of the war, but it was too late — Zarqawi and many of his followers were gone. “Here’s a case where they waited, they waited too long and now we’re suffering as a result inside Iraq,” Cressey added.

And despite the Bush administration’s tough talk about hitting the terrorists before they strike, Zarqawi’s killing streak continues today.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This was back in 2004 (the article) ---

Always begs the question Why Now ????

[Marine]

I remember the last time Bush rejoinced MISSION ACCOMPLISHED he crowed

How many people died since then? (on both sides?)

The active combat mission was accomplished G4A.

The United States Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard did an exemplary job in defeating Saddam's military and well deserved the "Mission Accomplished" accolades.

If you want to have an informed opinion as to the difficulties an occupying force must endure here is a good place to start. Maybe after you read a little you'll find out pacifying Baathist is a piece of cake compared to Nazis.

[Marine]

I remember the last time Bush rejoinced MISSION ACCOMPLISHED he crowed

How many people died since then? (on both sides?)

The occupation of Germany, the occupation of Iraq, many parallels

"For someone living in Germany in 1945 ... It was widely thought that the occupation would last decades, that it was quite possible Germany would never be a democracy ... It is impossible to overstate the disastrousness of the social and physical landscape of 1945 Germany, the so-called Stunde Null , zero hour. Every city in ruins, no transport or industry functioning, no political institutions, refugees everywhere. It has often been described how the entering American forces had to construct immediately a host of bureaucratic categories in order both to initiate functioning local governments and to keep former Nazis out of them. In such total flux no regulation could be immutable and no preconceived plan ... could be acted on. All was improvisation, nothing outweighed the restoration of viable living conditions ... The French and Russians were intent on reparations from the Germans; the Americans brought a program of universalist, New Deal-style democracy ... To pursue democratic goals meant to engage Germans in the process."

September 1, 2003

There is a lot of talk in the mainstream media these days about how poorly things are going in Iraq. Most of the media people doing most of the complaining know nothing of the burdens of sitting in the decision chair, and most know precious little about confronting and solving difficult problems after a major military victory is won.

That said, if they were students of history, they would know that there are some strong parallels between what we experienced after the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II and what we are experiencing now following the defeat of the Hussein government in Iraq.

The Truman administration faced many tough problems following the war which have parallels with what the Bush administration and all of us face today with regard to Iraq.

US National Security Advisor Rice drew the parallel before a recent American Legion convention:

"There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes," she told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 25. "But as some of you here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers—called 'werewolves'—engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them—much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants."
First, we want to present some excerpts from President Truman's broadcast on May 8, 1945, to announce that Nazi Germany had surrendered:

"General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations. The flags of freedom fly over all Europe...Our rejoicing is sobered and subdued by a supreme consciousness of the terrible price we have paid to rid the world of Hitler and his evil band. Let us not forget, my fellow Americans, the sorrow and the heartbreak which today abide in the homes of so many of our neighbors-neighbors whose most priceless possession has been rendered as a sacrifice to redeem our liberty ... We can repay the debt which we owe to our God, to our dead, and to our children only by work-by ceaseless devotion to the responsibilities which lie ahead of us. If I could give you a single watchword for the coming months, that word is-work, work, work ... We must work to bind up the wounds of a suffering world-to build an abiding peace, a peace rooted in justice and in law. We can build such a peace only by hard, toilsome, painstaking work-by understanding and working with our Allies in peace as we have in war ... The job ahead is no less important, no less urgent, no less difficult than the task which now happily is done ... I call upon every American to stick to his post until the last battle is won. Until that day, let no man abandon his post or slacken his efforts."
As an aside, in this day of criticizing the principle that ours is "one nation under God," President Truman said these things in his formal proclamation:

"The Allied Armies, through sacrifice and devotion and with God's help, have wrung from Germany a final and unconditional surrender ... For the triumph of spirit and of arms which we have won, and for its promise to peoples everywhere who join us in the love of freedom, it is fitting that we, as a nation, give thanks to Almighty God, who has strengthened us and given us the victory ... Now, therefore, I, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States of America, do hereby appoint Sunday, May 13, 1945, to be a day of prayer. I call upon the people of the United States, whatever their faith, to unite in offering joyful thanks to God for the victory we have won and to pray that He will support us to the end of our present struggle and guide us into the way of peace."
Once the war with Germany was declared "over," the US had to face very significant issues. The first was our failure to take action against the killing of Europe's Jews by the Nazis. The second was the debate on how a defeated, conquered Germany should be occupied, governed and eventually restored to the community of nations.

We want to focus on the second issue.

We commend to your attention a book by Alexander Perry Biddiscombe, entitled Werwolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944-1946. The book was published in March 1998 while Biddiscombe was Assistant Professor of History at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. It is rated as the most complete history to date of the partisan movement set up by the Nazi regime in Germany in the last days of the Second World War.

Well, let's take a look at the Werwolf. Some historians such as Antony Beevo have said this organization did not really exist as any significant Nazi guerrilla movement. Biddiscombe takes that view to task and reviewers of his work argue that he did so in a most convincing way. According to Biddiscombe, the Werwolf was a very active guerrilla organization that refused to surrender to the Allies even after their government had done so. They retreated into the Black Forest and Harz mountains to fight until at least 1947 and some say until the end of the 1940s.

The Werwolf is thought to have had about 5,000 members. Both the British and Americans were attacked by them. Major John Poston, who had been with Field Marshal Montgomery in the desert, in Sicily and in northwest Europe, and served as a liaison officer for the field marshal, was ambushed in his jeep and killed. On 24th March, 1945, the Lord Mayor of Aachen was assassinated by Werewolf agents. He was not the only US appointed official to die at the hands of the partisans, but he was the most important. The Commander of the 3rd Armored Division, General Maurice Rose, was allegedly assassinated by Werewolf agents in Padeborn.

