May 1, 2005

"In city after city and town after town, security forces who had signed up to secure Iraq and replace US forces appear to have abandoned posts or taken refuge inside them for fear of attacks" by Iraqi resistance fighters, the April 23 Washington Post reported.

As an example of this, the Post cited the situation in the town of Husaybah on the Syrian border, near a US Marine Corp base that came under a well coordinated attack by up to 100 insurgents on April 12. It reported that a puppet "Iraqi army unit that had once grown to 400 members has dwindled to a few dozen guardsmen 'holed up' inside a phosphate plant outside of Husaybah for their protection, a marine commander said".

Furthermore, according to the Post, "Many attacks have gone unchallenged by [US-recruited] Iraqi forces in large areas of the country dominated by insurgents".

In the 10 days before the Post carried its report on the collapse of the puppet Iraqi security forces, there was a dramatic escalation in attacks by Iraqi resistance fighters on US targets:

* Three GIs were killed and seven wounded in a mortar attack on the US military camp in Ramadi, west of Baghdad.

* A suicide car bomb detonated as a Pentagon military convoy passed through Mosul.

* A Turkish truck carrying supplies to refresh US troops came under siege in Baiji and was burned.

* A military base for US troops and puppet Iraqi forces in Al Touz, north of Baghdad, came under rocket fire.

* A GI died during an attack on the Pentagon base in Tikrit.

* Near Tarmiya, north of Baghdad airport, insurgents downed a helicopter using a shoulder-launched, heat-seeking missile, killing the three Bulgarian crewmembers, two Fijian security guards and six US mercenaries employed by the North Carolina-based Blackwater company.

* A US soldier killed when a roadside bomb exploded near a US military convoy west of Baghdad.

The Post reported that a "US official said this week that overall attacks had increased since the end of March. Roadside bombings and attacks on military targets are up by as much as 40 percent in parts of the country over the same period, according to estimates from private security outfits."

Only a few weeks ago, US commanders were telling the news media that the anti-occupation insurgency in Iraq was waning because of a decline in insurgent attacks on US occupation forces. However, the April 24 Boston Globe reported that Iraqi resistance fighters "have staged increasingly sophisticated attacks in recent weeks, according to US military assessments, moving beyond roadside bombings and suicide attacks to mount large-scale assaults against US and Iraqi forces and civilians.

"The greater coordination and larger scope of the attacks has prompted some commanders to reexamine their belief that the insurgency was on the wane, even though the number of daily attacks has fallen since the landmark Jan. 30 election, according to leading US military officials."

Finally abandoning claims that the Iraqi armed resistance was waning, on April 27 the top US military officer, joint chiefs of staff head General Richard Myers, admitted that the anti-occupation insurgency was just as strong now as it was a year ago, that is, during the Iraq-wide upsurge of fighting that accompanied the unsuccessful first US attempt to reoccupy Fallujah.

While claiming the Pentagon was "definitely winning" in Iraq, Myers told reporters that the number of resistance attacks was "right about where it was a year ago" — between 50 and 60 per day.


From Green Left Weekly, May 4, 2005.