Rebel war spirals out of control as US intelligence
loses the plot

The ghosts of Vietnam are returning as Baathists,
zealots, criminals, tribal leaders and al Qaeda unite
in a deadly alliance of hatred. Special report by
Peter Beaumont in London and Patrick Graham in Baghdad

Sunday November 2, 2003
The Observer

Sharp disagreements are emerging between the US and
the UK over the exact nature of the Iraqi resistance,
amid warnings that the US is losing the intelligence
war against the rebels.

After eight days in which Iraqi fighters have scored a
series of major blows to the coalition and its Iraqi
allies, intelligence and military officials in Iraq
and on both sides of the Atlantic are at odds over
whether they are fighting a Saddam-led movement or a
series of disparate partisan groups. They are just as
divided on finding a way to halt the escalating
violence.

The latest violence comes amid increasingly bleak
assessments from Washington, where the latest attacks
have been compared in the media to Vietnam's 1968 Tet
Offensive against US forces and described by Sandy
Berger, a former National Security Adviser to
President Bill Clinton, as a 'classic guerrilla war'.

The comments follow leaked assessments by both the US
pro-consul in Iraq, Ambassador Paul Bremer, and US
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that war against the
resistance was going less well than planned, with the
latter describing a 'long, hard slog'.

By last week that long, hard slog had seen attacks on
coalition forces and the Iraqis co-operating with them
reaching a level of 33 a day - more than twice the
level in July. Anti-coalition fighters have ratcheted
up the scale of attacks on schools, police and
politicians, while assaults on the US-led forces have
become more confident and sophisticated.

US and UK officials admit that at the centre of the
worsening crisis - which has seen the UN and other aid
agencies withdraw international staff from the country
following the bombing of the Red Cross headquarters in
Baghdad - is a continuing failure of hard intelligence
on exactly who is behind the resistance.

The urgency of the problem was underlined by comments
by a former CIA director last week that unless the
coalition forces get a grip on the intelligence-
gathering problem - in particular building
relationships with ordinary Iraqis - it may be too
late.

'We're at a crossroads,' Stansfield Turner, told the
Christian Science Monitor. 'If in the next few weeks
we don't persuade the Iraqi on the street that we're
going to straighten things out... we won't get that
intelligence.'

A mark of that failure, say officials, has been the
inability of coalition forces and the intelligence and
policing agencies available to them to solve any of
the major bombings that began in August.

'The fundamental issue with counter-insurgency warfare
is intelligence. Intelligence is what matters and it
is 90 per cent of the battle,' Gordon Adams, a former
associate director for national security, told the New
York Times.

'It's knowing who they are, where they are and when
they act. If we know anything from Vietnam and the
various things that have gone on in Afghanistan and
Iraq, it is that our humint [human intelligence] is
terrible. We know that we were woefully under-prepared
in general.'

It is a view shared in part by British officials, who
concede that attempts to infiltrate the resistance
have been without success.

Others are sharply critical of how the intelligence
war against the rebels has been handled. They point to
a woeful shortage of Arab linguists and analysts
familiar with Arab culture in the US-run sector,
despite being six months into the insurgency.

To counter this, Pentagon officials briefed last week
that some of these specialists working among the
1,400-strong Iraq Survey Group on the unsuccessful
search for stockpiles of unconventional weapons would
be transferred to this effort.

So who exactly is the resistance? In recent days
American officials have briefed US papers for the
first time that Saddam Hussein may be playing a
significant role in co-ordinating and directing
attacks by his loyalists, despite conceding such
reports could not be corroborated.

The claims are based in part on reports that Saddam
met Izzat Ibrahim, a senior Iraqi general suspected by
American officials of playing a significant role in
organising the resistance and co-ordinating with Ansar
al-Islam, linked to al Qaeda.

The depiction by these Pentagon officials of the
structure of the resistance - though tentatively
expressed - suggest a hierarchical organisation, led
by former Saddam officials, with Saddam at its head,
and allied to groups of foreign jihadists and al Qaeda
under a single command.

Whether true or not, it is a politically convenient
description of the resistance for the Bush regime,
suggesting as it does that the rebels represent no
more than the desperate remains of Saddam's regime
with no wider resonance, despite escalating attacks.

It is not, however, recognised by British officials.
The picture that they paint of what is going on in
Iraq is a more chaotic and a far more dangerous one.

