Gasps from al Qaeda

Article published Oct 13, 2007, credit: washington times
Gasps from al Qaeda

October 13, 2007

Jack Kelly - The last days on Earth of Abu Osama al-Tunisi apparently were filled with anxiety: "We are desperate for your help," he said in a letter to al Qaeda chieftains.

A copy of the letter was found by U.S. troops sifting through the rubble of the building in Musayb, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, where on Sept. 25 al-Tunisi had been meeting with two local al Qaeda operatives when an F-16 cut their discussion short.

Al-Tunisi was a key member of the rapidly dwindling inner circle of Abu Ayoub al Masri, the al Qaeda chieftain in Iraq. Another key member, Abou Yaakoub al Masri, an intimate of Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, was killed Aug. 31 near the northern Baghdad suburb of Tarmiyah.

Al-Tunisi was responsible for bringing foreign al Qaeda recruits into Iraq and placing them in operational cells, U.S. military spokesmen said. That effort suffered a major blow when "Muthanna," the al Qaeda emir for the Iraq-Syrian border region, was killed in early September.

The two al Masris are both Egyptian. Al-Tunisi was, as his nom de guerre indicates, Tunisian. Found near the body of the late Muthanna was a list of 500 foreign al Qaeda fighters. More than 80 percent of the suicide bombings in Iraq have been conducted by foreigners, the U.S. military estimates. Yet Democrats continue to describe the conflict as a civil war.

Al-Tunisi and Muthanna were among 28 local, city or regional al Qaeda leaders killed or captured in September. Two other very big shots nailed last month were Muhammad al Afari, who was responsible for the bloody attack on the Kurdish Yazidi sect in August, and Abu Taghrid, who ran a car bomb network.

Al-Tunisi wasn't alone in calling for help. "Al Qaeda has lost half its leadership over the summer, and American intelligence collectors have amassed a huge number of desperate messages from al Qaeda leaders and operatives," said StrategyPage.

The beat goes on. On Oct. 2, U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested an al Qaeda financier in the Baghdad suburb of Kindi. The financier is said to have had $100 million to disburse to fund terror operations.

The collapse of al Qaeda's networks in Iraq is the chief reason both U.S. casualties and Iraqi civilian deaths plunged in September, despite an increased operations tempo.

"Terror attacks are down by more than half because al Qaeda keeps getting run out of their refuges, and, in desperation, keeps asking each other for help," StrategyPage said. "When the terrorists are unable to escape, they more frequently surrender, rather than fight to the death. This is a sign of falling morale."

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on top of Page One on Oct. 2 printed a story about the plunge in U.S. casualties. But this was an exception. Most news organizations mentioned the casualty plunge on inside pages, if at all. None that I am aware of has reported prominently on the devastating losses of the al Qaeda network in Iraq. "That the media are no longer much interested in Iraq is a sure sign things are going well there," said an Oct. 1 Investors Business Daily editorial.

As the death toll for both U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians plunged, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continued to talk about "rising levels of violence in Iraq." If the facts on the ground are uncongenial, make up your own.

British Mideast expert Bartle Bull thinks it soon will be impossible to ignore the good news from Iraq. In an article this month in the British magazine Prospect titled "Mission accomplished," Mr. Bull wrote: "With most Sunni factions now seeking a deal, the big questions in Iraq have been resolved positively. The country remains one, it has embraced democracy and avoided all-out civil war."

The Sunnis, even the ex-Ba'athists, have turned on al Qaeda and are seeking a deal, and the predominantly Shia government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is willing to make one, Mr. Bull said. More than 14,000 Sunnis in Anbar Province, once al Qaeda's stronghold, have joined the Iraqi army and police since the troop surge began.

"The Sunni insurgents have recognized that there is little point fighting a strong and increasingly skilled enemy — the United States — that is on the right side of Iraq's historical destiny and has a political leadership that ... responds to setbacks by trying harder," Mr. Bull said.

"There is even less point doing so when you are a discredited minority, as the Sunnis are after 35 years of Ba'athism followed by their disastrous insurgency, and the enemy [the United States] is in fact your main guarantor of a fair place at the national table."

