War over Mosul – Moon of Alabama

February 8, 2008

War over Mosul

Mosul is for some time now a hotbed of resistance activities in Iraq.

It is the capital of the Ninawa Governorate near to the Kurdish area in north Iraq. It lies on both sides of the Tigris with five bridges connection these parts. At least two of these bridges have earlier been under attack. Mosul has nearly 2,000,000 inhabitants.

Maliki has ordered a huge offensive against Mosul involving a three brigade size (10,000-15,000 troops) force of Iraqi government troops and U.S. support (likely one brigade – 3,500 troops).

The attack will start in the next few days.

Yesterday someone took out eight cellphone towers in Mosul by setting them ablaze. This will certainly be a problem for the government forces who do not have good internal communication equipment yet and depend to least to some part on cellphone communication.

This attack on the telco towers comes the same day the Washington Post reports on a change in tactics of the Baathist resistance in Iraq (WaPo says ‘Al-Qaida in Iraq’, but I agree with Scott Ritter that AQI is to a large part "a con game being run by Izzat al-Douri and the Sunni resistance.")

WaPo:

The insurgent group is now reaching out to disaffected Sunni tribal leaders in a bid to win back their support, even as it attacks Sunnis working closely with the Americans, according to Abdullah Hussein Lehebi, an emir from the Amiriyah section of Anbar south of Fallujah. "In exchange, we would not target them again and would respect the authority of the tribal leaders," he said in an interview with a Post special correspondent at a date orchard near the Euphrates River in Amiriyah.

Lehebi, 47, whose nom de guerre is Abu Khalid al-Dulaimi, said the group’s main focus now was to attack bridges, oil pipelines and telephone towers, as well as U.S. troops and their Sunni allies.

This report of a change in resistance tactics is supported by a piece Juan Cole excerpts today. Arab Intelligence Organizations Hold Secret Meeting To Confront Shiites In Iraq. Coles summary:

The USG Open Source Center translates a report from the Iranian Fars News Agency that summarizes an article in the Iraqi newspaper al-Bayanat al-Jadidah claiming that Sunni Arab intelligence agencies recently met in Amman to discuss ways of undermining the Shiite government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and of replacing al-Qaeda commanders in Iraq with Sunni fighters more acceptable to the locals.

While the meeting might well have taken place, I doubt that the Arab intelligence services have the control and means to change resistance leaders in Iraq at will. (At the same time another Arab ministerial level meeting in Tunis just agreed on an all out media shutdown of resistance reporting.)

But the essence of both, the WaPo AQI interview and the Fars report, is the change in the tactical approach of the resistance towards other Sunni’s. The ending of attempts to impose Wahabbi style religious stricture on Sunni Iraqi tribes and a renewed emphasis on infrastucture attacks.

This is then the timely end of the suicide campaign run by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi which was ordered in early December and supposed to end on January 29.

That ‘unification’ campaign by the takfiiri side of the resistance targeted Sunni tribes and was to discourage especially some (temporarily) U.S. paid ‘Awakening Councils’ to split away from the resistance for good.

The initiative and emphasis is now (again) turning away from the religious side of the resistance back to the more military-pragmatic side of the Baathist resistance leader Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. (Where did he spend that two month vacation?)

A new phase of the war over Iraq has started.

The coming fight over Mosul will get bloody. As the Arab media will now be censored, it might take a while until we get a somewhat true picture of it.

If the resistance takes a stand over Mosul two big questions will come up:

Will Sadr end his truce and chip in with the resistance?
What will the ‘Awakening Councils’ do?

Posted by b on February 8, 2008 at 19:11 UTC | Permalink

Comments

wow, invaluable and timely, thanks as always

Posted by: annie | Feb 8 2008 21:06 utc | 1

b
i am surprised yet again by your work. my work & also my sickness allow me time to read & do a reasonable amount of analytic work – but you impress me both by your instinct & your ability to argue them
it is clear – but not as clear as all that – that the timetable is not being determined in washington but my the resistance & all the operational initiative has always been withy the resistance – multiple as it is – & paradoxically that is one of its victories
there seems to mme two determining factor – one which ritter elaborates – that the iraquis were well prepared operationally to fight & the extremity of the american response to each human shift in the internal affairs in iraq
it is almost a textbook case of how many ways a colonial power can alienate the colonised
like the ‘diplomat’ says in the film ‘no end in sight’ – there were 500 things not to do & u s power went through all 500 of them

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 8 2008 22:11 utc | 2

They should be taking out base stations, not towers. The destruction is just as complete that way but when America cuts and runs it’s easier to reconstitute for the ensuing civil war.

