[R-G] Guerrilla War 3.0 in Iraq

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.juancole.com/2007/12/attacks-in-bayji-yusufiya-elsewhere.html

Sunday, December 09, 2007
Guerrilla War 3.0 in Iraq;
Attacks in Bayji, Yusufiya, Elsewhere, Kill 32, Wound Dozens;
Dulaimi's Sunnis Unlikely to Rejoin Government

Guerrillas differ from conventional armies in that they typically  
avoid direct, conventional engagements on the battlefield. They melt  
away before a conventional army's advance, and then reemerge to  
engage in sniping, sneak attacks, and bombings from an unexpected  
quarter. The advantage of Fred Kagan's troop escalation or "surge" is  
that it allowed a tamping down of violence in Baghdad through a US  
campaign to disarm the Sunni Arabs there. There were two  
disadvantages of it. First, it allowed the Shiite militias to take  
advantage of the disarming of many Sunni Arabs, and to ethnically  
cleanse hundreds of thousands of Sunnis from the capital during the  
past six months. As a result, Baghdad is virtually a Shiite city now,  
like Isfahan or Shiraz. Second, the Sunni guerrillas melted away in  
West Baghdad, either laying low or relocating to other provinces, so  
that the violence was displaced to the provinces. Very likely when  
the extra US troops are removed, the guerrillas will reemerge in the  
capital, though their loss of so many Sunni neighborhoods to the  
ethnic cleansing may put them at a disadvantage now.

The Sunni Arab guerrilla movement has clearly regrouped outside  
Baghdad and is deploying high explosives with deveastating effect in  
Diyala, Salahuddin, Ninevah and Kirkuk provinces, to the northeast  
and due north of Baghdad. Cells also remain active in the northern  
reaches of Babil province just south of Baghdad, where Saddam had  
planted Sunni families in what had been a Shiite area, sowing the  
seeds of conflict when the Shiites returned to reclaim their property  
from 2003.

There were two big bombings in Diyala on Friday and a major attack in  
Mosul, a city nearly the size of Houston several hundred miles north  
of the capital On Saturday, the guerrillas deployed two big car bombs  
in Bayji, an oil refining center just northwest of Saddam's home town  
of Tikrit north of Baghdad. One car exploded with massive force  
outside the house of Ali al-Juburi, the counter-terrorism chief in  
the local police force, killing 11 individuals (7 of them policemen)  
and wounding 44 other persons. Another bomb targeting a police  
station killed 6 and wounded 15, and damaged surrounding buildings.

South of Baghdad in Babil Province, the US military forestalled a  
planned attack on American soldiers by a guerrilla cell at Yusufiya.  
They engaged well-armed cell members and the fighting grew so deadly  
that the US troops had to call in air strikes on their foe. They  
killed 10 guerrillas from the air and found a weapons cache. A mortar  
attack in nearby Mahmudiya killed one child and wounded two others.  
In addition, in Baghdad itself guerrillas used a roadside bomb to  
wound two police commandoes (these are usually recruited from the  
Shiite Badr Corps, the Iran-trained paramilitary of the Supreme  
Islamic Council of Iraq (ISCI).

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Adnan Dulaimi, the head of the Sunni  
fundamentalist Iraqi Accord Front, has been released from any  
confinement and is back in his house. But he expressed doubt that his  
bloc will rejoin the Shiite government of Nuri al-Maliki. He said  
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani had sent over some Peshmerga (Kurdish)  
bodyguards to protect Dulaimi. A car bomb was found near his house  
Thursday a week ago and one of his personal bodyguards had the key.  
Dulaimi claims that he the target of a Salafi Jihadi assassination  
plot, with the extremists having infiltrated his staff. (Whether that  
is true or not, it has happened to other Sunni politicians  
cooperating with the new government). Al-Hayat says that its sources  
in ISCI maintain that they are still negotiating with the Iraqi  
Islamic Party, a constituent of the Iraqi Accord Front, in hopes it  
will rejoin the al-Maliki government.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Mosul city council has decided to  
dig a ditch around the northern city of 1.5 million to keep radical  
Sunni extremists out. The council has seen an uptick of relocation of  
militants to the city from Baghdad. Cities haven't had moats since  
the medieval period. Such modern advancement, the Bush administration  
has brought to Iraq.

Leila Fadel's blog from Baghdad is revealing on the fears of a  
teenager that his mother may end up killed for working for a Western  
news service. He wishes he had more typical teenage problems, but his  
are that he cannot bring home friends since they would find out about  
his mother's employment.

Labels: Iraq

posted by Juan Cole @ 12/09/2007 06:30:00 AM