February28, 2007:
"Witness protection" has become a major tactic in the
effort to clear terrorists out of Baghdad. While cell phones make it easy to
call in the location of bomb factories, terrorist safe houses, and car
bombs on the move, the terrorists make a point of trying to locate and kill the
snitches. The Iraqi police are still pretty corrupt. With enough cash, you can
get information on phoned in tips. Tipsters getting murdered may not make the
headlines, but the word gets around. The only way to protect the witnesses is
to take down entire gangs, and that requires capturing the gang bosses, and
shutting down most of the gang operations in a short space of time. This puts
pressure on U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces to take down the gangs
operations all at once. So far, this blitz tactic has uncovered more bomb
factories, weapons caches and gang leaders. Tips are up as well, largely
because of growing disgust with the bombings of civilians. Many tipsters seem
to have a "the hell with it" attitude when the call in.
After
three weeks of "the surge", arrests are way up, and the murder rate
in Baghdad is down by more than half. One of the bomb factories captured
appeared to be the one that was including chlorine gas tanks in their truck
bombs. About 900 terrorists have been killed or captured so far. Many others
were able to drop their weapons and get away into the civilian population. But
some of these guys are getting fed up, and heading back to a Sunni village in
western Iraq, or trying to get out of the country. Life is becoming harder and harder
for Sunni Arabs.
One
downside of the security operation is that the Shia terrorist groups often
provided protection from car bombs. That's because the Shia terrorists, like
many factions of the Mahdi Army, had their black uniformed members manning
checkpoints around Shia neighborhoods. The Mahdi guys checked every vehicle,
while the police, who have replaced the Mahdi men (who are in hiding until the
surge operations are over) do not. The cops know that, if they find a car that
has a bomb, the bomber may be able to detonate it before the cops can kill him.
The Mahdi guards were protecting their own neighborhoods, the police usually
are not. Thus Sunni car bombs are getting through to Shia targets that have
been unreachable for the last few years.
The
surge operations, which are only using about 10,000 additional American and
Iraqi troops, are concentrating on the Sunni terrorists inside Baghdad. These
guys are not a mystery to American intelligence, which has been collecting
names, dates and events for over three years. The organizational structure of
the various gangs is known, along the approximate location of safe houses and
hangouts. With enough troops and police, dozens of raids on one neighborhood
will uncover most of the gangsters, and their assets. The terrorists crews tend
to be combined gangster/terrorist organizations. There are many money-making
opportunities for the lawless, and some of the terrorist operations are bought
and paid for as well. The al Qaeda crowd are still mostly volunteers, but they
depend on the more mercenary terrorists for some services, and, in a crunch,
support.
American
keeps their "Gangs of Baghdad" files secret. Especially when dealing
with the Iraqi police (many of whom are now on gangster payrolls), you can't
let on what you know. The Iraqis complain that the intel information on
terrorists goes one way (from police to the Americans), but will privately
admit that corrupt cops are a much larger problem that corrupt American
soldiers, especially those working in intelligence. Someday there will be some
fascinating books written about the inner workings of the Iraqi
criminal/terrorist underworld, and of the American intelligence operatives who
kept tabs on it. But for now, all we know is that recent arrests of terrorist
leaders, and take downs of bomb factories, were not the result of luck, but of
good information.
The
Sunni terrorists, faced with getting shut down, have shifted their aim to
targets more likely to get noticed by foreign journalists. The terrorists know
that the journalists are pretty dumb when it comes to terrorism. The
journalists don't do much counting or analysis, but simply rush from one large
explosion to another and try and make it sound like the sky is falling and the
end of the world-as-we-know-it is neigh. That's not dumb as much as it
recognizes how the news business works. It's all about events, the
"news", not trends and analysis. The historians can come along in a
decade or so and do that boring stuff. But for right now, the reporters want
hot headlines, and the terrorists are glad to oblige.
A
few months of stomping on Sunni terrorists will be followed, for most of the
Summer, by an even more difficult battle with the Shia terrorist organizations.
The problem with the Shia gangs is that they have more support (60 percent of
the population is Shia), and the worst ones have the backing of Iran (in the
form of cash, weapons and technical advice). Most of the Shia terrorist gangs
also have connections to Shia political parties. Shia politicians are nervous
about taking down the Shia gangs because of the risk of a civil war between
Shia factions. But either you take that risk, or you leave the Shia terrorists
to go on driving the Sunni Arabs out of Iraq. That would get ugly, and widely condemned.
For example, a European war crimes court recently condemned Serbia, and all
Serbians, for their support of Bosnian Serbs in the ethnic cleansing
massacres of the 1990s. Same thing is shaping up in Iraq, and the Shia
terrorists are very encouraged. Over half the Sunni Arabs have already been
driven from the homes, and most of them have fled the country. Kurds and Shia
in Iraq don't care what European war crimes commissions think, they can only
remember their dead, and an urge to prevent it from happening again. That means
the Sunni Arabs have to go.