Posted by: …—… | Feb 8 2008 22:37 utc | 3

I read someplace described that many of the troops Maliki is sending to Mosul were “aggrieved Shiites”. Implying that the only ones he could trust (or find) were ones with an personalized score to settle. This operation also has had an exceptionally long telegraph, they’ve been talking about it for weeks. Why would they compromise the element of surprise so blatantly? Quite possibly, there is considerable unease as to its consequences, since it could unravel completely the already frayed awakening alliance if it is perceived to be driven as a Shiite revenge operation aimed at Sunni resistance, as opposed to one against foreign AQinM. Especially if as Ritter would say the difference between AQin M and the resistance is a largely a PR fabrication. So this could at once collapse the awakening and ignite a set battle civil war.

Posted by: anna missed | Feb 8 2008 23:01 utc | 4

as opposed to one against foreign AQinM.
i just read somewhere in one of these links there are only 200 give or take foreign AQ’s in iraq.

Posted by: annie | Feb 8 2008 23:15 utc | 5

i just read somewhere in one of these links there are only 200 give or take foreign AQ’s in Iraq.
That’s an account giving in the WaPo piece. Sounds much too low to me. The same WaPO piece says 40 new foreigners are coming per month. A lower number than the 100 per month that the same piece says came before. But there are less than 40 “suicide attacks” per month.
So please tell me how a constant influx of 40-100 each month over a prolonged time end up in “less than 200” foreign fighters in Iraq “down from previous levels” when less than the incoming go “out”?
The journalist involved seem to have never managed to calculate that and ask the right questions.
This doesn’t sum up.
There is a constant influx of takfiiri folks willing to blow themselves up and al-Baghdadi may have exausted his reservoir a bit with the last two-month campaign.
But that campaign ended exactly on date and he likely had a tactical and a strategic reserve in case of something going wrong. So there is some kind of “pool” he and his boss al-Douri can drag on as needed.
Even with these numbers, likely underestimated, this seems like a long term building of ‘capacity’ for a “big push”. A Ted offensive like big push (in reality it will be much different – the U.S base are huge and few compared to Vietnam) to change the political agenda.
The Arab Sunni are by now a relative small minority in Iraq (10-15%) but with big support from outside. They don’t have many chances. There will be one big push when they are ready and everybody else is in a lull. This year? Next year? I don’t know. But it will come.

Posted by: b | Feb 9 2008 0:07 utc | 6

aqiniraq is largely a fiction. or at the very most a construction without weight. politically or strategically. there are clearly multiple ideologic & strategic positions held by the resistance but foreign fighters – small though they are – are just tools
time – is always the friend of the resistance – it is doubly true in iraq
the tet offensive was won by the vietnamese at enormous human cost & it could be argued that it was a military failure – but it was a psychological victory without parallel
what tet showed was the contempt with which the vietnamese held u s power – & that despite all the fancy language of the pentagon – it controlled nothing. nothing at all
in iraq – except for a few weeks in 2003 & i even question that – the control has been in the hands of those who oppose u s power
the arrival of the vicecounsel bremer & his praetorin guard from blackwater co – were the first signal & aknowledgement that the empire had failed. collosally
that it simply became a terrain for the profit of an infitismally small clique was signalled by the employ of small time hoods like bernard kerik
& if we need reminding – because of the rare violence used by the united states – the resistance is far more likely to create a pol pot than a nelson mandela

Posted by: Anonymous | Feb 9 2008 2:10 utc | 7

that was me, evidently

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 9 2008 2:21 utc | 8

anna missed is very accurate on the long telegraph. Local news reports were full of the plans for Mosul and the numbers of troops etc heading there for battle for at least the last two weeks – almost three I think.
And today there was another raid into Sadr City with civilian casualties and the US capturing “16 insurgents, one of who died later” which follows two other reports of US murders over the past few days including one the US actually admitted.
AQI has always been – to my thinking – a convenient PR exercise for the US – how better to buy support for the “surge” than to say we need to drive AQ out of Iraq.

