Iraqi attackers -- who are they?

[White Dove]

I have been questioning the assertions from our government that it is just Saddam's supporters who are responsible for the attacks on our service people. I believe that our government doesn't want to admit and have us realize that any others would oppose them. Now I find this article.


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/13/MN64827.DTL

[otohara]

1. Well I Certainly Don't Believe That Hooey

about Saddam supporters from the lying Bush administration. No, these are men/women who want the US out of thier country.

The Bushies don't exactly have a good track record for Iraq "intellegence" do they?

[White Dove]

2. I agree with you 100%

The Bush administration lies about everything to get what it wants. Whatever comes out of his mouth usually means just the opposite. If he says he is going to do something good, look out!

[bemildred]

3. Isolated pockets of remnants of disorganized terrorist,

militant, disgruntled former Saddam sympathizers.

[Darranar]

4. And Islamic guerillas...

who hate the US. Then there are groups of people who are simply really pissed off that we went in there and slaughtered so many people and now we think that we can take the oil and ignore the people.

[StevenLee]

6. and...

an eleven year old girl...

[Jackie97]

5. The Iraqis want us to go home. It's as simple as that.

That last thing that I want is to find out that more of our troops are dead or injured, but we need to face reality here. The reality is that we're occupying a land, which the majority of Iraqis have made it clear that they don't want us occupying. If a foreign force came to the United States and occupied us, I know that we would defend ourselves to drive them out. That's what this is in most cases in my opinion. The Iraqis are defending themselves against an occupying nation.

[LoneStarLiberal]

7. They Are At Least More Than Likely Sunni...

The geographic distribution of the attacks gives us a pretty good indication of at least one part of the demographic of the attackers: They are more than likely Sunni Muslims. Saddam's family are Sunnis and while he was in power the Sunni minority in Iraq kept a boot on the majority Shia Muslims.

Most of the attacks are occuring in the Baghdad-Tikrit-Al Hadithah triangle which also happens to be the area roughly encompassing the heartland of Sunni Iraqis. A smattering have occured in the south and more than a smattering have occured in the north in the vicinity of Mosul, but the bulk of the attacks are coming in the triangle mentioned above.

Why? Ease of movement. As Chairman Mao once wrote, "the guerilla should be as a fish in the sea among the people." What better place to find sympathy and anonymity than amongst your coreligionists?

The tactics, the demographic base, and the consistency all indicate to me that we are indeed in the midst of a guerilla war. The other side is fighting a damned tough war; now is the time where we will find out how well our lessons learned from Vietnam were learned.

[Aidoneus]

8. the Shia will join them in time

At that point, the occupation forces will wish it was just the Sunni Triangle again. The parallel to Lebanon'82 here still holds, for it was first the Sunnis and Palestinians that resisted the Israelis, the Shia throwing rice and welcoming the invaders; later the Shia rose up and replaced their rice with grenades, maintaining the resistance for many years later until their ultimate victory.

In Iraq right now they're utilizing other means than combat, planning on using their numbers and organization to be the natural power when the new order solidifies. When they have good levels of organization, I expect that to be the time that they enter the fight; that will be a lot sooner if the occupation forces keep bullying around and harassing people like Sadr.

It gets really ugly when the Turks finally get their way and south Kurdistan is "disarmed", which they're already inching towards, using KADEK as a foot-in-the-door for it.

[bemildred]

9. Yep. No hurry.

Time is on their (the Shiites) side.

God only knows what will happen up North, but I think
they are biding their time and watching the show for now, too.