Jack Kelly, a syndicated columnist, is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh (Pa.) Post-Gazette.

Hope Yet for Iraq?

By Victor Davis Hanson

Iraq for most Americans is now a toxic subject -- best either ignored or largely evoked to blame someone for something in the past.

Any visitor to Iraq can see that the American military cannot be defeated there, but also is puzzled over exactly how we could win -- victory being defined as fostering a stable Iraqi constitutional state analogous to, say, Turkey.

But war is never static. Over the last 90 days, there has been newfound optimism, as Iraqis are at last stepping forward to help Americans secure their country.

I spent last week touring outlying areas of Baghdad and American forward operating bases in Anbar and Diyala provinces, talking to Army and Marine combat teams and listening to Iraqi provincial and security officials.
Whether in various suburbs of Baghdad, or in Baqubah, Ramadi or Taji, there is a familiar narrative of vastly reduced violence. Until recently, the Americans could not find enough interpreters, were rarely warned about landmines and had little support from Iraqi security forces.

But now they are being asked by Iraqis in the "Sunni Triangle" to join them to defeat the very terrorists the locals once championed. Anbar, a province that just months ago was deemed lost by a U.S. military intelligence report, is now in open revolt against al-Qaida.

Why the change?

Officers offered a number of theories. The surge of American troops, and Gen. David Petraeus' risky tactics of going after the terrorists within their enclaves, have put al-Qaida on the run. Likewise, in the past four years, the U.S. military has killed thousands of these terrorists and depleted their ranks.

Sunnis -- angry over their loss of power to the historically discriminated-against Shiites -- discovered their al-Qaida allies to be worse than their Shiite rivals. We forget that jihadists drew in not merely religious fanatics but also repulsive common criminals and psychopaths who extort, butcher and mutilate innocents.

Iraqis of all tribes and sects are also growing tired of the nihilistic violence that is squandering the opportunity for something better than Saddam's rule. The astronomical spike in oil prices has resulted in windfall profits of billions of dollars for the Iraqi government -- and with it the realization that Iraq could someday become a wealthy advanced state.

Iraqis told me that their widely held fear that Americans are going to leave soon has galvanized Sunnis to finally step up to secure their country or face even worse chaos in our absence.

The result is that ordinary Iraqis are increasingly willing to participate in local government and civil defense. Such popular engagement from the bottom up offers more hope than the old 2003 idea that a democratically elected government could simply mandate reform top down from their enclaves in the Green Zone.

So we are at yet another turning point in the constantly changing saga of Iraq. On this recent trip to Iraq, I rode on highways that just a few months ago were nearly impossible to navigate without being blown up by improvised explosive devices. Soldiers now train Iraqi security forces as often as they fight terrorists.

But there is also a new sense of urgency on the part of the military that Iraqis must seize this new opportunity before it fades. Unless the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government steps up to reconcile with the Sunni provinces and begins funding social services, the insurgency will only rekindle.

The Iraqi army must be freed up to police its porous borders with Iran and Syria. That's impossible without a national police force inside Iraq's cities that is both competent and law-abiding. So far the police are not quite either.

The Shiite community must appreciate that it has won the political struggle and finally achieved political power commensurate with its numbers. This majority must now take on Shiite death squads and their sympathizers inside the Iraqi government. Otherwise, an intolerant Shiite-run Iraq will either become a pawn of Iran or fight a perpetual war with the country's Sunni provinces.

Meanwhile, the American military, after four years of hard fighting in Iraq, is strained, its equipment wearing out. America's finest citizens, fighting for an idealistic cause that has still not been well explained to the American people, continue to be killed by horrific murderers.

If the unexpectedly good news about the surge has given Gen. Petraeus another six months to improve further the situation, the political debate at home has changed only from "Get out now!" to "Victory still isn't worth the cost in blood and treasure."

Lost in all this confusion over Iraq is the fact that about 160,000 gifted American soldiers are trying to help rebuild an entire civilization socially, politically and economically -- and defeat killers in their midst who will murder far beyond Iraq if not stopped.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.