Posted by: Siun | Feb 9 2008 3:57 utc | 9

Siun, it’s true that exaggeration of an “AQI threat” is one of the backup propaganda points for keeping the troops in Iraq, but there is another, much more important, selling point too. It is the blurring or lack of distinction between blind killings of fellow Iraqis for religion and/or for revenge on the one hand, and fighting the foreign occupation on the other. It is what keeps Americans from feeling any sense of solidarity with the resistance.
As everyone knows, there is a natural tendency in cases like this for violence to escalate into the former type of blind, tit-for-tat, cycles of killings. And I don’t think there is any doubt that the Baghdadi organization in Iraq has been able to use this as a bottomless recruiting pool. The key is that the classic AlQaeda ideology about “God’s will (meaning Sunni orthodoxy) always and everywhere”, is able to make use of Iraqi Sunnis motivated by desperate feelings of revenge against Shiites as Shiites, as cannon fodder. I think the recent preoccupation with “foreign fighters” (fueled I think by recent US discovery of a cache of “entry-registration” documents) is a side-issue. The key is to understand the link between the classic AQ “political theology” bigotry on the one hand, and the automatic generation of emotional blindness feeding sectarian killing on the other. (By contrast, Harith al-Dhari’s letter to the tribes urging them not to declare war on AQI on the basis that 90% of AQI are young Iraqis who have been led astay (“they are of us, and we are of them”); and Sadr’s decision to draw his Mahdi Army back from the brink–both reflect a nationalist approach in contrast to this AQI strategy).
So there are and always will be plenty of opportunities for sectarian killings, “foreign fighters” or no, and US propaganda will continue to be focused on tarring the national-resistance with that brush. This is where I would caution against confusing the point you have made about “exaggerating AQI” with the idea that really there isn’t that much to this sectarian-killing phenomenon (I know you didn’t intend that, but I’m just saying what I think the sequence of ideas is here).
Because the next step is to do what Ritter and Bernhard have inadvertently done, and that is to consider the sectarian-killing phenomenon as just another easily-manipulable battlefield tactic, and conflate the sectarian-killing phenomenon with the national resistance itself. I don’t know where either of them got their conviction that Baghdadi works for Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, but first of all there isn’t any evidence for it; secondly it is as implausible as can be, because if you read any any of the takfiiri chit-chat you will soon see that next to the “rejectionist” Shiites the thing they hate most in the world is the Baathists and other “filthy nationalists”; and thirdly, I think the Baghdadi=Douri canard is something that originated in the competition between different resistance factions (and perhaps more particularly in the competition between the Douri “loyalists” and the breakaway Yunis al-Ahmed wing of the Baath) perhaps not unconnected with the current round of US attempts to split the resistance.
So yes, one should be careful not to fall for exaggerated “AlQaeda/Iraq” threats. But more importantly, one should also be careful not to (1) minimize the problem of indiscriminate revenge-killings and its unquestionable utility for the AQ movement in upsetting the nationalist project and keeping Iraqis divided; and (2) having forgotten that important point, let your imagination carry you away and postulate exactly what US propaganda wants people to think, namely that AQI and the national resistance are one and the same thing.

