Marines report insurgency has a foothold in Anbar
Details of August memo more bleak than first thought
Nov. 27, 2006, 11:49PM
By DAFNA LINZER and THOMAS E. RICKS
Washington Post
WASHINGTON . The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaida’s rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate in recent months about the military’s mission in Anbar province.
The Marines recently filed an updated version of that assessment that stood by its conclusions and stated that as of mid-November, the problems in troubled Anbar province have not improved, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Monday. “The fundamental questions of lack of control, growth of the insurgency and criminality” remain the same, the official said.
The Marines’ August memo, a copy of which was shared with The Washington Post, is far more bleak than some officials suggested when they described it in late summer. The report describes Iraq’s Sunni minority as “embroiled in a daily fight for survival,” fearful of “pogroms” by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on al-Qaida in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital.
True or not, the memo says, “from the Sunni perspective, their greatest fears have been realized: Iran controls Baghdad, and Anbaris have been marginalized.” Moreover, most Sunnis now believe it would be unwise to count on or help U.S. forces because they are seen as likely to leave the country before imposing stability.
Between al-Qaida’s violence, Iran’s influence and an expected U.S. drawdown, “the social and political situation has deteriorated to a point” that U.S. and Iraqi troops “are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar,” the assessment found.
The Post first reported on the memo’s existence in September, as it was being circulated among military and national security officials. Several officials who read the report described its conclusions as grim.
But the contents have not previously been made public. Read as a complete assessment, it paints a stark portrait of a failed province and of the country’s Sunnis . once dominant under Saddam Hussein . now desperate, fearful and impoverished. They have been increasingly abandoned by religious and political leaders who have been assassinated or who have fled to neighboring countries. And unlike Iraq’s Shiite majority, or Kurdish groups in the north, the Sunnis are without oil and other natural resources. The report notes that illicit oil trading is providing millions of dollars to al-Qaida while “official profits appear to feed Shiite cronyism in Baghdad.”
As a result, “the potential for economic revival appears to be nonexistent” in Anbar, the report says. The Iraqi government, dominated by Iranian-backed Shiites, has not paid salaries for Anbar officials and Iraqi forces stationed there. Anbar’s resources and its ability to impose order are depicted as limited at best.
“Despite the success of the December elections, nearly all government institutions from the village to provincial levels have disintegrated or have been thoroughly corrupted and infiltrated by al-Qaida in Iraq,” or a smattering of other insurgent groups, the report says.
The five-page report . written by Col. Peter Devlin, a senior and seasoned military intelligence officer with the Marine Expeditionary Force . is marked secret, for dissemination to U.S. and allied troops in Iraq only. It does not appear to have been made available to Iraqi national forces fighting alongside Americans.
Devlin wrote that attacks on civilians rose 57 percent between February and August of this year. “The steady rise in attacks from mid-2003 to 2006 indicates a clear failure to defeat the insurgency in al-Anbar.”
