Inside Al Qaeda’s Crisis in Iraq
Lee on Feb 10 2008 at 7:27 pm | Filed under: Military Matters, Notes on the war
A Concerned Local Citizens (CLC) member in Arab Jabour, Iraq (photo: DoD)
In extraordinary documents confiscated in November by the United States, we get an enemy’s eye view of the Awakening in Iraq, and further confirmation about how debilitating the effects were for Al Qaeda. An AQ commander, Abu-Tariq, relates that his own unit declined from 600 terrorists to less than 20 over the summer.
“We were mistreated, cheated and betrayed by some of our brothers,” he says. “Those people were nothing but hypocrites, liars and traitors and were waiting for the right moment to switch sides with whoever pays them most.”
(The Times)
A second unnamed commander acknowledges awareness that Al Qaeda’s hopelessly misguided tactics alienated the population and crippled their capabilities:
“We helped them to unite against us . . . The Americans and the apostates launched their campaigns against us and we found ourselves in a circle not being able to move, organise or conduct our operations.”
“This created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight. The morale of the fighters went down . . . There was a total collapse in the security structure of the organisation.” The emir complained that the supply of foreign fighters had dwindled and that they found it increasingly hard to operate inside Iraq because they could not blend in. Foreign suicide bombers determined to kill “not less than 20 or 30 infidels” grew disillusioned because they were kept hanging about and only given small operations. Some gave up and went home.
(The Times)
The unnamed emir recommends a change of tactics, but one that seems to have taken few lessons from their devastating defeat in Anbar. He suggests offering bounties for killing traitors, using Iraqi doctors to murder Americans and giving gifts to tribal leaders. Strategically he recommended a shift in focus toward Diyala and Baghdad. However, Al Qaeda has met with equally strong resistance in their attempt to do so.
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