Posted by: Badger | Feb 9 2008 15:56 utc | 10

hmmm – what is AQI? We use mental models to sort out and store information. So here’s my mental model of AQI. It may be wrong and I am of course willing to change it when I find a better one.
Al-Qaeda has developed into a brand that can be used and abused by anyone.
The U.S. propaganda does, as badger rightly says, attributes about everything bad to AQI. (The same tactics is Israel with the Quassams from Gaza. These are mostly launched by Fatah attached groups like Islamic Jihad, but inevitably counted against Hamas.)
But the other side uses the AQI label as well. In my model, there are three groups who have killed under the label AQI.
1. I believe the U.S. used the AQI brand:
The bombing of the Golden Mosque of Samara was attributed to al-Qaeda. But it was likely something very different:
In 2005, when Negroponte was U.S. ambassador in Iraq, the Iraqi Interior Ministry, with its top floor occupied by the CIA, carried out the “Salvador Option”. Composed mostly of Shia Badr brigades members it ran death squads against Sunni insurgents, against Sadr’s Mahdi army and in general implemented a “strategy of tension” which reached its top in the professional demolition of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. The demolition was done professionally by a group masked people in black cloth. They were accompanied by people in police uniforms that send away the guards of the Mosque and secured the perimeter.
So this was something “al-Qaeda” was said to have done, when the reality might well be that this was a Negroponte job – divide and rule. The whole sectarian fighting and ethnic cleansing campaign was, in my view, initiated and supported by the occupiers. (After the surge in Baghdad the ethnic cleansing continued under the watchful eyes of the U.S. troops. Numbers of refugees in Syria increased by several 100,000 over the “surge” period.)
2. There is a genuine group of religious lunatics running under AQI. These are financed and supported by Saudi indiviuals and have done a few spectacular suicide missions.
3. There is the baathist/national resistance which is using the genuine AQI lunatics for its purpose. Not that they are formaly under command of Douri, but they are fitting and coordinated within his strategy. It is certainly not the first time in history some secular/national group uses lunatics as proxy groups for its purpose. (btw – Lockheed and Boeing love the evangelicals for rallying for more wars) The question and problem is to keep them on a leash and to pull them back and finish them when the higher aim is achieved.
The third group also does most of the IEDs in Sunni areas, fights against Shia ethnic cleansing and has done some spectacular non-suicide bomb jobs.
—
So in my model the label AQI is used by whoever feels in that moment that it might help the current purpose. The lunatic group that really could be put into an al-Qaeda category is rather small and is used by the resistance as long as it fits the bigger plan.
—
On why I thing Baghdadi and Douri are somewhat coordinated:
The ‘Awakening’ movement was quite successful for the U.S. side when it started. Some of these groups really were going over to the U.S. The resistance had a double string answer to that:
a. It offered some of its own groups as ‘Awakening’ force to get weapons, money and training and to later turn against the U.S.
b. It got rid of those ‘Awakening’ leaders and groups that really sided with the U.S.
a. was implemented by Douri, b. by Baghdadi
Why do I believe this happened coordinated?
a. No reports of fights between the resistance and the lunatics.
b. That’s the way I would have done it
c. This scheme was used by some WWII resistance groups against the Germans too (the Germans hired proxy forces in Yugoslavia. The project was successful and then extended, the extended forces later turned out to be largly the enemy)
d. It fits with the reports I have read.
Again – I maybe totally wrong but this the ‘best fit’ I can make.

Posted by: b | Feb 9 2008 17:37 utc | 11

badger
i am with b on this. the people of ira would not be the first people instrumentalised by an occupying force for their own ends. i imagine b mentions the salvador option precisely because here social conflicts were instrumentalised into a war of anhilation. it is also true of guatemala. the operation level of these exercises depended totally on ammerican direction, resources & funding
i am not suggesting sectarian tensions do not exist – we even today in bolivia see the instrumentalisation of regional tensions – but it is clear that on all the evidence – it was instrumentalised from the beginning
the element i find discomforting in your argument badger – is that there appears a certain ‘innateness’ or ‘destined’ origin to the sectarian conflicts. i do not believe that to be the case
the crazy theology of certain groups did not fall from the skies & it is after all relatively recent – the extent of this craziness – much in the way the khmer trouge were transformed from guerrilla fighters into genocidal actor with the crazy communism of pol pot.
when u s power declares a war as total as it did against the cambodians then & the people or itraq today – you are going to get some ideological tangents & even actions that are far removed from the concrete conditions. pol popt wanted the perfect paradise of communism & the crazier theologians want a new caliphate – both are perversions of history & of a people
what cambodia required was a genuine reconstruction ater the massive carpet bombing by the united states & its destabilisation by lol nol by a genuine peasant movement engaged in genuine land reform & nationalisation. what it got was madness fully funded by us power in its hatred of the vietnamese & the isolation of a leadership that had divined answers that had more to do with pol pots buddhism than anything to do with communism or the conrete conditions of cambodia
but the scale of that bloodbath was determined & in fact governed by us policy
in the face of the anhilation of the people in iraq – it is not so strange that theologians might have more power than military tacticians
america had conducted colonial wars for a long time but beginning with guatemala & continuing to the present – the extent of their extermination of the other – of all forces & especially leadership of those forces – is extreme – by any rule of war it is both criminal & insane. in that computation – it will both utilise & create forces that refelct that criminality & that insanity
iraq is not the first time they have done it & it won’t be the last

