Information Is Flowing After Hussein’s Arrest

The capture of Saddam Hussein has prompted many more Iraqis to come forward with intelligence about the armed insurgency, but there has been no letup in the deadly attacks on troops and other targets, U.S. officials said Sunday.

Last week, officials said, coalition forces experienced about 22 attacks a day, slightly above the rate reported before Hussein’s capture Dec. 13.

Some of the recent attacks have been especially lethal. Four soldiers died Friday in three separate attacks, including a roadside bombing, the downing of a helicopter and a mortar strike on a U.S. base. A series of coordinated suicide bombings on Dec. 27 in Karbala, south of Baghdad, killed 19 people -- seven coalition soldiers and 12 Iraqis.

Occupation authorities have said repeatedly that they expect acts of violence to intensify as Iraq approaches a scheduled handover of power at the end of June. After visiting troops Sunday in the southern city of Basra, British Prime Minister Tony Blair stressed that the next six months would be a major challenge.

“The important thing is to realize we are about to enter into a very critical six months,” Blair told reporters on his flight home. “We have got to get on top of the security situation properly and we have got to manage the transition. Both of those things are going to be difficult.”

“The opposition is getting more sophisticated, using bigger bombs and more sophisticated controls,” Blair’s senior diplomat in Iraq, Jeremy Greenstock, said. “We will go on seeing bigger bangs.”

Nevertheless, occupation officials said Sunday that Hussein’s capture has prompted many more informers to come forward with details about the insurgency that have led to raids and other operations.

“What we have seen is this: a gradually increasing number of Iraqis providing intelligence, providing actionable intelligence,” said Dan Senor, spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the top U.S. civilian official in Iraq. “The quality has definitely improved since the period leading up to the capture of Saddam Hussein.”

Some Iraqis wishing to talk show up voluntarily at U.S. bases. Other informants have been detained in raids and agree to talk in interrogations, U.S. officials said. Some seek reward money for their information; others want no compensation for their cooperation.

The wealth of “humint” -- human intelligence, in military terms -- is leading to the capture of high-ranking insurgent operatives, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said. Raids have also netted troves of documents, computer disks and other evidence that has led higher up the dispersed insurgency command chain.

“Before, we were getting the foot soldiers,” Kimmitt said Sunday at the same Baghdad news briefing as Senor. “Now, to some extent, that’s helping us get some of the mid-level financiers and organizers.”

In the last 24 hours, Kimmitt said Sunday, coalition forces had arrested 83 anti-coalition suspects, now a typical daily tally. Among those detained, Kimmitt said, were a pair of brothers believed to be leaders of insurgent cells in Baghdad; a suspect in the downing of a helicopter in Mosul in November; and a man identified as Hussein’s personal photographer.

“The quality of intelligence that is cascading as a result of Saddam’s capture is very much a virtuous cycle,” Kimmitt said. “We hope that continues over the days and weeks ahead.”

Much of the new information on the armed opposition is from mid-level members of Hussein’s Baath Party. His capture, officials say, has finally convinced many that he will never regain power -- and prompted them to turn in other hard-liners.

Those providing information, Senor said, include “people who just want their jobs back in the ministries, want their cars back, want a stake in Iraq, and were hoping that Saddam Hussein would return, because they believed that’s how they would get that Baathist largess showered upon them once again.”

“They can no longer be hopeful,” he said. “And we find among those individuals ... less of a reticence to cooperate.”

Also among those coming forward, officials said, were Iraqis who previously avoided cooperating with the coalition because they feared that Hussein and his Baath Party might return and exact revenge on people they regarded as collaborators.

At the same time, officials cautioned that the insurgents’ bloody campaign against perceived collaborators -- such as Iraqi policemen and civil defense officers -- continues to prevent many people from coming forward.

Commanders are still trying to piece together exactly what part Hussein played in the opposition, which U.S. officials say is largely financed and organized by loyalists of the former regime. Some foreign fighters are also involved, officials say, but it is still unclear whether they operate independently or are controlled by supporters of Hussein.

There is a general consensus that Hussein, who was on the run and isolated in hide-outs for eight months, could not have exercised operational control, though he may have had a say in funding, officials say.

“Do we fully understand where Saddam fit in? We’re putting that puzzle together,” Kimmitt said last week. “We don’t think ... he was the central figure managing the entire anti-coalition operation. Nor do we think he was simply sitting in a hole waiting for somebody to come and capture him.”

Authorities here are also still trying to understand the overall nature of the armed opposition, which, officials say, operates in a decentralized, cellular structure, allowing the battle to go on even as coalition forces arrest fighters and cell leaders. U.S. commanders have recently raised their estimate of the number of cells operating in Baghdad from 10 to 14; each is believed to have between 20 and 100 members. But officials still put the overall number of enemy combatants nationwide at about 5,000.

As the battle drags on and a major rotation of U.S. forces looms, commanders are stressing offensive operations against suspected cells, including house-to-house searches, raids, targeted bombings and other tactics designed to utilize the coalition’s superior firepower. Intelligence about the workings of the cells is the key, officials say.

“This is not the kind of fight where we expect somebody to walk out of a house with a white flag and surrender to us,” Brig. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, who heads the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad, said last week. “This is the kind of fight that will end when the insurgency realizes that the weight of progress has made it such that there is no hope for them.”

Associated Press contributed to this report.