U.S. in guerrilla war, general says
Iraqi resistance now more co-ordinated, ‘less amateurish,‘ Abizaid acknowledges
Thursday, July 17, 2003 - U.S. military commanders were forced to acknowledge yesterday that their soldiers are fighting an all-out guerrilla war in Iraq, as a flurry of attacks and killings made it apparent that U.S.-led forces do not have control over the country.
The 24th anniversary yesterday of ousted president Saddam Hussein‘s seizure of power in Iraq saw an escalation of attacks. First, an attack killed the pro-U.S. mayor of a city west of Baghdad and his son. Later, a surface-to-air missile was fired at a U.S. transport plane landing at Baghdad airport but missed it, and three grenade attacks on convoys and troops killed at least one U.S. soldier and an 8-year-old Iraqi boy.
Yesterday‘s attacks raised the U.S. death toll in combat since the war began to 146, just shy of the 147 U.S. combat deaths in the 1991 Persian Gulf war. More than 35 soldiers have been killed in guerrilla attacks since May 1, when U.S. President George W. Bush declared major combat over.
The attacks appeared to be co-ordinated by a group calling itself Liberating Iraq‘s Army, whose members appeared on the Al-Arabiya satellite news channel and sent leaflets to some government workers urging them not to go to work yesterday.
Previously, U.S. commanders had insisted they were not facing a full-scale war and that they had control of the Baghdad area. Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defence Secretary, recently described atttacks on soldiers as unrelated police matters.
But General John Abizaid, the recently appointed commander of U.S. troops in the region, said in an unusually frank briefing yesterday that his soldiers will be forced to change their tactics as the attacks have increased in frequency and appear to be centrally co-ordinated.
The insurgents, possibly led by Mr. Hussein, who remains at large, "are conducting what I would describe as a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us," Gen. Abizaid said. "It‘s low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms, but it‘s war however you describe it."
Gen. Abizaid, who is fluent in Arabic, said he believes the guerrillas are mainly Iraqi Baath Party loyalists, backed by foreign Muslim fighters entering through Syria.
"Look, war is a struggle of wills. You look at the Arab press. They say, ‘We drove the Americans out of Beirut; we drove them out of Somalia; you know, we‘ll drive them out of Baghdad.‘ And that‘s just not true. They‘re not driving us out of anywhere."
He acknowledged for the first time, however, that the more than 140,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq will be forced to change their tactics because it has become apparent the war has not been won.
"At the tactical level, they are better co-ordinated now," he said of the guerrillas. "They‘re less amateurish, and their ability to use improvised explosive devices and combine the use of these explosive devices with some sort of tactical activity . . . is more sophisticated."
In one of yesterday‘s attacks, Mohammed Nayil al-Jurayfi, who had actively co-operated with U.S. forces as mayor of Hadithah, was killed along with his son when their car was ambushed and raked with automatic rifle fire as they drove away from his office in the city 240 kilometres northwest of Baghdad, Iraqi police said.
Some military observers said the U.S. troops are ill-prepared for the sort of urban warfare they are facing in Iraq, and that an international policing body is needed.
"I think that the U.S. went into this with somewhat unrealistic expectations of how quickly and easily it could be done," said James Dobbins, a former senior U.S. State Department official who led operations in Somalia, the Balkans and Afghanistan. He was one of several veteran officials who said that stability cannot be reached in Iraq until a much larger, international force is imposed.
The morale of U.S. soldiers has fallen dramatically. Soldiers openly criticized Mr. Rumsfeld on television yesterday, some calling for his resignation.
Gen. Abizaid, acknowledging that U.S. troops will have to remain for months longer, said he was determined to replace the longest-serving units by September, a year after they arrived in the region. He also acknowledged the occupation and violence are hurting the morale of U.S. soldiers.
Read it in
The Globe and Mail by Doug Saunders.
) but if it really tickles you that much, you should goto the US. I‘m sure somewhere in the world right now, someone would want to take your place.
