Fruits, Flowers and Civil War: The Iraq Insurgency in Year Four

The traditional gifts given to celebrate a four year anniversary are fruits and flowers. With regards to our four year anniversary of the end of major combat operations in Iraq, neither fruits nor flowers are on the gift registry. The only gifts being given by the ongoing civil war are death, maiming, destruction and suffering.

On May 1, 2007, we passed a solemn four year anniversary. On May 1, 2003, President Bush flew to the carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and had his famous "Codpiece" photo-op where he announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Four years later, with thousands of Americans killed, tens of thousands of Americans wounded and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, it appears that the diverse groups fighting the U.S. and one another that we lump into the conglomerate term "insurgency" somehow missed the message about major combat operations being completed. These various groups are stronger than ever and are showing a frightening level of tactical sophistication. This sophistication, as well as a snapshot of the dynamics of the current insurgency, is the focus of this article.

Before delving into two recent increases in tactical sophistication on the part of Sunni insurgents, the infighting within the Sunni insurgent groups, and the growing political and tactical strength of the Shia insurgent groups, I think it is necessary for us to properly frame the insurgents and the "insurgency."

Because of the politically charged consequence of calling Iraq a civil war, our media and our government have resorted to misleading frames when discussing the "insurgency" (Sunni insurgent groups, particularly al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, attacking American troops) versus the "civil war" (Sunni insurgent groups targeting Shia civilians, and Shia insurgent groups and Shia members of the government security forces targeting Sunni civilians).

The simple facts on the ground in Iraq are that our troops are in the middle of a civil war between Shia forces and Sunni forces and are being targeted by Sunni insurgents, and increasingly will be fighting Shia insurgents as the surge strategy goes forward. There is no more serious disagreement in the community of scholars of civil wars and militarized intrastate disputes over whether or not Iraq is in a civil war than there is serious disagreement over evolution amongst scientists. Iraq is currently and has been for quite some time within the generally accepted definition of a civil war. This definition comes from the Correlates of War project as discussed in this paper (link to a PDF file):

Defined initially by Singer and Small as “intrastate conflict”, a civil war onset (CW) occurs in the COW dataset when there is sustained conflict between the armed forces of the government and forces of another entity either for control of the country or over local issues. To count as a civil war the event must lead to 1,000 battle-related fatalities per year. Both military and civilian deaths are included in this total, although massacres are excluded.

Even though some news organizations flaunted the administration's firm denials that Iraq was in a state of civil war and labeled it as such regardless, this appears to have been a temporary eruption of pique and not a paradigm shift. It is still uncommon to hear the "civil war in Iraq" discussed independently from the "insurgency in Iraq." To our administration and many in our news organizations, they are one and the same, differing only in connotation. "Deepening rifts?" Check. "Sectarian violence?" Yawn. "Internal turmoil?" Reporting for duty. "Civil war?" What, do you hate the troops?

To complicate the picture further, not all insurgents are created equal. Sunni insurgents are not the same as Shia insurgents. Not even all Sunni insurgents are the same. As we stand at the moment, Sunni insurgents are much more likely to be engaged in attacks against U.S. forces (the insurgency) with a secondary interest in attacking Shia civilians and Shia paramilitaries (the civil war), while Shia paramilitaries are much more likely to be engaged in hiding from U.S. forces (since they are the targets of much of the surge strategy in Baghdad) and attacking mainly Sunni civilians and Sunni paramilitaries (again, the civil war). Some Sunni insurgent groups are becoming more focused on eliminating the foreign militants in their country than they are in killing U.S. soldiers, Shia civilians and Shia paramilitaries in what appears to be a power struggle pitting the native Sunni paramilitaries (Ansar al Sunna and the 1920 Revolutionary Brigades) against the foreign militants of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

The Sunni insurgents, particularly al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, have shown a tactical learning curve that does not bode well for the safety of American soldiers in Iraq. In recent months, the mostly non-Iraqi al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia have begun utilizing a deadly new twist on a truck bomb, blowing up trucks filled with explosives and chlorine. As of a chlorine truck bombing in Ramadi at the beginning of April, six chlorine truck bombs have been used since January in al Anbar province, the Sunni tribal heartland of Iraq and the grassroots home of the Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq (which are often allied along tribal lines, amplifying political power plays behind the scenes).

