Who Are The Terrorists In Iraq?

[Bronco_Beerslug]

Our government says that less than 7% are from foreign countries so who really are the terrorists in Iraq. Is this who Bush is talking about?


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http://us.news3.yimg.com/us.i2.yimg.com/p/ap/20051001/capt.bag10110010916.iraq_us_military_vehicle_destr oyed_bag101.jpg?x=246&y=345&sig=hX8TyAOeY1AuZi5uH9xabg--
Iraqi youngsters shout holding the remains of an US military vehicle destroyed by a road side bomb in Ramadi, Iraq, Saturday Oct. 1 2005. About 1,000 U.S. service members launched an offensive in western Iraq near the Syrian border on Saturday aimed insurgents from this country's most feared militant group, Al-Qaida in Iraq, the military said.(AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)


"As Iraqis take these next steps on the path to freedom and democracy, the terrorists will do everything they can to stop this progress and try to break our will," the president said. "They will fail."
http://tinyurl.com/9uc2p

[Odysseus]

I think the quickest way to end this is to import American women. When the divorce rate kicks in after 10 years we'll ship in the lawyers and own this place.

[patteeu]

Our government says that less than 7% are from foreign countries so who really are the terrorists in Iraq. Is this who Bush is talking about?



I'd say he's talking about that 7% (7% of what btw?) and a percentage of the iraqi insurgents. Is that all you wanted to know?

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

The myth of Iraq's foreign fighters

Report by US think tank says only '4 to 10' percent of insurgents are foreigners.

The US and Iraqi governments have vastly overstated the number of foreign fighters in Iraq, and most of them don't come from Saudi Arabia, according to a new report from the Washington-based Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS). According to a piece in The Guardian, this means the US and Iraq "feed the myth" that foreign fighters are the backbone of the insurgency. While the foreign fighters may stoke the insurgency flames, they make up only about 4 to 10 percent of the estimated 30,000 insurgents.

The CSIS study also disputes media reports that Saudis are the largest group of foreign fighters. CSIS says "Algerians are the largest group (20 percent), followed by Syrians (18 percent), Yemenis (17 percent), Sudanese (15 percent), Egyptians (13 percent), Saudis (12 percent) and those from other states (5 percent)." CSIS gathered the information for its study from intelligence sources in the Gulf region.

The CSIS report says: "The vast majority of Saudi militants who have entered Iraq were not terrorist sympathizers before the war; and were radicalized almost exclusively by the coalition invasion."

The average age of the Saudis was 17-25 and they were generally middle-class with jobs, though they usually had connections with the most prominent conservative tribes. "Most of the Saudi militants were motivated by revulsion at the idea of an Arab land being occupied by a non-Arab country. These feelings are intensified by the images of the occupation they see on television and the Internet ... the catalyst most often cited [in interrogations] is Abu Ghraib, though images from Guantánamo Bay also feed into the pathology."

The report also gives notes that the Saudi government for spending nearly $1.2 billion over the past two years, and deploying 35,000 troops, in an effort to secure its border with Iraq. The major problem remains the border with Syria, which lacks the resources of the Saudis to create a similar barrier on its border.

The Associated Press reports that CSIS believes most of the insurgents are not "Saddam Hussein loyalists" but members of Sunni Arab Iraqi tribes. They do not want to see Mr. Hussein return to power, but they are "wary of a Shiite-led government."

The Los Angeles Times reports that a greater concern is that 'skills' foreign fighters are learning in Iraq are being exported to their home countries. This is a particular concern for Europe, since early this year US intelligence reported that "Abu Musab Zarqawi, whose network is believed to extend far beyond Iraq, had dispatched teams of battle-hardened operatives to European capitals."

Iraq has become a superheated, real-world academy for lessons about weapons, urban combat and terrorist trade craft, said Thomas Sanderson of [CSIS].
Extremists in Iraq are "exposed to international networks from around the world," said Sanderson, who has been briefed by German security agencies. "They are returning with bomb-making skills, perhaps stolen explosives, vastly increased knowledge. If they are succeeding in a hostile environment, avoiding ... US Special Forces, then to go back to Europe, my God, it's kid's play."

Meanwhile, The Boston Globe reports that President Bush, in a speech Thursday that was "clearly designed to dampen the potential impact of the antiwar rally" this weekend in Washington, said his top military commanders in Iraq have told him that they are making progress against the insurgents and "in establishing a politically viable state."
Newly trained Iraqi forces are taking the lead in many security operations, the president said, including a recent offensive in the insurgent stronghold of Tal Afar along the Syrian border – a key transit point for foreign fighters and supplies.
"Iraqi forces are showing the vital difference they can make," Bush said. '"They are now in control of more parts of Iraq than at any time in the past two years. Significant areas of Baghdad and Mosul, once violent and volatile, are now more stable because Iraqi forces are helping to keep the peace."

The president's speech, however, was followed by comments made Thursday by Saudi Arabia's foreign minister. Prince Saud al-Faisal said the US ignored warnings the Saudi government gave it about occupying Iraq. Prince Faisal also said he fears US policies in Iraq will lead to the country breaking up into Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite parts. He also said that Saudi Arabia is not ready to send an ambassador to Baghdad, because he would become a target for the insurgents. "I doubt he would last a day," Faisal said.
Finally, The Guardian reports that "ambitions for Iraq are being drastically scaled down in private" by British and US officials. The main goal has now become avoiding the image of failure. The paper quotes sources in the British Foreign Office as saying that hopes to turn Iraq into a model of democracy for the Middle East had been put aside. "We will settle for leaving behind an Iraqi democracy that is creaking along," the source said.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0923/dailyUpdate.html

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

I'd say he's talking about that 7% (7% of what btw?) and a percentage of the iraqi insurgents. Is that all you wanted to know?

Many a right-winger, in an attempt to bolster his claim that the Iraqis welcomed BushCo's invasion and occupation, argued that "most of the insurgents are foreign jihadists."

Those of us who didn't drink the Kool-Aid have denied this all along.

[W*GS]

There seems to be more than one group of terrorists operating in Iraq. There are the jihadists, under al-Zarqawi. Their main ambition is apparently killing Americans and other non-Muslims with the goal of ridding Iraq of non-Muslims. They tend towards the more gruesome acts (beheading, specifically, which doesn't occur as much, or at least the media isn't broadcasting those incidents). I suspect most of the non-Iraqi Muslim terrorists are part of this group.

Another group are the Sunnis, who think they can restore their power by killing Shiites, hopefully provoking a sectarian civil war. They kill Americans too, but are more likely to strike at targets related to the Shia community and the nascent Iraqi government, in order to make it impossible to create a federal Iraq, in which they would have to share power with the Shiites and Kurds. I believe a good many Baathists are part of this group.

Working in concert (to a greater or lesser degree) are the Iraqi nationalists, who aren't necessarily anti-Shiite, but anti-non-Iraqi. They just don't want Americans and the other coalition members in Iraq at all. It's not clear to me that they have an obvious religious-based agenda, but they're certainly not above exploiting it.