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 9 2008 18:33 utc | 12

whatever ceasefires the resistance has accepted appear for the last month to be finished & i think the american political process will now be a witness to a surge by that resistance that will make mccain shit in his pants & lead huckabee to the power of prayer

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 9 2008 18:49 utc | 13

when u s power declares a war as total as it did against the cambodians then & the people or itraq today – you are going to get some ideological tangents & even actions that are far removed from the concrete conditions.
reminds me of something i read this morning following billmon’s strategy of tension link.
By 1974, right-wing terror began to be answered by the armed left, which favored carefully targeted hit-and-run attacks over the right’s indiscriminate bombings. For the next six years, leftist militants, especially the Red Brigades, responded with a vengeance, accounting for far more acts of political violence than the right. For several years, Italy plunged into a virtual civil war.
r’giap i am not suggesting sectarian tensions do not exist -….but it is clear that on all the evidence – it was instrumentalised from the beginning
while the seeds of discord existed, and we knew it existed, we watered and nurtured them for the sectarian bloodbath. i don’t think iraqs held long simmering revenge minded needs destined to come to fruition. i think BY DESIGN the organized ethnic cleansing of sunnis was designed for the explict purpose of instigating revenge.
b Al-Qaeda has developed into a brand that can be used and abused by anyone.
anyone who wants to scapegoat their crimes ala strategy of tension, but also now, if one observes the lingo of the gov trolls, there IS NO MORE nationalist movement. it has virtually dissolved (according to them) all absorbed, flipped into the awakening. w/the exception of ‘rouge criminal shia elements’ all there is left of the sunni side is.. AQ. this is the label for any sunni still against the occupation. you don’t ever hear of ‘shia insurgent’ or ‘rouge sunni element’. there are, presumably, they would have us believe, a mere straggling of dissidents. either takfiiri in nature, or ‘against’ sadr’s orders ie rouge.
i swear, i have been arguing w/some gov trolls, and this is their position.

Posted by: annie | Feb 9 2008 19:08 utc | 14

i think the american political process will now be a witness to a surge by that resistance that will make mccain shit in his pants & lead huckabee to the power of prayer
spot on. any national resistance would be taking advantage of our elections to send us a message and make fools of the zionist mouthpieces.

Posted by: annie | Feb 9 2008 19:10 utc | 15

I said this a while back, month ago. and they say we making progress, the surge is not working and the Sunni Awakening Councils are on strike LOL, an still being paid by US

Posted by: rawdawgbuffalo | Feb 9 2008 20:25 utc | 16

Good discussion here. In some ways r’giap confirms Badgers point on the political cleavage of AQinM and serves as a warning to misreading its consequences. Obviously, the pressure of occupation both attracts and exaggerates differences for the purpose of creating internal strife (so it can be turned in upon itself) and radicalizing behavior to fit a prescribed narrative (for propaganda purposes). But as Badger insists, this shouldn’t be a reason to discount the root differences that are being exploited. The important difference here being the makeup, behavior, and agenda of AQinM. Who as r’giap implies is not only a creation of U.S. policy, but one that can work in concert with, do work for that policy, and if left unchecked, can snowball (like pol pot) into mindless national destruction (that also serves the policy). So I think its important to understand who AQinM actually is and how they function in Iraq. In many ways AQinM represents a straw man resistance to U.S. power, attracting from the region (and to Iraq) Sunni religious extremists willing to sacrifice themselves symbolically, and equally, against the rise of Shiaism, secular Baathism, along with U.S. hegemony – the net effect of which is to dilute and prevent a broad nationalist front from forming.

