Our Mesopotamian Foes: Just Who Are They?

Army, Mar 2005 by Atkeson, Edward B

For more than three years the nation has been at war against global terrorism. In that time the struggle has branched out from the stunning attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon to involve vigorous air and ground reactions and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. The former was especially notable as the first instance of the invocation of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. A member state (the United States) had been attacked, and all members of the alliance were obliged to come to its assistance. But that venture has not grabbed the national attention-or the controversy-of the second. While Afghanistan will be written into the history of NATO, it appears that Iraq will not.

Oddly enough, the American public is probably better informed about both the initial assault and the day-to-day follow-on combat actions on Iraqi highways and rubblestrewn streets than it has been about any other war in its history. Much credit is probably due to the embedding of civilian correspondents with Army and Marine units in the field. While some observers suspect the Pentagon of tardy explanations of unfavorable events (for example, the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Graib prison), by and large, the public's thirst for news has not been badly served by DoD officials. To most interested viewers and readers, both the Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are well known figures on television and in the press.

Nevertheless, however bountiful the flow of friendly information, it does not include much about the enemy. Either DoD does not know much, or it is loath to reveal that which it does know. Perhaps both. At any rate, to much of America's informed public, the enemy is little more than a shadowy and murderous religious fanatic in a ski mask who hates the West for no comprehensible reason. Indeed, one might say, he shows little appreciation for the trouble to which we have gone to liberate him from a hideous dictator.

Whoever he is, he seems inclined neither to listen to Western reason nor to fear for the consequences. He lives in a world about which we know little and seems not to have much else on his mind than our demise or expulsion from his homeland. If we, as citizens, are to play a responsible role in our democracy, we should look more closely at this strange land of ancient civilizations: Babylon, Nineveh and Ur.

Broadly speaking, the population of Iraq is composed of three main groups, all followers of the prophet Mohammed, but with marked differences, not totally dissimilar from the multiple branches of Christendom since the Protestant Reformation. The majority of the Iraqi population-about 60 percent-are Shiite Arabs and tend to identify in religious matters with like-minded Muslims in Iran. Saddam Hussein, the deposed dictator, was basically a Sunni, but ran a secular (Baathist) government, dominated by other Sunnis, and, more particularly, by his own relatives. The third group, the Kurds, constitute an independence-minded, non-Arab Sunni off-shoot. They would like to form their own nation-state in the northwestern corner of the country, but they recognize the many complications-especially Turkish suspicions that any hint of Kurdish nationalism might bring the loyalty of their own Kurdish peoples into question. For the time being, the Iraqi Kurds appear content with their practical, if unrecognized, independence.

The resistance in Iraq is fundamentally religious and tribal in nature. This aspect tends to set the various elements apart, creating a far less coherent insurgency than has been known in other countries, such as in the two great military disasters of the 20th-century French Empire: Vietnam and Algeria. In the period shortly following the maneuver phase of the American invasion, the Shiites, being the most numerous, were of greatest concern. But as the time for the national elections approached, the minority Sunnis became more active, fearful as they were of losing the favored position they had enjoyed under Saddam Hussein.

As Edward Wong of The New York Times pointed out on December 5, 2004, "The Americans have added to the alienation of the Sunnis by relying on Shiite and Kurdish military recruits to put down the Sunni insurgency in some of the most volatile areas. The [Sunni] guerrillas in turn reinforce sectarian animosities when they attack police recruits or interim government officials as collaborators." For their part, the Shiites have formed additional militia to exact revenge upon the Sunnis.

Jane's Defense Weekly reports that every insurgent group in Iraq is different in size, composition and modus operandi, but that all share an opportunist streak. They all also seem to be able to recruit new members any time they gain control of territory. It goes on to say that much terrorist activity, such as kidnapping and hijacking of property, is largely the work of criminal gangs rather than political groups, and that the loyalty of insurgents tends to be flexible, changing its focus from time to time. This greatly complicates the intelligence officers' tasks, making the groups difficult to track.