Resistance in Iraq Is Home Grown

The men attempting to recruit a former soldier in the Fedayeen Saddam militia for today’s war against the Americans took him to a bearded sheik seated in a pickup truck.

They appealed to the mortar expert’s sense of nationalism and then to his religious conviction. The Americans have done nothing for Iraqis. They defile the homeland. Attacking the American occupiers is the only way to make them leave, the recruiters argued.

In their shadowy guerrilla war to drive American forces out of Iraq, hundreds of insurgents have organized into cells, especially in Al Anbar province west of Baghdad and Diyala province to the northeast, both strongholds for Saddam Hussein, the Sunni tribes that supported him and Wahhabi and other Islamic fundamentalists.

Despite the U.S. government’s insistence that Iraq has become the new battlefield of global terrorism, most of the resistance is home grown. The guerrillas are militants from the deposed regime, but they are also ordinary Iraqis opposed to occupation. They are ex-intelligence officers and farmers, militiamen and merchants, bombers and fishermen, according to more than a dozen interviews with Americans and Iraqis.

Added to this mix of Iraqis are the Islamic fundamentalists, especially Sunnis who have stepped into the power vacuum created by the war and its aftermath to take leadership roles in the resistance. Foreign fighters from Syria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia have infiltrated in moderate numbers, working alongside some of the Iraqi groups. The first arrests in last week’s bombing of the Imam Ali Mosque in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, for example, were said to be of two Saudi nationals allied with two Fedayeen militiamen.

The Najaf attack and the bombings in Baghdad at United Nations headquarters and the Jordanian Embassy, all within 22 days, reflect a new, higher level of coordination. For the dozen or so daily ambushes targeting American troops, however, there is little indication of an overarching coordination uniting cells.

Instead, the groups remain largely localized and their weapons of choice remain readily available from the Hussein government’s leftover arsenals, according to Iraqis familiar with the resistance as well as U.S. field commanders battling it day in, day out. Bombs are made of dynamite or plastic explosives planted in discarded canisters, bottles or, more recently, the bodies of dead dogs left on the side of the road and detonated by remote control.

A guerrilla fighter from Fallouja, 35 miles west of Baghdad, said in an interview that his cell was not working with foreign fighters but is willing to do so in the future. For now, he said, his unit is adequately equipped and trained.

“The former regime left behind a huge military arsenal, and it’s enough to fight for tens of years,” he said.

Criminal gangs in many cases have entered a temporary marriage of convenience with the groups, according to Iraqi sources. Within the epidemic of kidnappings plaguing Baghdad, some are staged to earn ransoms to finance attacks on U.S. soldiers. And insurgent chieftains often hire common criminals to pull off bombing or shooting attacks.

About 145 U.S. soldiers have been killed since major combat was declared over May 1; 282 have been killed since the war began March 20.

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Islamic Alliance

An alliance with Islamic extremists allows guerrillas to cast their fight in religious terms, which also helps to distance them from the discredited Hussein regime. The puritanical Wahhabi brand of Islam, for example, is especially anti-Western. Adherents believe that any non-Muslim who trespasses on Islamic land is an invader who must be repelled. Its members have also clashed with the Shiites for generations.

“Our religion asks of us jihad whenever we are being occupied,” said the guerrilla, who insisted on responding to questions in writing and declined to describe specific operations. Contact with him was made through an imam. “America now is an occupying country, so jihad is a must for every single Muslim in the East or West.”

The guerrilla also revealed his Sunni bias against Iraq’s Shiites, who have gained power in the new Iraq at Sunni expense.

“The Americans are in harmony with the Shiite, but the Shiite will not be useful to them -- their loyalty is to Iran,” he said. “They are mistaken to trust the Shiite. Why such wrongful thinking?”

The mortar expert being recruited by the resistance said the bearded sheik who urged him to join the movement was a Wahhabite, probably from central Iraq.

“He spoke to me like officer to soldier, master to slave,” said the man, who did not want his name used because he fears for his life. “We want you to teach your brothers how to use the mortar,” the man told him. “Money is no object.”

The mortar expert, 26 and unmarried, said he refused to go along with his recruiters when they approached him a final time the day after Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusai, were killed by American soldiers. Angrily, the sheik branded him a traitor who deserved to die. He has gone into hiding.

