News analysis: Iraq insurgents fight on despite major setbacks
BY STEVEN R. HURST
ASSOCIATED PRESS

June 25, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The new Iraqi government and its American patrons should have been basking in the glow of a two-week blitz of good news.

Violence had eased significantly in Baghdad from a security crackdown that blanketed the chaotic city with 75,000 U.S.-backed Iraqi soldiers.

President George W. Bush paid a surprise visit to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in a show of support for an Iraqi government that emerged from an agonizing six-month birth.

And most dramatically, Al Qaeda in Iraq lost its leader when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- the brutal terrorism boss -- was killed by a U.S. air strike.

But insurgents have counterattacked, scuffing the sheen of progress.

By week's end al-Maliki's government was forced to declare a state of emergency and shoo its citizens off Baghdad's streets with two hours notice after the tenacious insurgency took the offensive Friday along Haifa Street, just blocks from Iraq's seat of government.

Two days earlier, one of the defense lawyers for Saddam Hussein and his codefendants was kidnapped from his home by men wearing Interior Ministry uniforms and flashing genuine-looking credentials. He was found slain in Sadr City -- the third defense attorney killed since the trial started.

On Tuesday, the bodies of two U.S. soldiers were recovered -- beheaded and surrounded by booby traps. And al-Zarqawi's successor, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, said he conducted the brutal slayings.

At least 13 other U.S. soldiers or Marines died in combat or insurgent bombings in a particularly bloody week.

Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Rand Corp., said the good news side of the balance sheet, when seen as a whole, is a "significant step forward, at least in the immediate sense."

"But the facts on the ground have not really changed one iota," he said. "It was just one brick in the wall." The al-Zarqawi killing was decisive, but the rest of the Al Qaeda "machine remains intact."

In recent months, the Bush administration has increasingly acknowledged that it will be years before Iraq is a truly stable and democratic nation. But that goal, at present, appears to be receding even as progress is made against the Sunni-dominated insurgency that has killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers and thousands of Iraqis.

Criminal gangs and sectarian militias are rapidly filling a security vacuum created by the lack of a trustworthy police force. The Interior Ministry, a Shi'ite-run agency that controls police forces, is rife with militiamen bent on revenge killings, shakedowns and kidnapping for ransom.

"Sectarian and ethnic violence has come to rival the insurgency in terms of casualties and the threat it poses to political, social and economic progress in Iraq," security analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "There is less and less difference between insurgency and civil war, and all sides are to some extent guilty of terrorism."

The breakdown of civil conventions and trust impose a fundamental and unbearable strain on the Iraqi people. Their misery was detailed in a recent confidential memo from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to the State Department.

The collection of anecdotes from Iraqi workers paint a bleak picture of life in the capital, where local employees do not dare reveal where they work, even to family members, for fear of retribution.