By Tod Robberson
LONDON - (KRT) - Iraq's insurgents, described earlier this year by U.S. officials as a dwindling force, have resisted military efforts to halt their attacks and have an apparent new bombing strategy to inflict headline-grabbing casualties, according to diplomatic and academic experts.
The specialists, including one with extensive experience in Iraq, suggested that Washington misinterpreted a lull in attacks after January's national elections as a sign that the Iraqi insurgency was dying out or relaxing its effort to force a foreign military retreat.
Instead, the experts said, the insurgents have shown patience as they regrouped, devised new strategies and repeatedly demonstrated an ability to thwart U.S.-led efforts to stabilize Iraq. The persistent campaign of attacks has demoralized the population while proving the insurgents can withstand repeated military offensives designed to defang them.
Events in Iraq this week showed the effectiveness of the insurgents' campaign. A car bomb exploded Tuesday outside a girls' school in Baghdad, killing six people, while eight U.S. troops were killed in separate attacks. A total of 14 Americans have been reported killed since Sunday, while about 60 Iraqis have died in shootings, car bombings and suicide attacks launched by the insurgents around the country.
"The fact that the U.S. Army managed to prevent insurgent plans from halting the elections, and the fact that such a large percentage of the Iraqi population defied the violence to vote, shook the confidence of the various groups deploying violence for political aim," said John Chipman, director of the independent International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
But the three-month gap between the elections of formation of a new government "gave the insurgency the strategic and political space to regroup and strike back," he added.
In spite of "risking their lives" to vote for a better future, Iraqis have not been impressed by the new government. Its inaction "has also demobilized the Iraqi population and encouraged a return to the alienation and cynicism that (previously) marked popular attitudes," Chipman said.
A senior British official said the repeated "spikes and lulls" between attacks, especially after the election, did not necessarily mean U.S. anti-insurgent military operations were successful. Rather, the lulls appear to have resulted from deliberate decisions by the insurgents to slow their activities in order to prepare explosives, train and map out their plans for new rounds of attacks.
Having previously used small-scale attacks to hit numerous targets each day, the insurgents now are focusing their efforts on one or two big attacks designed to inflict maximum casualties - and garner maximum world news coverage.
The lull following the election "made it appear as if they had packed up and gone home," said the official, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. But after a few weeks, "they produced another surge." This pattern will continue, he said, because they are determined "to prove that they're back, they're still in business."
The British official said the insurgents' targets also appear to be changing.
"They have moved away from attempts to kill Iraqi officials and, instead, just ... (bomb) an Iraqi marketplace because you can kill 100 people, and you get all the headlines for the next 24 hours. They want to prove they're still a force to be reckoned with."
Toby Dodge, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the insurgents have exposed how vulnerable Iraqi police and army troops would be if U.S.-led multinational forces withdrew. As a result, U.S. and British troops, who form the largest foreign contingents, should expect to remain in Iraq indefinitely.
"I don't think we have a viable exit strategy," Dodge said.
The IISS annual Strategic Survey, a security report issued Tuesday that focuses on international security concerns, indicated that Iraqi forces are nowhere near ready to assume the counter-insurgency role dominated by the United States.
U.S. assessments have been more optimistic.
Gen. George Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq, told CNN in late March that if all went well, "we should be able to take some fairly substantial reductions in the size of our forces" by this time next year.
"The magnitude of the task it (Iraq) faces is indicated by the fact that 155,000 U.S. troops failed to impose order during two years of occupation," the survey said.
As U.S. forces reduced street patrols and redeployed to more secure bases outside urban areas, "the insurgents sought more accessible targets, which the nascent institutions and personnel of the new Iraqi state provided."
Between June and February, the insurgents killed an estimated 1,342 Iraqi soldiers and police, 115 of whom died in a single attack.
As for the insurgents' motives, the report said various domestic and international factors are at play. Some attacks are the product of longstanding disputes between Iraq's Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities. Others are motivated by a desire to force U.S. troops into retreat.
"Those deploying this form of violence appear to believe that the resulting chaos will de-legitimize the Iraqi government and hasten the departure of U.S. troops, leaving a political and security vacuum that they would be best placed to exploit and eventually fill," the report said.
Dodge said it is wrong to assume that most of the activity comes from bands of "transnational jihadists" who seek to use Iraq as a staging ground for a holy war against the West.
"Militarily, it's a security vacuum that various groups have stepped into," including militant nationalists, criminal gangs and those Iraqis who continue to view the U.S. military presence "as a potent focus for resentment and alienation," he said.
Islamist militants include a large Iraqi contingent and "a smaller, much more radical and much more violent" group of transnational fighters, Dodge said.
"I would assume that the U.S. tactic - and I would hope that the new government's tactic - would be to split the radical fringe from the mainstream fighters" and draw the latter group into a dialogue.
"But I have yet to see evidence that that is the U.S. ... or the new Iraqi government's policy," he said, suggesting the intensified state of bloodshed could continue well into the future.
