Iraq Islamists Take Ownership of Insurgency

B E I R U T, Lebanon, April 3 -- Since the capture of Saddam Hussein inDecember, a drumbeat of attacks across central and northern Iraq hasclaimed hundreds of Iraqi and American lives and has given little hopethat the war is winding down.

There are daily reports of insurgent attacks against Americans, Iraqi police and soft targets. In one day this past week, four American contractors were killed in a rebel ambush in Fallujah and jubilant residents dragged charred corpses through the streets and hanged two of them from the bridge spanning the Euphrates River. The same day, five U.S. soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing nearby.

Yet, U.S. commanders and officials paint an optimistic picture of the security situation and blame foreign-led Islamist fighters and small pockets of Hussein followers for most of the attacks. This reasoning was reinforced by the discovery of a paper by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born lieutenant affiliated with al Qaeda, in which he urged the network's senior leadership to support his goal of starting a "civil war" in Iraq.

This official version does not consider the existence of an indigenous, Islamist-nationalist resistance within the Sunni Arab community that appears to be the driving force behind the insurgency. Establishing the extent of al Qaeda's involvement is important so long as it does not distort understanding of who are the real players in Iraq.

Grass Roots?

By fixating on al Qaeda, Islamic extremists and desperate Hussein die-hard insurgents, the Bush administration underestimates the fundamental role played by Iraqi Sunni Islamists and nationalists in keeping the insurgency alive. The minority Sunni Arabs had a dominant position under Hussein.

According to Iraqi observers, activists, and academics who live in the Sunni Triangle and closely follow the insurgency, Iraqi Islamists predominate.

A consensus emerged at a recent conference on Iraq organized by the Center for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut and attended by over 50 Iraqi civilian leaders that Iraqi Islamists and nationalists — not foreign fighters or Hussein loyalists — are behind most of the attacks in Iraq.