General sees sophisticated foe from abroad

The top U.S. commander in Iraq on Thursday described an evolution in the insurgency opposing American troops, as homegrown guerrillas give way to an increasingly sophisticated opposition originating abroad.

An apparent relationship among groups such as Ansar al-Islam and Al Qaeda and Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is “beginning to take precedence” as the source of attacks against Iraqi police, army and forces working toward democracy, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said in a news briefing Thursday.

The capture of Saddam Hussein in December produced intelligence that helped military analysts track Hussein loyalists and led troops into successful raids. Opportunistic attacks by former regime elements, such as roadside bombings and shootings, have fallen off in the past couple of months as those arrests mounted, Sanchez said. Even so, such attacks persist at a rate of about one a day.

However, major suicide bombings and coordinated attacks have increased in pace and scale, particularly in February, indicating a more sophisticated enemy, Sanchez said. Such violence and the discovery of a memo thought by the military to be written by al-Zarqawi have bolstered suspicions that Iraq is under siege by outside agitators, he said.

“I think the Zarqawi letter is fairly robust in laying out its strategy,” Sanchez said about a 17-page memo believed to be written by the man who has been tied to Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish militant group that the U.S. has linked to Al Qaeda.

Nonetheless, the coalition has yet to prove that al-Zarqawi is linked to any bombing or has ties to groups carrying out such attacks. A top military official recently backed away from a broad coalition statement that blamed al-Zarqawi for two bombings in August.

In the memo, al-Zarqawi appears to say that he has completed 25 “operations” in Iraq and urges strikes against the majority Shiite population and their “religious, political and military symbols” to provoke infighting.

“It’s a terrorist element that’s focusing on the Iraqi people and people who are defenseless,” Sanchez said. The U.S. led-coalition has doubled its bounty for al-Zarqawi to $10 million, in part because of the memo.

The memo has generated intense interest inside the coalition to better analyze the source of the large bombings. An interagency task force has been set up to improve coordination of information about the attacks. Suicide bombings in Irbil, Kirkuk and Iskandariyah this month are thought to be the work of outside sources, one senior military official said.

“Iraq has been fairly secular in the past, and to see a suicide bomb come through is not typically what we’d expect,” said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt.

But that doesn’t mean Iraq, particularly in the run-up to a scheduled hand-over of sovereignty from the U.S.-led coalition at the end of June, is safe from regime loyalists. A recent coordinated attack in Fallujah on an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps post and a police station–in which prisoners were released–indicated “a pretty high-order military tactic,” Kimmitt said.

Out-of-work Iraqi army officers could have pulled off that kind of attack, he said.

Violence continued in Iraq on Thursday as a bomb exploded in Baqouba, about 30 miles north of Baghdad. One Iraqi police officer was killed and seven people were wounded.