His efforts to pass information to the American military, he said, were rebuffed, mostly because he could not provide the addresses of his recruiters.

Mortars are notoriously imprecise weapons. The expert, a stocky man who chain smokes out of nervousness, said he received top honors in the Fedayeen because he could hit a tank at 400 yards. The sheik’s interest in mortars suggested that the insurgency was expanding its repertoire of targets from convoys -- a moving target against which a remote-controlled bomb is more useful -- to fixed installations such as military bases.

To battle the insurgents, U.S. troops have launched hundreds of raids across central Iraq, rounded up numerous suspects and confiscated tons of weaponry and ammunition.

On Aug. 1, U.S. forces acting on a tip raided a Baghdad hotel and captured two men suspected of having ties to Ansar al Islam, a radical militant organization based primarily in the north. As the soldiers searched, the hotel proprietor alerted the Americans to four additional men from the same network who had just checked in.

The military emerged with six suspects identified as part of a financing cell for Ansar. Based on information from the men, additional raids were conducted in the city of Mosul and in Saudi Arabia, said Army Col. Rob Baker, commander of the 1st Armored Division’s 2nd Brigade, which oversees a large part of central Baghdad.

The significance of the raid was the confirmation that elements of Ansar -- which U.S. and Kurdish forces pounded during the war -- have returned and reached the Iraqi capital, something that top Pentagon officials had recently asserted.

The arrests had the bonus of supplying intelligence that enabled U.S. forces to pursue other leads, a rare event because of the compartmentalized nature of the cells.

“You take one cell down, it doesn’t necessarily lead to a series of takedowns,” Baker said.

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Dwindling Patience

Hardly a day goes by in which U.S. soldiers don’t capture military materiel. On Aug. 15, for example, one raid turned up 123 pounds of plastic explosives, seven rocket-propelled grenade launchers and 47 warheads. Baker keeps a confiscated RPG on top of the television in his office.

Interrogations of suspected resistance fighters have further persuaded the military of the disparate nature of their attackers. “One claimed he was doing it for Allah,” Baker said. “Another claimed he was doing it for money.”

Army Maj. Tony Aguto, a commander at the American base at Ramadi, deep in the hostile Sunni heartland, said his forces have captured numerous foreign infiltrators who appear to be bringing money but not weapons. Aguto’s jurisdiction is an immense swath of western Iraq, including the porous borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The volume of people illegally crossing is huge, he said. The U.S. military says Iraq’s borders are being patrolled by 4,700 Iraqi guards but that 25,000 are needed.

Hostility from local townspeople has diminished in the four months his unit has been stationed in Ramadi, Aguto said, but the concentrated mortar and grenade attacks have increased. “What I’m seeing is not coordinated region to region,” he said. “I see local attacks, coordinated by five or six guys with [improvised bombs] or AK-47s. We are weeding them out of our area.”

Purported resistance fighters have sent videotaped messages to several Arabic-language television stations. Wearing checked kaffiyehs and brandishing rifles, they use names like Muhammad’s Second Army and vow to eject the occupier.

The insurgents are able to blend into their villages and towns, eluding capture, thanks largely to tribal networks and ancient friendships. Those connections also help pay their bills.

“It was a mistake to let Saddam sit and rule us as he did, and not resist,” said the affluent manager of an import-export business from Fallouja. “We won’t make that mistake again.”

The list of Iraqis’ grievances against their occupiers is long and accented by unrealistic expectations and cultural xenophobia. Rather than feeling safe and free, Iraqis feel less secure than ever. They accuse soldiers of humiliating their men in raids and searches and abusing their women.

So far, most religious leaders have discouraged violence against the U.S.-led forces and have urged followers to give the Americans time. But each new disappointment and each new outrage erodes such restraint.

“After this occupation, the American government became the enemy,” said Sheik Annas Mahmoud Aisawi, an imam from Fallouja who was leading prayers recently in Baghdad’s Gilani mosque.

“If the Americans do not keep their promises of allowing Iraqis to govern themselves and restoring security, then Iraqis must find a solution. They cannot be motionless and surrender.

“We tell our people they must be patient, but patience will not last.”