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U.S. expects Iraq insurgency attack rate to continue for 6 months

Jul-23-2005 » Filed Under: Iraq News

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By John Hendren, Los Angeles Times

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Insurgents in Iraq probably will sustain the current rate of bloody attacks for at least six months, through the next elections, and expect the United States to give up on Iraq within five years, senior defense officials in Baghdad said yesterday.

Increasingly violent suicide and roadside bombings are expected to continue at a rate of 65 daily — nearly 500 a week — as insurgents hold enough popular support to carry them out, the officials said, outlining the coalition's latest intelligence assessment of security here.

Hoping that support for the government wanes, rebel forces are banking on a coalition withdrawal that allows them to overtake a weakened Iraqi government in the end, the officials said.

"We have to make certain assumptions for planning. Because the number of incidents and indicators have been relatively stable, we must assume that will hold true for the next several months, absent a diplomatic and a political breakthrough [with insurgents]," said Lt. Gen. John Vines, the commander in charge of U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq.

Vines and three other senior officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because their comments reflected military and intelligence operations, outlined an updated picture of an insurgency increasingly driven by a small minority of foreign fighters carrying out bolder and deadlier bombings under the leadership of Jordanian al-Qaida figure Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. [...]

As some insurgents from al-Zarqawi's group and pro-Saddam Hussein Baath party sympathizers use Syria as an external "safe haven," the defense officials said, they also have shown an interest in reasserting control over the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah, in western Iraq. As with Mosul to the north, officials said, Fallujah holds strong symbolic value for the insurgency, as a Sunni-dominated region with a ferociously independent streak.

One prospect for a faster end to the insurgency throughout Iraq, commanders speculated, is negotiations that would bring insurgents from Saddam's Sunni Muslim sect into the government peacefully. Sunnis benefited from the previous regime and feel marginalized under majority Shiite rule. [...]

The article continues.


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