IRAQ - Salafi War On Shiites & US U-Turn.

A suicide bomber on Sept. 16 blew himself up outside the al-Rasoul al-Atham mosque in Tuz Khormato, a city 200 km north of Baghdad, killing 13 Shiite worshippers, mostly followers of Sadr, with 28 wounded. That was another in a pattern of strikes aimed at Shiite Arabs. On Sept. 14, more than 180 Iraqis were killed in explosions across Baghdad, terrifying Iraqi civilians and largely paralysing the capital. Al-Qaeda Organisation for Jihad in Mesopotamia claimed responsibility for the attacks, and an Internet audiotape from its leader Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi declared an "all-out war" on the Shiite Arabs. For two days, Salafi fighters kept to that promise. On Sept. 15, 20 people were killed. In the morning in Baghdad on Sept. 16, Salafi insurgents fired from a car at a group of such Shiite Arab labourers, people who come from the south to earn as little as $4 a day in tea shops or on construction sites in Baghdad. Two were killed and 12 were wounded. On Sept. 14, 114 labourers were killed when a Salafi bomber lured them to a minivan with promises of work and then detonated it.

In other violence in Iskandariya, 60 km south of Baghdad, men raided the house of a town official early on Sept. 16, shooting to death the Shiite Arab official, Amer al-Khafagi, and four of his bodyguards. Local officials have been prime targets for the insurgency, which has said it considers any Iraqi co-operating with the US effort a traitor. In continuing violence against the Iraqi Army and the police, three police officers were on Sept. 16 killed as a car bomb exploded near their convoy in the town of Haswa, just south of Baghdad; three police officers were wounded. A US Marine was killed by an "indirect fire" explosion in Ramadi, west of Baghdad in the Sunni Arab province of Anbar.

Since on May 1, 2003, when President Bush stood beneath a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished", the course of the conflict in Iraq has been one of optimism followed by revision. From the earliest battle plans, which called for the quick return home of tens of thousands of US troops, to the November 2004 campaign in Falluja and national elections on Jan. 30, the Pentagon had hoped it could largely eliminate lingering unrest before turning security over to Iraqis.

The bracing tone from the White House and Pentagon now points to a new calculus. The persistence of the Salafi attacks and their undiminished capacity seems to have confirmed that the violence will probably outlast the US occupation. The inability of US forces to defeat the insurgency through strikes such as the Sept. 11-17 offensive in the predominantly-Turkoman town of Tal A'far - in which over 200 Salafi fighters have been killed and more than 600 others captured - raises doubts about the possibility of any clear victory for the Bush administration in Iraq. And it could leave the Iraqis with a years-long task which many planners had not anticipated.

The Christian Science Monitor on Sept. 16 quoted Seth Jones, a terrorism expert at Rand Corp, as saying: "There has been a clear realization that this war is not winnable in the short term". The change in thinking has come gradually, as pivotal moments in the maturation of the Iraqi state have come and gone - and the insurgency has remained.

In the first months after Bush declared victory, Pentagon officials were loath even to use the word "insurgency" to describe the attacks which killed some two dozen troops in May and June 2003. In testimony before Congress in July 2003, Gen. Tommy Franks argued that the attacks did not fit his definition of an insurgency. A year later, however, the continuing toll of the insurgency was reshaping the Pentagon's expectations. By the spring of 2005, a spike in violence made it clear that political momentum was not enough.

One reason for the failure to plan for uncertainties came from an insistence that almost all Iraqis would see Americans as liberators. Yet it also came from a political calculation which dismissed the lessons of the Clinton years. The Monitor quoted Dr. Jones as adding: "There was a sense that there was nothing to learn from Somalia or Haiti or Bosnia".

Parts of the administration have been slower to reach this point than others. During the May attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney said the insurgency was in its "last throes". On June 26 Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years. Coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency. We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency". It is this attitude which has moved from post-invasion rhetoric to Pentagon doctrine. In some ways, it is the same measure of victory that the Pentagon laid out two years ago. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez on Aug. 7, 2003, told the Pentagon: "At an absolute minimum, we'll be here for [two years], and probably longer, to make sure that [Iraqis] are capable of protecting the sovereignty of Iraq". Bush administration officials have always insisted that events on the ground - and not artificial timelines - would dictate US actions in Iraq. Yet today, the finish line is no more certain than it was two years ago - and the threat which Iraqi forces will be facing when US troops leave is more dire than many military officials imagined. The result is that Bush's characteristic steel about Iraq still lacks any specifics or certainty.

