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Who are the insurgents
and what do they want?
Scott Ritcher, October 2007, from NewsTheMagazine.com
On May 1, 2003, under a colorful banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” President George W. Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended. The first year in Iraq – called “the lost year” by a PBS Frontline documentary – saw a number of successes and reasons for hope. Iraqi children caught candy tossed by US soldiers from Humvees, ordinary citizens celebrated their freedom in the streets, and iconic symbols of Saddam Hussein’s government were defaced across the country. By the close of that year, though, something had begun to shift dramatically.
About seven months after the invasion, in October 2003, the terms “insurgent” and “insurgency” began appearing with significant regularity on CNN and in other mainstream media outlets. The usage of these names grew alarmingly and the tactics employed by those who held them became increasingly more offensive and abhorrent. Sniper and rocket attacks on convoys gave way to roadside bombs and videotaped beheadings of civilian contractors.
Two years after Bush’s announcement of the end of combat operations, Vice President Dick Cheney commented that this second horrific phase was coming to a close. “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.” That, too, proved to be a premature assumption.
So much day-in-day-out coverage of endless reports of the violent, indiscriminate deaths of Americans and Iraqis alike has led to what has been described as “outrage fatigue.” Yet after all this reporting of the so-called insurgency, many Americans still have a few simple, basic questions about the whole ordeal.
Who are the insurgents and what do they want? Are the Americans or the new Iraqi government able to give them what they want? And if so, would giving them what they want – even if it means conceding some sort of defeat – be worse than the continued spilling of blood?
The name of a fighter
The terms “insurgent” and “insurgency” in relation to the guerilla fighters of the conflict in Iraq have been controversial since their introduction. Many would argue that one cannot be justly classified as an “insurgent” or “terrorist” if he is protecting his home or defending an established way of life. By definition, an insurgent is a rebel, revolutionary, or one who rises or attacks in revolt. That is to say that insurgents take up arms against an established authority or a larger opposing force. It is more often the tactics of these fighters – attacking crowds of civilians or infrastructure installations – rather than a literal definition that make these terms so tempting, if not their continuous repetition without question that makes them seem like acceptable labels.
Equally controversial is the debate over what to call these people if “insurgent” is not an appropriate designation.
Steve Jetton, a writer for the Houston Chronicle, documented some examples of this debate in a July 2005 blog entry about the inner operations of the newspaper. His article juxtaposed letters the paper had received from readers with responses from one of the Chronicle’s editors. That debate in Texas, however, was markedly different than “insurgents” versus “fighters” in that many readers were urging the paper to replace the term “insurgents” with “terrorists.” Jetton remarked, “we use the ‘insurgents’ to describe the resistance to democracy and US troops being in Iraq. Some readers would prefer we label them as ‘terrorists.’” He concluded with the observation, “The US Department of Defense and other news media use the term ‘insurgent.’ Still, the issue unfortunately has morphed into an ideological debate rather than a journalistic discussion about style.”
In November 2005, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attempted to discredit the guerilla fighters and declared that calling them “insurgents” gave them too much legitimacy. Moments later, standing right next to him, General Peter Pace stopped mid-sentence and said, “I have to use the word ‘insurgent’ because I can’t think of a better word right now.”
The fighters referred to as the Iraqi insurgency are typically normal civilians who have been motivated to act because they feel an uninvited aggressor has invaded their country and disturbed their normal way of life. As a result, their daily rituals and comforts have been interrupted, and this has affected everything including jobs, commerce, security, water, and electricity. The predictability of daily life has been unhinged, their national sovereignty has been violated, and in response, individuals have chosen violence as a way to influence the retreat of the occupying forces, in hopes, to restore order. Suffice it to say that most of those who are now labeled as insurgents have different terms for themselves. To the roadside and neighborhood fighters in Iraq whose lives have been thrown into confusion, their fight is not too dissimilar to the French “resistance” against German invaders during World War II. Regardless of what the US government or media may call them as a collective group of disparate factions, depending on their principles, their names for themselves include freedom fighters, nationalists, defenders, or mujahedeen – “holy warriors.”
Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Iraqis, neighbors
In the same way that Catholics and Protestants are both Christian denominations, Sunnis and Shiites are all Muslims. While parallels can be drawn to the Catholic/Protestant conflicts and, in turn to in Northern Ireland, the Sunni/Shiite feud has been going on for more than 1,400 years. It started when the Prophet Muhammad died in the year 632. Those who became Shiites believed that leadership of Muslims should be passed to direct descendants of Muhammad. Those who became Sunnis believed the new leader should be elected from those who had the ability to lead.
