The Iraqi resistance

One of the amazing things about the Iraq War is that, a year and a half into it, there is still no common definition of who the enemy is.  Bob Dreyfuss looked at this issue three weeks ago: The Resistance by Bob Dreyfuss 09/24/04.  His conclusion:

If we get out [of Iraq], it [the resistance] will peter out. That doesn’t mean Iraq will avoid a civil war, but if we pull out in the right way, we might be able to arrange things so that the central government holds. But that will mean that we encourage a real Iraqi government, one in which Iraqi nationalists, Baathists, communists, Islamists and other “unfriendlies” are amply represented. And then we’ll have to live with that. Or, we could stay and get chewed up for the next 10 years.

But the bulk of his post is devoted to discussing this report from the Federation of American Scientists translating what Dreyfuss calls "a very interesting article from Al Zawra , an Iraqi weekly published by the Iraqi Journalists Association, that provides an unprecedented (for me, at least) look at the size and shape of the resistance groups in Iraq."

An Inventory of Iraqi Resistance Groups, FBIS Translated Text, accessed 09/28/04, by Samir Haddad and Mazin Ghazi, Al Zawra (Baghdad) 09/1904.

It lists Sunni groups it says are mainly targeting "the US occupation": the Iraqi National Islamic Resistance, aka, "The 1920 Revolution Brigades"; the National Front for the Liberation of Iraq, composed of "nationalists and Islamists"; and, the Iraqi Resistance Islamic Front (JAMI).  Smaller Sunni groups include: the Hamzah Faction; the Iraqi Liberation Army; Awakening and Holy War; the White Banners; and, the Al-Haqq Army.  In addition, the article says there are two groups of Sunni Baathists that mainly finance the operations of other groups:

Al-Awdah (The Return): This faction is concentrated in northern Iraq -- Samarra, Tikrit, Al-Dur, and Mosul. It consists of members of the former intelligence apparatus.

Saddam's Fedayeen: The faction was formed by the Saddam regime before the US invasion. Now, it is rumored that many of its members have abandoned their loyalty to Saddam and have joined Islamic and national groups on the side of the 11 September Revolutionary Group and the Serpent's Head Movement.

Among Shiite groups, the article names:  the Al-Mahdi Army, Muqtada al-Sadr's group and Imam Ali Bin-Abi-Talib Jihadi Brigades.  Al-Sadr's group is one that has been considerably discussed in the Western press.  It draws heavily on support among the urban poor. The article doesn't give much information about the other groups, except that it first appeared a year ago.

The article also mentions a number of groups engaged in kidnapping and murder, which presumably range from the fanatically political to organized gangs with few or no political goals.  Among the ones named in the article are the Islamic Retaliation Movement, the Islamic Anger Brigades, the Khalid-Bin-al-Walid Brigades, the Iraq's Martyrs Brigades, the Black Banners Group.

It also lists four that it says "are clearly intellectually close to the beliefs and thinking of Al-Qa'ida Organization and its leader, Usama Bin Ladin," including the Abu-Mus'ab al-Zarqawi Group, the Al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad Group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, a"secret organization that adopts the ideology of Al-Qa'ida," and the Ansar al-Sunnah Movement.  It's a little confusing in that it also says that the Black Banners group is "battalion of the Secret Islamic Army," but it's not clear if that the same as the Islamic Army in Iraq.  And does it mean that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has two separate and distinct groups?

It's not clear how good the information in this article is.  Dreyfuss called it "very interesting" and clearly thought it was worth mentioning.

But what's striking is that there has been so little written about the resistance, other than vague generalizations about "Baathist dead-enders" and so forth, that I've seen very little information about specific groups to compare to this article's claims.

A year and a half into the war, it's obviously a bad sign if the US government and the "sovereign" Iraqi regime don't have a clear idea who the resistance and the leaders are, other than constantly mentioningal-Zarqawi as an all-purpose bogeyman.