The first ten days of Ramadan saw a pronounced increase in the insurgency in Iraq. The weekend of 23-24 October alone was brutal: more than sixty army recruits and police officers were killed in three different incidents; Australian, American and Estonian troops were attacked; and United States forces staged further attacks on Fallujah, and engaged in clashes with insurgents in Ramadi. There were numerous additional incidents across Iraq, including the assassination of a tribal leader, Sahir Khodhir, in a car bomb attack in the northern city of Mosul.
This activity came at a time of an increasing likelihood of a major American attack on Fallujah, just as the first detailed report was published of the deaths in that city during the US attacks in April. According to Iraq Body Count, some 600 of the 800 deaths that month were of civilians, including 300 women and children.
Paul Rogers will deliver a lecture on The war on terror and the new American century: reflections on the US presidential election at Londons Birkbeck College on 11 November 2004; for further details, click here
Three other recent developments illustrate the seriousness of the problems now facing the United States and its coalition partners.
The first is a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirming the disappearance of over 300 tonnes of conventional high explosives from the al-Qaqaa site, fifty kilometres south of Baghdad. This was a site repeatedly inspected by IAEA personnel prior to last years occupation because the explosives concerned could theoretically be used to make triggers for nuclear weapons.
In their more common usage they can be formed into very powerful conventional explosives the quantities that have gone missing could produce around 6,000 large truck bombs of a power substantially greater than those used by the Provisional IRA in the three City of London bombings in the 1990s.
The second development is the Bush administrations proposal to increase American troop deployments in Iraq, after the US presidential election but before the planned elections in Iraq in January 2005. The White House is seeking an additional $70 billion in emergency funding for the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the total war costs to nearly $225 billion. This includes a $6 billion request from the US army to be used specifically for refurbishing equipment that has been worn down or destroyed by unexpectedly intense combat. (By comparison, that one item alone is close to Britains entire overseas aid budget in 2004).
The third development is increasing activity among al-Qaida and its associated groups, evident in significant recent attacks in Indonesia and Egypt, and reflected in continuing unrest in southern Thailand, where many Muslim prisoners were killed on 25 October.
Following the intense conflicts in the region in April 2004 between security forces and Islamic separatist groups, a period of relative calm ended at the start of this week with clashes between security forces and demonstrators that left six people dead. 1,300 people were then arrested, many of them packed tightly into trucks for transport to army camps. During the process, seventy-eight of the prisoners were reported to have suffocated to death in the trucks.
Devising a nightmare
In this context, a detailed assessment of the current condition of al-Qaida in the latest issue of the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) journal Military Balance is highly relevant.
The Military Balance is the leading non-governmental bean-count of military power and IISS is possibly the most prominent of the western strategic studies centres. In September 2002 soon after the British governments dossier about Iraqs weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that has since been shown to be so misleading the IISS published its own dossier. This came to broadly similar conclusions but was considerably more scrupulous in the implications it drew from them.
The aftermath of war and occupation in Iraq in 2003, with their clear evidence of intelligence failure over WMD, caused the IISS which relies, in part, on official contacts for its assessments some embarrassment, giving the organisation even more reason to be cautious in its pronouncements and to avoid overstating any particular threat. (It is fair to point out here that earlier columns in this series drew the erroneous conclusion that the Saddam Hussein regime may have had some chemical and biological weapons for use as some kind of final deterrent, even if that did not constitute the general threat often claimed.)
This makes the IISSs new evaluation of al-Qaida in relation to Iraq particularly significant. According to The Military Balance, as many as 1,000 foreign paramilitaries may be active in Iraq, but even this represents a small fraction of the potential numbers available to al-Qaida and associated groups which may be as large as 18,000.
In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here
The journal says that the substantially exposed US military deployment in Iraq represents al-Qaida with perhaps its most iconic target outside US territory, and that (galvanised) by Iraq, if compromised by Afghanistan, al-Qaida remains a viable and effective network of networks. Although the termination of the Taliban destroyed its command base and training facilities, it has dispersed effectively, with some activities such as bombmaking still more centralised and potentially more efficient and sophisticated (The Guardian, 21 October 2004).
The involvement of al-Qaida affiliates in Iraq still represents a small proportion of al-Qaidas strength and also of the insurgency itself, which is mostly indigenous. Yet it has a significance that is potentially far greater than the direct involvement of foreign paramilitaries.
One of the features of the al-Qaida network has been the movement of militants in and out of zones of conflict Afghanistan, the north-west regions of Pakistan or even to an extent other parts of central Asia. The insurgency in Afghanistan is still continuing and is sufficient to tie down some 17,000 US troops, but it is not currently at the level of ferocity reached during the civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance warlords, a conflict that gave many al-Qaida supporters direct experience of unconventional warfare.
What Iraq is starting to do is to provide an entirely new training ground for many paramilitaries that are loosely associated with al-Qaida. It is, in effect, beginning to replace Afghanistan in this role. We are therefore left with yet one more irony in the desperate situation in Iraq. The Bush administration has claimed repeatedly that there were links between Iraq and al-Qaida, though producing virtually no evidence to substantiate this. Now, having terminated the Saddam Hussein regime, the United States occupation has succeeded in facilitating that link.
It has done so, moreover, in a way that is particularly useful to the al-Qaida network, enabling it to train new generations of paramilitaries in circumstances greatly to their benefit. In the long run, this may be one of the most damaging effects of the whole Iraq occupation, giving al-Qaida an enhanced capability that it could not easily have acquired by any other means.