'What we are looking at,' one UK official told The
Observer, 'is not some monolithic organisation with a
clear command. That would be far easier for us to deal
with and get into. Instead, we are looking at lots of
different groups with different agendas. They are
locally organised with each having its loyalty focused
on middle-ranking former commanders.'

What he describes is a network of partisan-type groups
without a central command and links between them based
on personal relationships - an organic rather than
monolithic structure.

The groups' communications - based, say Iraqis, on
couriers, often teenage boys, to carry messages - have
been equally difficult for the coalition to penetrate.

And they have very little difficulty in getting
materiel for attacks or the money to finance the
operations. Iraqi military doctrine under Saddam,
especially after the first Gulf war, long envisaged
the risk of a second US-led invasion that would
attempt to depose the regime. The consequence was the
placement across the country of hidden caches of
weapons, explosives, fuel and cash, all in vast
amounts - everything required to run a guerrilla war.

'We are looking at three categories of group involved
in the resistance,' said one official. 'There are ex-
Baathists, especially in the Sunni triangle [where the
majority of Special Republican guard and members of
Saddam's security organisations were traditionally
recruited from]. Then there are groups like Ansar al-
Islam and groups that may be affiliated to al Qaeda or
sympathetic to them. Finally, there are foreign
jihadists who have been drawn to Iraq to fight
Americans.'

It is a view endorsed by a former colonel in the Iraqi
security services interviewed by The Observer. 'It is
a mixture of different groups - former Mukhabarat
[security services], religious groups and Baath party
members. If Saddam is involved in the resistance, as
some at the Pentagon are claiming, then he believes he
is just one leader among many.

'Saddam is playing some role but he is not the only
one. Some groups may not even know he is leading them.
I think that he is moving around meeting as many of
these groups as possible.

'These groups are separate, but work together more and
more as the various leaders are contacting each other.
Most people are not doing it because of Saddam, but
for religious or nationalist reasons. Some are
criminals, who under other circumstances few people
would have anything to do with. Some are paid, but not
many.'

He suggested that last Sunday's rocket attack on the
Al Rashid Hotel showed a level of sophistication that
was new for the resistance. An underground cell
working with staff at the hotel, which was once
virtually run by the Iraqi secret service, watched the
arrival of guests while street cleaners worked with an
underground cell to position the rocket launcher.

After the arrival of Under-Secretary of Defence Paul
Wolfowitz, the launcher, disguised as a generator, was
remotely activated.

Most worrying of all is the emergence of a broad,
post-Saddam ideology across the groups. And if recent
polling in Baghdad is to be believed, it is rapidly
gaining currency with ordinary Iraqis. It is crudely
simple, insisting that the US-led occupation is an
assault against both Islam and the wider Arab nation,
that Iraqis must resist and that anyone who assists
the occupiers is an enemy as much as US troops.

But it is not only the home-grown resistance that is
concerning the coalition. It has also been struggling
to prevent a wave of devastating suicide bombings
against a variety of targets which Western
intelligence officials increasingly believe may be
being carried out by foreigners coming to fight the
Americans in Iraq.

Two officials have told The Observer that they do not
believe the suicide bombings are 'Iraqi style'. 'It
does not feel to us like their way of doing things,'
said one.

The comments follow warnings from intelligence
officials across Europe, reported in yesterday's New
York Times, that since the summer hundreds of young
militants have left Europe to join the resistance in
Iraq, a trend which is also in evidence across the
Arab world.

The paper quotes Jean-Louis Bruguière, France's
leading investigative judge on terrorism, who said
that dozens of young Muslim men had left France for
Iraq since the summer, inspired by the exhortations of
al Qaeda leaders, even if they were not trained by the
movement.

According to the Iraqi colonel interviewed by The
Observer: 'There is no specific information on these
car bombs.' He believes that the attacks are 'probably
organised by religious Iraqi groups but carried out by
foreigners who want to become martyrs during Ramadan.'

But a question that is also worrying coalition and
other officials is precisely who is organising these
would-be foreign fighters and putting them in touch
with resistance groups.

One disturbing theory being investigated is that Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, a former Afghan jihadist of
Jordanian-Palestinian extraction who knows the al
Qaeda leadership, may have recently entered Iraq and
be organising foreign fighters the way he once
organised them in Afghanistan.

According to the former Iraqi security services
colonel, 'These Saudis, Yemenis, Algerians, Syrians
and Jordanians were trained for these kinds of
operations and want to die. They are now working with
various resistance groups whether they are religious
or not.'