[NYTr] Juan Cole: Guerrilla War 3.0 in Iraq

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Informed Comment - Dec 9, 2007
http://www.juancole.com/2007/12/attacks-in-bayji-yusufiya-elsewhere.html

Guerrilla War 3.0 in Iraq

Attacks in Bayji, Yusufiya, Elsewhere, Kill 32, Wound Dozens;
Dulaimi's Sunnis Unlikely to Rejoin Government

by Juan Cole

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. See: http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/baghdad/