The country’s neighbors are split – Iranians to the east are predominantly Shiite, and Saudi Arabians and Syrians to the west are mainly Sunni – making Iraq either the middle ground or the battlefield. The Islamic militant groups are also split. Hezbollah is Shiite. Al Qaeda is Sunni. It’s a lot to remember, but immensely important to know in order to understand the conflicts.
There are also secular members of each tribe. For instance, Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Arab, but hardly a religious leader. He and many Ba’athists adopted the rhetoric of Islam in an effort to gain credibility with the people, much in the same way some less-than-religious American politicians invoke the name of God to earn the trust of their largely Christian constituencies.
To make things even more complex, even though Iraq and Iran are both chiefly Shiite, they fought against each other in a terribly bloody war from 1980 to 1988. The war cost over a million lives and created still-lingering animosity among Shiites on both sides of the border for secular and nationalist reasons. The Americans were allies of Iran until a revolution overthrew their government in 1979 and hostages were taken from the US Embassy in Tehran. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the US eventually supported Iraq as a proxy to weaken Iran, and ironically through backdoor deals, also provided arms to Iran. The Soviet Union supplied more arms to Iraq, while North Korea, Syria, and Libya sent assistance to Iran.
Who are the “insurgents”?
While there are literally dozens of groups in Iraq who are fighting some sort of resistance – or “insurgency” – they can all be categorized into three major factions. They are former members of the Ba’ath Party, former members of the Iraqi army, and foreigners who have descended on Iraq for a variety of reasons.
The Ba’ath Party, of which Saddam Hussein was a member, was a minority group that was founded in Syria in the 1940’s. The Ba’athists came into power in Iraq by overthrowing the government in 1968. They held onto it by force and kept their minority Sunni allies in power as well.
From 1968 until the American invasion in 2003, the minority Sunnis enjoyed power and ruled Iraq with the help of the elite Ba’ath Party. With the introduction of democratic elections, the majority Shiites now control the new Iraqi government. Needless to say, this is a thorn in the side of those Sunnis who had become accustomed to being in control despite their minority status.
Coalition Provisional Authority director Paul Bremer carried out two orders during the first year in Iraq that, perhaps more than anything else, gave birth to the backlash against the Americans by locals who previously – or otherwise – would have been supporters. These directives were the order to prohibit any members of the Ba’ath Party from participating in Iraq’s new government, and the order in May 2003 to disband the Iraqi army.
During Saddam Hussein’s rule, many ordinary Iraqis had joined the Ba’ath Party out of fear rather than loyalty, while others had subscribed to the party line in order to get better jobs. With no quick way to tell which former staff had been Saddam Hussein loyalists, the US edict eliminated their influence by removing the entire party from the process completely. The order affected everyone in government from high-ranking officials to clerks and office workers. Unfortunately, because the Ba’ath Party had been in charge for such a long period of time, the elimination of Ba’athist participation essentially excluded the vast majority of any Iraqis with governmental experience from being able to contribute to the new government. Furthermore, it fueled bitterness in these same people and skepticism in the ability of the inexperienced government to succeed.
In a September 2007 op-ed in the New York Times, Bremer justified the move to disband the Iraqi army, writing, “the largely Shiite draftees of the army were not going to respond to a recall plea from their former commanders, who were primarily Sunnis. It was also agreed that recalling the army would be a political disaster because to the vast majority of Iraqis it was a symbol of the old Baathist-led Sunni ascendancy.”
In much the same way that the expulsion of Ba’athists from government provoked their opposition to the new authorities, Bremer’s dissolution of the Iraqi army instantly created a force of tens of thousands of unemployed and resentful men who no longer had a way to provide for their families, and most importantly, were armed. This happened almost overnight and thus was born the best-equipped wave of retaliation in what is commonly known as the insurgency.
Disgruntled, unemployed Ba’athists and former members of the Iraqi army are the first main distinctions of people who are carrying out attacks. They target American troops, contractors, members of the new Iraqi government, local Iraqi police forces, and anyone who is seen helping any of the above.
Some former Iraqi troops are not inherently anti-American or against the success of the new government, but take up their arms for hire because they have no other options to earn a living. Military operations are what these have been trained to do for years. Simply getting a job would be enough to squash their impetus for killing, but with no prospect of employment, foreign interests and groups who may be ideologically opposed to these former soldiers pay up to several hundred dollars per attack. This amounts to a huge and desperately coveted sum of money as an average Iraqi’s annual income is about 4% that of the average American. Furthermore, the CIA estimates 30% of Iraq’s workforce is unemployed.
