BAGHDAD, 21 April 2005 — For a while after Iraq’s election in January, it looked as if the country’s nearly two-year-old insurgency was showing signs of flagging. Attacks against US forces fell more than 20 percent in the weeks immediately after the poll, and March’s US death toll was the lowest in more than a year, the US military said.
While Iraqi security forces were still dying every day, with more than 400 police and soldiers killed over the past two months, positive signs were appearing. Iraqi troops even captured several senior militant leaders, the government said.
But over the past two weeks, much of that optimism has been wiped away as insurgents have hit back with a series of deadly attacks targeting both US forces and their Iraqi allies. Insurgents shot dead 19 Iraqi National Guards in a soccer stadium on Wednesday after taking them prisoner, a hospital spokesman and a witness said. There were three car bombings in Baghdad on Wednesday, a day after a car bomb in the capital killed two US soldiers and wounded four others. There have been about 10 car bomb attacks in just the past four days.
“I don’t think the insurgency has gone away at all,” said a US military official in Baghdad, who asked not to be named. “Perhaps we just had a spike in success against it.”
The resurgence of violence has coincided with deepening uncertainty over the formation of the next government, with Iraq’s new prime minister, Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, still no closer to naming his Cabinet more than 80 days after the election. The delay has created a climate of indecision, officials say, and allowed the momentum built up by January’s successful poll, when more than 8 million Iraqis defied insurgent threats to vote, to slip away.
“All this talking and deliberating over the government isn’t helping when it comes to taking on the insurgency,” Sabah Kadhim, an adviser to the Interior Ministry, said recently. “We were having some successes against them, we were. But now it isn’t clear if the new government will follow the same policies, and that could have an impact on our effectiveness.”
In the weeks after the vote, US and Iraqi officials gave a variety of reasons for their success against the militants. Not only had the vote shown that the majority of Iraqis were opposed to the insurgency, it also gave people the confidence to come forward with intelligence on its activities, they said.
The broadcast of “Terrorism in the Grip of Justice”, a television series showing guerrillas confessing to their crimes, helped bolster the public’s feeling that something was being done and that the insurgency could be beaten.
And new Interior Ministry commando units, staffed by former members of Saddam Hussein’s armed forces, began to show their effectiveness. It was a case of Sunni commanders, many of them former Baath Party members, leading the fight against the Sunni-led insurgency, and appearing to get results.
Combined with the success of a US military offensive on Fallujah last November, in which hundreds of militants were captured or killed, the insurgency appeared to fall into a lull.
But insurgent leaders claim otherwise. In Internet postings, groups such as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by Jordanian militant Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, have said the Americans and Iraqis are fabricating their successes. The insurgents insist they remain active. In recent weeks, hardly a day has gone by without Al Qaeda in Iraq claiming one deadly attack or another, often within minutes of the assault taking place.
Some of those who monitor the group’s postings say their tone has on occasion been more confident in recent weeks. One recent posting denied an Iraqi government announcement that an aide to Zarqawi had been arrested.
“We announce to the Islamic nation that we are easily pursuing our jihad,” it said. A posting on Wednesday began: “How you can be a member of the media section of Al-Qaeda in Iraq” and invited followers to spread the group’s messages via chat rooms and billboards.
The concern among US and Iraqi officials is that further delays in forming the government will mean further losses in battling the insurgency, particularly if the new government — headed by Shiite Muslims — changes tack and does away with units like the Sunni-led commandos.