Radio Werwolf bragged that "the arm of the National Socialist Party was long and that its agents, the Werwolf, were vigilant, ruthless killers." The radio station broadcast a call to arms claiming itself to be the organization of National Socialist Freedom Fighters. The radio station vowed that the Werwolf would never bow to the enemy and would employ every means to damage the enemy. Perhaps more important, the radio station told the German people that the Werwolf was employing its own judicial system to decide the life and death of German traitors.

Back in those days, American retaliation was ruthless and swift. The Americans were overwhelmed by the notion that the Werwolf presented a serious threat and that there was a distinct possibility that a major resistance movement would take hold once again in an Alpine redoubt.

Let's change gears just a bit, and look at the state of Germany following the war.

James Rolleston of Duke University wrote this of post-war Germany, which was published by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, in its South Atlantic Review:

"For someone living in Germany in 1945 ... it was widely thought that the occupation would last decades, that it was quite possible Germany would never be a democracy ... It is impossible to overstate the disastrousness of the social and physical landscape of 1945 Germany, the so-called Stunde Null , zero hour. Every city in ruins, no transport or industry functioning, no political institutions, refugees everywhere. It has often been described how the entering American forces had to construct immediately a host of bureaucratic categories in order both to initiate functioning local governments and to keep former Nazis out of them. In such total flux no regulation could be immutable and no preconceived plan ... could be acted on. All was improvisation, nothing outweighed the restoration of viable living conditions ... The French and Russians were intent on reparations from the Germans; the Americans brought a program of universalist, New Deal-style democracy ... To pursue democratic goals meant to engage Germans in the process."
It is worth noting that Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. did have a plan for post-war Germany. Morgenthau drafted a punitive plan that would have removed all German industry and converted Germany to a "pastoral" state. He was able to get preliminary approval from FDR and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Quebec Conference in September 1944. But opponents argued that Germany could hardly feed itself before the war, and needed its industrial and coal-mining revenue to pay for the rest of its food. The Morgenthau plan was discarded, in part because the Soviets took over some of Germany's most fertile land . But the truth is that there was no choice but to rebuild the German manufacturing sector that had its center in the western sectors.

This is certainly no exhaustive study, but simply tweaks one’s urge to study more history and search for the parallels that might exist with regard to today’s situation in Iraq. We see several:

There was no consensus plan immediately following the war with Germany that addressed what to do about post-war Germany. It took several years for the Marshall Plan to emerge. In the interim, and after, there was a great deal of improvisation. The focus during the war years was on winning. That the Bush administration might not have had a consensus plan on what to do about post-war Iraq should come as no surprise. That the Bush administration might be improvising as its moves down the track should come as no surprise either. The reality is that Americans are great at improvisation, because they are independent thinkers, innovators and creative.
That said, President Truman recognized that the US faced significant responsibilities in Germany following the war. He knew there was a good deal of work ahead, that the job ahead was as important as the job just finished. He called on all Americans to dig in and help. President Bush has concluded much the same about Iraq and made similar pleas.
There was a Nazi resistance movement in post-war Germany that continued to disturb peace and stability for several years after the war, until at least 1947, perhaps even until 1949-1950. There was debate on how significant this movement was. At the time, many in the US were obsessed by it and many military mistakes were made by focusing too heavily on it. Americans, Britons and innocent Germans died at the hands of the Werwolf. There is a resistance movement in Iraq as well, and its members have killed Americans, Britons and Iraqis. While the US is working hard to deal with these thugs, thus far it has refrained from committing atrocities and making major military blunders as was done after WWII in Germany. The US is trying to rebuild and handle the thugas at the same time, and is to be congratulated for that.
The Werwolf had a mouthpiece in Radio Werwolf, and the Iraqi guerrillas have similar mouthpieces throughout the Arab world. There is a consistency in the theme --- to scare the citizens and threaten them with being treated as traitors should they come to support their occupiers.
There were many who said democracy in Germany had no chance, just as there are many who say today that democracy in Iraq has no chance. Of course, Germany today is one of the world’s great democracies. The Americans are not seeking retribution and reparations from the Iraqis, just as was the cae in Germany. They are simply seeking to keep the Ba’athists out, as they sought to keep the Nazis out, and they are seeking to pursue democratic goals meant to engage Iraqis in the process just as was done with the Germans.
It is most interesting to note that the Americans planned to restore and use German industrial and coal-mining revenues as the means to help Germans eat. The Bush administration is planning the same for Iraqi oil revenues.

http://www.talkingproud.us/International090103.html

[USA#1]

The active combat mission was accomplished G4A.

The United States Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard did an exemplary job in defeating Saddam's military and well deserved the "Mission Accomplished" accolades.

If you want to have an informed opinion as to the difficulties an occupying force must endure here is a good place to start.  Maybe after you read a little you'll find out pacifying Baathist is a piece of cake compared to Nazis.

And the Flowers and open arms were waiting Maurice --- Right !!!

[tazvil04]

I fail to see the similarity between the occupation of Germany and Iraq.

Were we short on troops in Germany?

Did we have to fight an ever-growing insurgency in Germany?

The book discusses 5,000 at most members of Werwolf...

There are considerably more insurgents in Iraq.

We had considerably more troops in Germany...

Was the German citizenry as anti-American as much of the Iraqi citizens after our bumbling introduction to the war with inadequate planning and resources and ability to restore electricity and other vital infrastructure?