In addition to utilizing chlorine to add a dimension of NBC (nuclear/biological/chemical) warfare to truck bombings to make them even more deadly, Sunni insurgents have also begun to "piggyback" attacks on American security sweeps, finding that it is more effective to deliver car bombs and truck bombs aimed at Shia communities and civilian concentrations immediately after an American security sweep than it is at other times. For example, take Sadr City. Sadr City is a sprawling neighborhood of Shia in eastern Baghdad that is the home ground of the Mahdi Army, Shia cleric Moqtada al Sadr's large Shia militia. Quoting at length from Michael Schwartz's December 6, 2006 article for TomDispatch:

When the American troops enter the various sections of Baghdad, they drive the militias off the streets and underground. Usually this results in battles between militia-members-turned-insurgents and the invading force, but it also results in the suppression of their enforcement and protection activities. Local militia members cannot patrol the streets for fear of being attacked by the invading army -- and the soldiers of that army have neither the skills, nor the every-street-corner presence to replace them. This makes the community not less, but far more vulnerable to suicide bombers and death squads.

This vulnerability is all-too-vividly illustrated by the tragic events associated with Operation Together Forward in Sadr City, the vast Shia slum and stronghold of the Sadrist movement in East Baghdad. The dense presence of the Sadrist militia, the Mahdi army, had made the city-within-a-city relatively invulnerable to suicide car bombs, but this ended in October when American troops sealed off the area and set up checkpoints at key entrance and exit spots in order to hunt down Mahdi army leaders they suspected of participation in death squads as well as the kidnapping of an American soldier. Local residents told New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise that the cordon "forced Mahdi Army members who were patrolling the streets to vanish," and set the stage for a ferocious series of car bombings by Sunni jihadists.

Even after the check points were dismantled, American patrols kept the Mahdi Army underground, opening the way for a devastating, coordinated set of five car bombs that killed at least 215 and wounded 257. Qusai Abdul-Wahab, a Sadrist member of parliament, spoke for most residents of the community when he told the Associated Press that "occupation forces are fully responsible for these acts."

In conclusion, Iraq is becoming less secure, more chaotic and more dangerous for both Iraqi civilians and American soldiers as the fourth year of the occupation begins. It is a place where insurgents target American soldiers and where warring paramilitary groups target one another, even using American security patrols as a means to penetrate otherwise secure communities in order to kill more civilians and push the civil war into even deeper and more dire circumstances. The tactical innovations of incorporating chlorine into truck bombs and piggybacking car bombs and truck bombs into Shia communities in the aftermath of U.S. patrols shows that the Sunni insurgency is learning, adapting its tactics in order take advantage of the current situation in order to inflict more casualties.

I once hoped that the volumes of books, reams of scholarly articles and years worth of seminars taught on the lessons learned in Vietnam and the new information gleaned from quantitative research on civil wars and insurgencies would be of use to our leaders in formulating a coherent and achievable strategy for dealing with what everyone who knew anything about such situations — a group which apparently doesn't include our administration and their cheerleaders — knew would come in the power vacuum left behind when Hussein's government fell after the invasion. Even this basic expectation of competence and thoroughness was too much to ask of our carnie barkers masquerading as leaders.

Fruits and flowers indeed fall flat on this fourth anniversary. The only thing that seems appropriate for this anniversary gift are divorce papers ("irreconcilable incompetence" sounds like grounds for political divorce to this author) to be served in 2008 and a timetable that gets our men and women out of the middle of a civil war where no matter who wins, we lose.