Posted by: anna missed | Feb 9 2008 20:40 utc | 17

ps: do u mind if i add you to my blog roll?

Posted by: rawdawgbuffalo | Feb 9 2008 20:45 utc | 18

rawdawgbuffalo
thanks for the link to your site -& i’m sure b will accept – it is a solid site (it would seem as if we do the same sort of work with writing in prisons etc)
anna missed
that is why i thank christ for a site suchh as ours because what is required in the intentional desert of information – relible & precise indices – of who what & i – & because even the left sometimes exhibits a bourgeois humanism about the movement & shifts of others ignoring the rivers of blood – that informs those shifts
& i’d like to insist that all the evidence has been with us since the invasion that which military intelligence practiced all over latin america was now being practiced & perfected in iraq. the evidence is in fact overwhelming & on what lawyers would call the limit of probabilities – i’d suggest that there is u s involvement in the great majority of sectarian battles. as i sd it is what it practiced as far afield as the phillipines & guatemala

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 9 2008 21:16 utc | 19

@18 – ps: do u mind if i add you to my blog roll?
certainly not – you have a fine blog and a experience missing in many discussions. I’ll add yours to my daily reads.

Posted by: b | Feb 9 2008 21:39 utc | 20

“We have brought to Iraq the worst of America” (Leaked Memo)

In a confidential memo, a long-time Republican, Manuel Miranda, who has served in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad for the past year says the State Department’s efforts in Iraq are so poorly managed they “would be considered willfully negligent if not criminal” if done in the private sector.

Six years to late?

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Feb 10 2008 8:23 utc | 21

25 Communications Towers Destroyed in Nineveh

Twenty-five mobile communications towers were destroyed in Nineveh province, due to sabotage operations that have started since last Tuesday, causing a break down in the mobile communication systems, which has stretched to Qayara district south of Mosul city, according to a Nineveh security source.

Posted by: b | Feb 10 2008 8:48 utc | 22

Uncle $,
After watching (the PBS level) “no end in sight”, this guys memo fits neatly at the end of a long chain of disgruntled former state dept. diplomatic personal. I wonder why, don’t any of these people bump into their replacements in some airport cocktail lounge as they ping-pong back and forth to the green zone? Would it be some great epiphany for them to stumble on the obvious fact that for five bloody years, they have been played as the chumps over and over again. That their enlightened notion of bringing liberal reforms and reconstruction to Iraq has been at best a cynical ruse. And they have been used as an unwitting stooge of propaganda, as they breathlessly recount their deeds and accounts to the press about all the great things they have planned for that war torn country. Only to be ignored and rebuffed month after month, year after year.
The mini rebellion at state last year by the diplomatic corps serves to only underline how far they have slipped into the dark void of solipsism. I don’t get it, because first of all, have they forgotten who they work for? That woman, who has single handedly cast herself into the roll of the fat Nazi prison warden in Lena Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties – who only, on the occasion of the complete and utter domination of her captive, allows for her own sense of humanity to be exposed, albeit for selfish pleasure. “You disgusting macaroni” she said, as she allowed him to fuck her. Because in a nutshell thats what the employees of state dept. are up against, fucking power to maintain the illusion of their liberal ideals. Which if you think about it, haven’t chance in hell of succeeding in the first place considering the lack of liberal institutions necessary to replace the inherited obligation honor/shame tribal cultures typical of Iraq. So on they go, spinning their scenarios of blame and “America is better than that” woman scorned apology.
My guess is that the those at state are lusting in anticipation of the big O or the big C to reconstitute their credentials as the architects of benign empire redux.

