WP: Sunni Resistance to U.S. Presence Hardens

Main Iraqi Insurgency Will Persist as Long as Troops Remain, Observers Warn

Wednesday, July 7, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- The violent insurgency against U.S. occupation has slackened noticeably in the week since formal political authority was turned over to an Iraqi government. But according to Iraqi and U.S. sources, the bloodshed is far from over.

The insurgency is likely to persist as long as U.S. soldiers remain visible in Iraq, they said, because it cuts across several irreducible currents in the country's long-dominant Sunni Muslim minority. These include nationalism and Arab pride, local and transnational Islamic fundamentalism, and tribal loyalties cultivated by ousted president Saddam Hussein.

"If you don't remove the causes, you will never get rid of the resistance," said Saleh Mutlak, a onetime Hussein official who helped negotiate the ragged truce protecting Fallujah, the embattled city 35 miles west of Baghdad that is his family home and the insurgency's main stronghold.

(snip)

But Sheik Abdul-Satar Abdul-Jabbar of the Council of Islamic Scholars, Iraq's preeminent Sunni organization, said the main, Sunni-based insurgency is likely to rage as long as Iraqis' sense of nationalism is bruised by the presence of U.S. military forces on their soil. The emergence of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's interim government has changed that equation little, he said, because the insurgents regard it as an extension of the military occupation with no roots of its own in Iraq.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32356-2004Jul6.html

Fourteen dead Marines in the last week is "slackening"?

There is a huge power vacuum with the "handover," and the insurgents will take advantage of that and become increasingly violent.