The third major group implementing guerilla tactics in Iraq are foreign fighters and bombers who have come in from nearby countries such as Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and Jordan in order to carry out attacks on Americans. Iraq’s porous borders provide easy entry to the country from any number of points. Religious fundamentalists who see the United States as a great Satan, or a purveyor of immoral, decadent, or anti-Islamic values have dedicated themselves to striking Americans in exchange for everything from cash for rocket attacks to martyrdom in the role of suicide bombers.
Foreign fighters are by far the smallest group attacking American and Iraqi government personnel and assets. Despite the characterization of Iraq as a “central front in the war on terrorism,” a Defense Department report found that of the more than 1,600 bombs that exploded in Iraq during the month of July 2006, less than 6% of them originated from foreign operations including Al Qaeda. On the other hand, ninety-four percent of the attacks targeted at American-led forces were from Iraqis.
What do they want and can the Americans or the new Iraqi government give it to them?
The longer the Americans are on the ground, it seems, the greater motivation these groups have for their attacks. They are all either opposed to the American presence, opposed to the new Iraqi government, seeking revenge for past killings or imprisonments, performing strikes for hire, or some combination of all the above. Getting the Americans to leave Iraq would achieve a common goal for many of these religious and secular factions who may ideologically agree on little else.
The Washington Post obtained a report of State Department polling data in September 2006 that provided rare insight into the feeling on the street in Iraq. They found that nearly three-quarters of the Baghdad residents polled “said they would feel safer if US and other foreign forces left Iraq, with 65 percent of those asked favoring an immediate pullout.”
Support for American withdrawal is the majority opinion in all areas of Iraq except the Kurdish northern areas. In that area, the regional flag of Kurdistan is frequently flown as opposed to the Iraqi national flag. The area is comparatively peaceful and enjoys the benefits of its oil-rich ground. A February 2007 “60 Minutes” report titled “The Other Iraq” profiled this “peaceful swath of Iraq where Americans are liked, violence rare and the Kurdish people yearn to be their own separate country.” In fact, not a single American soldier has been killed in the Kurdish region since the beginning of the war. The Kurds fear a US abandonment would open the door to incursions from the south and a potential loss of oil revenues and security. It could also lead to a greater chance of conflict with their neighbors in Turkey, many of whom share Kurdish ethnicity, but also a great deal of tension.
In essence, other than a departure of American forces, each bloc of the so-called insurgency wants something different, but they employ common methods in their efforts to force change.
Obviously, the vast majority of Iraqis want the same things that people everywhere else in the world want, and what the people in Kurdistan celebrate: food, shelter, security, medical care, and comfort. Restoration of the basic infrastructure of electrical and water service; the rebuilding of roads, bridges, and buildings; the re-emergence of institutions like schools, hospitals, and broadcasting; and the reliability of peace and quiet may all be decades away for most of Iraq, even if the fighting were to stop tonight.
The minority Sunnis want guarantees of representation in the new government. Former members of the Ba’ath Party want the opportunity to participate and gain official employment without fear of reprisals. So far, both groups have been blocked by the majority Shiites who harbor resentment from years of Sunni and Ba’athist political domination. Understandably, Shiites want to enjoy the benefits of the democratic majority their sheer numbers mandate and that they have waited so long to enjoy.
The troops of the former Iraqi army also want employment and a way to provide for their families. Many of them would like to be permitted to join Iraq’s new national armed forces or local police squads, but also, so far, they have been prohibited from doing so.
The foreign operatives, religious militants, and suicide bombers want – at most – to kill Americans wherever they may be, and at least, to force the United States to revise its foreign policy to a more respectful discourse that includes a list of ends such as the establishment of a Palestinian state, a cessation of interference in Middle Eastern affairs, and a removal of US troops and bases from soil they see as sacred. Chances are, if the Americans left Iraq, so, too, would the influence of Al Qaeda and other foreign entities.
For those Iraqis who have been wrongfully imprisoned or abused, or whose family members have been innocently killed in the crossfire, there may be nothing that can repair their animosity, calm their anger, or replace their losses. Whether you call it a quagmire, a disappointment, or an ongoing effort, one of the few things that most could agree on is that perhaps only the passing of generations can serve to rebuild all that has been lost so far by so many in this tremendously multilayered conflict.
See also: BBC Guide: Armed groups in Iraq
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