Posted by: anna missed | Feb 10 2008 11:11 utc | 23

On page A01 the WaPo today has another pure military propaganda piece:Diary of an Insurgent In Retreat

On Nov. 3, U.S. soldiers raided a safe house of the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq near the northern city of Balad. Not a single combatant was captured, but inside the house they found something valuable: a diary and will written in neat Arabic script.
“I am Abu Tariq, Emir of al-Layin and al-Mashadah Sector,” it began.

The “diary” includes many names of fighters, exact number of weapons, and wines about the demise of the movement. At least that is what the military wants us to believe.
The reporter (Sudarsan Raghavan) seems not to believe most of it as she is fair enough to mix in these statements:

The diary is the U.S. military’s latest weapon in a concerted information campaign to undermine al-Qaeda in Iraq and its efforts to regroup and shift tactics.
…
In recent days, U.S. officials have released seized videos showing the Sunni insurgent group training children to kidnap and kill, as well as excerpts of a 49-page letter allegedly written by another al-Qaeda leader that describes the organization as weak and beset by low morale.
“It is important we get our story out,” a U.S. military official said on condition of anonymity. “I firmly believe the information part of this conflict is as very vital as the armed element of it. . . . We don’t want to lose that to al-Qaeda.”

and

The Post could not independently verify the diary’s authenticity.

(The military would have loved to have Michael Gordon write the piece – he certainly would have left those sentences out.)
The whole thing is obviously a part of a disinformation campaign that intends to let the resistance look weak in the public eyes. The need to run such a campaign is in itself a sign that this is not so.

Posted by: b | Feb 10 2008 18:23 utc | 24

b, Nineveh is across the river from mosel. wonder who doesn’t want news to spread.

Posted by: annie | Feb 10 2008 18:58 utc | 25

Re the long telegraph (thank you anna missed, that is a term I hadn’t heard before), I suspect it is for the benefit of non-Iraqi audiences. Putting the generally little heard of Mosul in the news and equating it with Al Qaeda (e.g. Al-Qaeda’s Last Iraqi Stronghold just in today), so that the carnage they are preparing won’t come as a surprise to the public.
This is what I fear: Second Largest City In Iraq About To Get The Fallujah Treatment. Speculation only, but it parallels my own feelings. It is what the population is bracing itself for, as they stock up with supplies.
It isn’t that Mosul is a hotbed of Al Qaeda, or of nationalist resistance even. Mosul has been a hotbed of backbone. Remained proudly mixed, and refused to be cantonized. Remained nearly functional. And that won’t do at all… Also, subduing the city should be critical for Barzani’s ambitions over Nineva province.

Posted by: Alamet | Feb 11 2008 23:42 utc | 26

Sociology professor Michel Schwarz on the Iraqi refugee crisis and the consequences for the country: Iraq’s broken pieces don’t fit together

Those refugees who have left Iraq now face a miserable limbo life, as Syria and other receiving countries exhaust their meager resources and seek to expel many of them. Those seeking shelter within Iraq face the depletion of already minimal support systems in degrading host communities whose residents may themselves be threatened with displacement.
From the vast out-migration and internal migrations of its desperate citizens comes damage to society as a whole that is almost impossible to estimate. The displacement of people carries with it the destruction of human capital. The destruction of human capital deprives Iraq of its most precious resource for repairing the damage of war and occupation, condemning it to further infrastructural decline. This tide of infrastructural decline is the surest guarantee of another wave of displacement, of future floods of refugees.
As long as the United States keeps trying to pacify Iraq, it will create wave after wave of misery.

Posted by: b | Feb 12 2008 14:48 utc | 27

Sad irony:
Diyala police ask U.S. troops’ help in battle with U.S.-backed militias

Fierce clashes between U.S.-backed Sunni militias and Iraqi police have prompted U.S. occupation troops in the country to interfere.
But the troops have opted to side with the police against the Sunni tribal militias they created, trained, financed and armed to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Tensions are high in the restive Diyala Province of which Baaquba is the capital with the Sunni militias threatening to turn their guns against U.S. troops and the Shiite-dominated government if their demands are not met.
(snip)

The background of the story from Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail:
US-Backed Groups Challenge Government

Posted by: Alamet | Feb 13 2008 1:14 utc | 28

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