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Foreign Fighters Now Seen as Main Threat in Iraq

(Washington Post) Bradley Graham - The top U.S. military intelligence officer in Iraq, Maj.-Gen. Richard Zahner, said Abu Musab Zarqawi and his foreign and Iraqi associates have essentially commandeered the insurgency, becoming the dominant opposition force and the greatest immediate threat to U.S. objectives in the country. "I think what you really have here is an insurgency that's been hijacked by a terrorist campaign," Zahner said. U.S. military leaders say they now see Zarqawi's group, known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, as having supplanted Iraqis loyal to ousted president Saddam Hussein as the insurgency's driving element. Although numerically still a small fraction of the insurgency, Zarqawi's network is said to be behind a disproportionately large share of the violence. Since spring, U.S. commanders have moved beyond targeting the group's leaders and urban cells to try to shut off the flow of foreign Islamic extremists infiltrating from Syria. Zahner said the number of foreign fighters entering Iraq, which had started to approach 200 a month in June, appeared to drop to 100 a month or fewer by the end of August. More than 315 foreign fighters have been killed since March and nearly 330 detained. The average level of daily attacks across Iraq is about 90.
2005-09-28 00:00:00
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