Here's an important article from the UK about what's powering the Iraqi insurgency: Ba'athist planners hiding in Syria.
A senior Baath party organiser and Saddam Hussein aide, Mohammed Younis al-Ahmed, has been named by western intelligence officials as one of the key figures directing the Sunni insurgency from his hiding-place in neighbouring Syria.The naming of Ahmed comes amid growing concern that hardline factions in Syria are providing protection for cells still loyal to the old Iraqi regime who were involved in organising the flow of money, people and material for fighters in Baghdad and the Sunni triangle. This is despite Syrian moves to tighten up its border with Iraq after complaints from Washington and London that arms and foreign terrorists were crossing into Iraq.
The intelligence officials believe the activities of the Syrian-based former regime members - who quickly formed into cells after the fall of Saddam - may be a considerably more significant threat to the interim government of Ayad Allawi than the more widely visible activities of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has been behind a series of beheadings and suicide bombings.
'The main organisational strength behind the insurgency is Baathist military intelligence types who enjoy safe refuge in Syria,' said one official. 'So although Syria has clamped down on the border, they have not done anything about the planners and organisers. We are talking about 20-50 people who have access to funds, who know how to organise and use existing networks and are adept at reforming into cells.'
The new assessment that former Baath party officials in hiding in Syria might, in reality, be more significant than Zarqawi and his foreign fighters, suggests an important change in emphasis in the understanding of the increasingly more violent insurgency.
Zarqawi, some officials now believe, could not survive 'if he was not tolerated and exploited by the old Baathists'.
The disclosure, however, that it is largely regime officials who are leading and funding the insurgency, tapping into a widespread discontent among many Iraqis, will raise questions again over whether the resistance is conforming in large part to a plan prepared before the fall of Baghdad.
'The idea that it was organised before the war is beginning to reassert itself,' says Dr Rosemary Hollis of Chatham House. 'There is a thesis that is gaining some currency with Arab nationalists that this definitely required a lot of preparation. There is also an increasingly long-term view, that they are playing a long game and, with a properly managed resistance, this is a conflict that can be won and that the Americans can be forced to go home.'
Read the whole thing for more details, but don't buy for a minute the notion that it's only "hardline factions" in Syria that are behind this. Syria's president, Bashar Assad, is surely playing all sides in the conflict for all they're worth.
Posted by Alan at October 18, 2004 05:23 PM