Rebels’ Arsenal Includes Politics

Once viewed as a series of scattered cells with unfocused goals, Iraqi insurgents have begun to develop a coordinated political agenda, reaching out to Sunni Arab politicians and distancing themselves from foreign fighters whose attacks against civilians have alienated possible allies in a new government.

The political engagement is still in its nascent stage, and there is no sign that extreme factions of the insurgency, including those led by foreign Islamists such as Abu Musab Zarqawi, have shown any willingness to cease operations. But there are signs that certain segments of the insurgency may be refraining from attacks to give counterparts in the political arena time to promote their agenda: setting a timeline for U.S. troop withdrawal and preventing the division of Iraq into federal regions.

The number of insurgent attacks has dropped to about 70 a day from about 100 a day last summer and fall, according to the U.S. military.

The size and scale of attacks against civilians also have declined precipitously. This year there were virtually no attacks on Shiite Muslims celebrating the holiday of Ashura, compared with last year and 2004, when suicide bombers killed dozens of pilgrims.

Such attacks could have undermined efforts to persuade the Shiite government to make concessions to Sunnis.

“From what I see and what I hear, they’re organizing themselves to separate themselves from the terrorist groups,” said Hassib Obeidi, a political scientist who is on the leadership committee of a Sunni Arab parliamentary group and who served on the committee that wrote Iraq’s Constitution last year.

Increasingly, the insurgency’s rhythms have fallen into step with political events and negotiations. Although surges in attacks have always occurred around key political events and milestones, it now appears that informal cease-fires are also being observed.

Evidence of that synchronization of military and political strategy can be found on Arabic online discussion boards, where armed groups talk about matters such as treatment of prisoners, assembling effective roadside bombs and whether to boycott, sabotage or take part in the political process, according to a study released Wednesday by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank.

The clearest illustration of such coordination was the sharp decline in attacks from the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum to the Dec. 15 elections, a calm that ended as soon as results were released.

“All the armed Iraqi groups agreed that the political process should have a space or an area and that the elections should be allowed to happen,” said Talat Wazan, a Sunni Arab politician in the northern city of Mosul who says he has been authorized to speak on behalf of a nationalist insurgent group.

“It’s a process of the institutionalization of the insurgency,” said Ami Pedahzur, a terrorism expert at the University of Texas at Austin.

Pedahzur likened the possible increased coordination between groups in Iraq to that of Jewish groups that banded together in the 1940s to fight the British and the Arabs, and Palestinian ideological factions that came together in the 1960s and 1970s to fight Israeli occupation.

“After a long period of less organized attacks, these groups find a way to organize,” he said. “By sharing a certain common enemy, they cooperated on the tactical level even though they were very opposed to each other ideologically.”

Reaching Out

Sunni Arab politicians have long sought to reach out to the insurgents. Now it appears that some fighters are reaching out to politicians. In recent weeks, numerous Sunni Arab politicians and tribal leaders, some based abroad, have come forward claiming to represent the “honorable” resistance.

Wazan said he received a call several weeks ago from a man claiming to represent an insurgent group.

They arranged a meeting, and Wazan, a hard-core Sunni Arab nationalist and former member of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, was asked whether he’d be willing to act as a spokesman and negotiator.

Wazan, who has said that he shares the aims and ideology of the insurgents, said he agreed to assume that role. “Through talking with these armed groups we’ve convinced them to enter the political process,” he said. “If we see that the Americans are serious, we expect an improvement in security.”

Another Sunni Arab who claimed to represent the political ideology of the resistance but asked that his name not be published said that what he called the legitimate Iraqi resistance was holding back on attacks to see whether it could gain some of its goals through negotiations.

“We want to give the politicians elected to the government the chance to get the occupier out of Iraq,” said the man, a member of the Dulaimi tribe, which is believed to be a major component of the insurgency. “If they don’t, there will be a storm that even the United States cannot deal with.”

The insurgency also shows signs of coordinating military operations. The International Crisis Group report says insurgents have developed an informal military doctrine outlining tactics for a war of attrition against U.S. and Iraqi forces.

According to the report, the insurgents have decided that it’s futile to try to hold territory and recommend that fighters slip into the local population, and then leave before U.S. troops can strike.

“We can call it a strategy of recoil, redeploy and spoil,” said Peter Harling, an ICG analyst who spent three years researching the Internet communiques of insurgent groups in assembling the study.

Assessing the structure, capacity and aims of Iraq’s Sunni Arab insurgency has been a confounding exercise. Unlike insurgent groups in Northern Ireland and the Palestinian territories, Iraqi fighters have failed to assemble official front groups or political wings. A spokesman for Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels is a cellphone call away, but contact with verifiable Iraqi insurgents is close to impossible.

Clandestine Cells

Iraq’s insurgency is believed to draw its ranks from members of Hussein’s dissolved security organs, a smattering of foreign Islamic militants and Sunni Arab tribesmen disaffected by Iraq’s emergence as a pro-U.S. nation run by Shiite Arabs and Kurds.

Insurgents are believed to be loosely organized into clandestine cells that carry out operations and quickly disperse.

U.S. officials have been skeptical of Sunni political groups, clerics and community leaders -- some with tribal and ideological ties to the militants -- who have publicly issued political demands in exchange for stopping the violence. But U.S. officials, counterinsurgency experts and Iraqi politicians who say they are allied with the guerrillas acknowledge that recent patterns show a higher degree of political and military coordination.

“Everybody recognizes that there’s a political purpose behind the attacks, that they occur for specific political purposes,” said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, spokesman for U.S.-led forces in Iraq. “Their patterns show there is some thought and coordination.”

Although the U.S. military continues to lead and support offensives against suspected fighters, American officials have said they would welcome any political compromise that would help draw down the insurgency. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad this month acknowledged holding a series of talks with tribal leaders close to elements in the insurgency in an attempt to bring them into the political process.

“In the end, what’s important to remember is if you believe that part of the problem in Iraq is a political one fueling a security one, at some point you have to reach out a hand politically to the militants,” said a Western official in Baghdad who spoke on condition of anonymity.

But many Iraqi political elites, including President Jalal Talabani and Shiite coalition leader Abdelaziz Hakim, have repeatedly condemned any attempt by Sunni counterparts to make political concessions in response to violence. Sunni political leaders often praise the efforts of the “honorable resistance” while condemning acts of terrorism against civilians.

Jawad Maliki, a powerful Shiite legislator, said that any political group that talks of violence is not acceptable.

“Some of the takfiris [Islamic extremists] and others have formal ties to the Baath Party, while others are decent and believe in the political process [and] are qualified to participate in the new government,” he said. “The ones who deal with takfiris and Baathists want to force a new political situation on us. They want to weaken Shiites and Kurds by imposing their old ways on us.”

‘Horrible Realities’

Coupling peace deals with sporadic attacks mirrors previous wars in which paramilitary groups bombed their way to the negotiating table, said Shelley Deane, who has studied insurgencies in Northern Ireland and the Middle East and now teaches international diplomacy at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. “This one of the horrible realities of any peace process,” she said. “You’re only worth consideration if you’re dangerous enough.”

Still, Wazan said the insurgency included many groups that have no interest in working within the political process. He said that though talks may lead to a moderate decrease in violence, they could never eliminate it.

“If the political process works, the only remaining fighting groups will be those that are not in the Iraqi resistance,” he said. “Many entities in Iraq are executing military operations. Iraq has now become an arena for settling scores with the Americans.”