Iraqi Islamists Seen Taking Ownership of the Armed Insurgency

B E I R U T, Lebanon, April 3 — Since the capture of Saddam Hussein in December, a drumbeat of attacks across central and northern Iraq has claimed hundreds of Iraqi and American lives and has given little hope that 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?

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