Updated: 3:11 p.m. ET Oct. 27, 2004: Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi's brutal campaign of vehicle bombings and beheadings has grabbed most of the headlines coming out of Baghdad in the weeks before the U.S. presidential election. But terror attacks by a far larger—and more ominous—insurgent network organized by remnants of Saddam Hussein's deposed regime may be having an even more disruptive impact on U.S. efforts to bring stability to Iraq before nationwide elections scheduled for the end of January, according to U.S. and British intelligence officials.President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have repeatedly asserted that the new Iraqi government and U.S. forces are having success in building a post-Saddam Iraq. "We're making progress in Iraq," Bush told an enthusiastic crowd at a recent campaign stop in the battleground city of Canton, Ohio. "What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do," Cheney insisted during his televised debate earlier this month with Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards. "We've made significant progress in Iraq."
But data flowing into U.S. defense and intelligence agencies suggests that if progress is being made, it may not be in the right direction.
According to U.S. defense sources, for example, the rate at which "improvised explosive devices"—military jargon for home-made bombs—are being planted around Iraq every day by insurgents has nearly doubled since last spring. As of May and June, sources say, the rate of bombs being planted ran at about 500 per month. Today, the figure is running at just under 1,000 per month, which means that about 30 bombs are being planted somewhere in Iraq every day. (About half are found and defused by U.S. or Iraqi technicians before they explode).
U.S. experts are seeing patterns in the way improvised bombs are constructed and planted which have reinforced the view of many analysts that there are two distinct groups of insurgents.
One relatively small group consists of Islamic holy warriors, many of them foreign fighters who infiltrated Iraq from neighboring countries like Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Increasingly, these jihadis seem to be submitting themselves to the leadership of Zarqawi, whose flamboyant video appearances (which U.S. intelligence agencies believe include his personal wielding of the knife in the taped beheadings of American businessman Nicholas Berg and other hostages) have made him the world's second best-known terrorist after Osama bin Laden.
U.S. intelligence analysts believe Zarqawi's group consists of a hard core of only 200 or 300 fighters, perhaps an equal number of serious supporters, and another 1,000 or 2,000 tacit supporters—defined as those who might be willing to give active fighters food, shelter or other logistical support. This relatively small network has had an impact on Iraq far out of proportion to its small size, however. That's due to Zarqawi's willingness to employ terrorist tactics of the most brutal kind, ranging from videotaped beheadings to car and truck suicide bombings of civilian and nonmilitary targets (like the United Nations headquarters or the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad) to the mass abduction and execution-style mass murders of recruits to Iraqi's new security and police agencies.
But a much larger network of former Saddam loyalists—directed by former leaders of Saddam's feared intelligence service, the Mukhabarat—may be playing an equal, if not even larger role in the Iraq insurgency. According to U.S. and British intelligence sources, the insurgent network of former Baathists consists of as many as 8,000 to 10,000 active fighters—a hard core 40 to 50 times the size of Zarqawi's coterie—and at least that number of tacit sympathizers or logistical supporters.
Unlike Zarqawi and his religiously motivated associates, the Baathists don't go in for sadistic exhibitions like Internet beheadings and large-scale suicide bombings. Instead, U.S. analysts believe they are responsible for many of the smaller-scale bombings of supply convoys and oil pipelines which make up a majority of the daily toll of terrorist acts committed in Iraq. While these attacks may have less impact on the U.S. and Iraqi public than Zarqawi's blood-drenched spectaculars, they are extremely damaging to the Iraqi economy and only seem to be increasing in frequency. Some U.S. officials believe the Baathist insurgency was well-planned by Saddam and Mukhabarat leaders before the U.S. invasion and that it is being led by former members of M-14 and M-16, two sections of the Mukhabarat that under Saddam were responsible for monitoring—and, according to some conspiracy theories, liaising with—local and international terrorist groups.
U.S. officials say that while there is believed to be no grand alliance between Zarqawi's jihadis and Saddam's former spooks, the two rival insurgencies may occasionally collaborate on an ad hoc basis to stage particular attacks. U.S. intelligence sources acknowledge that both insurgent networks have what amounts to virtually unlimited access to military material.
The U.S. failure to secure Iraq's weapons cache immediately after the start of the occupation has in recent days emerged as a major issue in the presidential campaign. Democratic candidate John Kerry has pounded the president all week over this week's disclosure that nearly 380 tons of powerful explosives has disappeared from a Iraqi munitions stockpile called Al Qaqaa.. The Bush campaign has fired back, arguing that the explosives may have been removed by Saddam before American troops even arrived at the complex in April of last year and that the Kerry camp was seeking to gin up a last-minute political hit with the timing of the disclosure.
But while the dispute has grabbed the headlines, United Nations officials tell NEWSWEEK that the Al Qaqaa case may only be the tip of the iceberg. As many as 10,000 other conventional-arms dumps dotted around Iraq are believed to have been looted after the U.S. invasion, the officials say. In addition, as many as 30 out of 90 of Saddam's known nuclear research facilities were also stripped down—some to the ground—by looters.
While much of the material taken from the nuclear sites is believed to have been "dual use" manufacturing equipment largely useless to terrorists, the looting of conventional-arms depots means that Zarqawi and the ex-Baathists are not unlikely to run out of weapons any time soon—and that the insurgency may have a long way to go before it runs out of steam.