Anthony Cordesman, an analyst for the Washington Centre for Strategic and International Studies, says: "As a practical matter, no one in the administration is going to admit this. Nobody's making military promises that are unrealistic". There are some positive signs, however. The offensive to roust insurgents from Tal A'far, Karabila, al-Qa'im, Haditha, Al-'Ana, Hit, Ramadi and other Sunni towns and villages near the Syrian border - which began in May and intensified in the past two weeks - has put more responsibility in the hands of the Iraqi military. Rachel Bronson, an analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, says: "It's a very important step in turning over security to the Iraqis". But there is a long way to go, she and others say.

When Talabani last week in Washington suggested that Iraqi forces would be ready to replace 50,000 US troops by end-2005, he quickly reversed his statement and later added that US soldiers might be needed for another two years, though he set no deadline. Amid this military uncertainty, administration officials have turned to political events as the primary marks of progress. The top US commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, told Congress in June: "The [Oct. 15] referendum on the constitution and the elections at the end of December are the most important aspects of what we're doing now". Yet the continuing violence suggests that the practical matter of adequately preparing the Iraqi military will determine the success or failure of American hopes. In a recent paper, Dr. Cordesman writes: "If political developments do have a positive effect, it will be...because a substantially larger number of Iraqi Sunnis...see the military balance shifting decisively in favor of Iraqi government forces".

Iraqi and US troops last week went house to house in their search for insurgents in Iraq's predominantly Turkoman own of Tal A'far. An Iraqi lieutenant colonel said among those Salafi insurgents captured at Tal A'far were foreign fighters, including around 20 Syrians, four Afghans and two Saudis.

The offensive near the Syrian border has involved over 8,500 US and Iraqi troops, the latter largely drawn from the Shiite Arabs and the Kurdish peshmerga militia. That was to deny Salafi insurgents the "rat-lines" to move non-Iraqi volunteers and equipment into Baghdad and other Sunni Arab Triangle cities to carry out major attacks. These towns have historic trading links to Syria and the US military now says they are no longer way-stations for foreign fighters. In particular, Tal A'far has until recently served as a pathway from Syria which historically was a smuggling route into Iraq.

Insurgents are counting on US forces to eventually withdraw and on the Iraqi forces left behind not being able to prevent their return. So far, that approach has worked. This was at least the third major assault on Tal A'far in the past 18 months. As in previous engagements in western towns along the Euphrates, the insurgents reasserted themselves when US forces were shifted elsewhere.

While much of the US effort now is focused on shutting off infiltration into Iraq, completely sealing Iraq off is not likely. This is because of the topography of the desert and expanses of arid plains along the border with Syria. Col. Pat Lang (ret.), a former head of Middle East intelligence analysis for the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency was on Sept. 15 quoted as saying: "The border is absolutely something you can't seal. I wandered back and forth across those borders in the region for a long, long time where there's supposed to be border guards and desert police, but you just don't see them". Colonel Lang said when the US masses troops, as in Tal A'far, it was always going to win, but it did not have enough troops to deny insurgents sanctuary elsewhere, essentially shifting the problem around. He added: "The insurgents are increasingly creating redoubt areas, the kinds of places we can't go without stripping people from elsewhere and entering in large numbers. Therefore the insurgents own it 95% of the time. The object of the drill for the [Salafi] guerrillas is not to fight [US forces] head-to-head, but to wait until they have an advantage".

That was what happened in the western part of Anbar province this year. In a major operation there last March, US Marines swept through Hit and other cities, and encountered little resistance as insurgents melted away. At the time, Marine commanders fretted about what would happen when they rotated out at the end of the month, and were replaced by other Marine units with about 1,000 fewer troops. Officers and enlisted men at the time said they worried their replacements would be in greater danger because of their smaller size. Roads would not be patrolled as often to keep them clear of concealed bombs.

At least 40 US troops have been killed in the western Anbar since the start of August. In Tal A'far, a city of 200,000 people, there are other concerns. It mostly Turkomen population views the Kurds as their enemies, so ethnic tension could be ratcheted up after using Kurdish militias to attack the city. Walid Sharika, a Turkman member of the National Assembly and on a government committee focusing in Tal A'far, has said that, while he was glad the assault took place, ethnic divisions there now widened, adding: "This should have happened four or five months ago because Tal A'far is one of the most important terrorism bases in all the world. I believe for a lot of problems in Iraq the source is Tal A'far". Even so, he said, "more than half the city is destroyed and there are a lot of refugees living in a camp and we lost children and elderly".

The US-Iraqi forces at Tal A'far have discovered a big bomb factory, 18 weapons caches and the tunnel network in the ancient Sarai neighborhood, 97 km east of the Syrian border. "The terrorists had seen it coming", said Major General Rick Lynch in Baghdad, adding that the insurgents prepared "tunnel complexes to be used as escape routes".