The Campaign to Pacify Sunni Iraq
Iraq's Sovereignty Vacuum (Part 2)
By Michael Schwartz The December elections in Iraq did not initiate a period of state building, but instead marked an expanding, many-sided conflict whose latest major horror was the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra and the carnage it triggered. All the conflicts of the present moment have metastasized and spread from the ill-fated attempt by American-led forces to pacify Sunni communities in Baghdad and in four provinces to the north and west. Today, not only is the country edging toward an ever-more virulent civil war, but the Sunni resistance is stronger than ever, registering about 100 attacks a day in January.
This original war remains the central front in the ongoing battle for domination in Iraq and, as the core conflict, it continues to cast off enough bitterness, suffering, destruction, and rebellion to guarantee its never-ending spread to new areas and groups.
More than anything else, this low-level but fierce war is responsible for the constantly diminishing reservoir of sovereignty in Iraq. If the Americans sought to establish the legitimacy of the occupation by crushing early signs of Sunni resistance, that effort has, in the end, only helped convince Iraqis of the illegitimacy of the American presence. For all its failures, however, the occupation has succeeded in one endeavor. It has managed to undermine all efforts by other parties to establish their own legitimacy and therefore to build a foundation for a new and sovereign Iraq. If one day Iraq ceases to be, splitting chaotically into several entities, the way the occupation destroyed sovereignty (along with parts of Sunni cities) will certainly come in for a major share of the blame.
The Sunni Resistance 
What the world has come to call the "insurgency "in Iraq is largely located in Baghdad and the Sunni-dominated cities to the north and west of the capital. In the Kurdish north and Shia south, residents have largely been organized into local quasi-governments that are frequently at odds with the American occupation (and therefore with the central government in the capital); but -- despite notable moments of great violence -- none of these localities has mounted a sustained war against the American-led presence as the Sunnis have.
While the Sunni insurgency is certainly the focus of Iraqi news coverage, the actual nature of the war in Sunni areas goes largely unreported. Coverage tends to focus on spectacular moments of violence and destruction, especially car bombs and other suicide attacks against civilian targets. Only rarely mentioned are the multitude of small-scale confrontations between resistance fighters and patrolling American troops that account for the majority of violent clashes. As a result, the methods of the American side -- the use of assault weapons, tanks, artillery, and air power -- and so the spreading "collateral" damage to Iraqi civilians is significantly underreported.
A recent James Glanz piece in the New York Times proved an exception to this pattern. Based on U.S. military statistics, Glanz offered strong evidence against the administration portrait of a weakening (or at least stalemated) resistance movement. Guerrilla attacks had, in fact, "steadily grown in the nearly three years since the invasion." Even during a "lull" in December 2005, the 2,500 violent confrontations -- over 80 per day -- were "almost 250 percent [higher than] the number in March 2004," which, in turn was twice the level of August 2003.
The chart that accompanied the article (originally delivered to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee by Joseph A. Christoff of the Government Accountability Office) contained an even more significant fact, almost unknown to the American public: Despite the impression we may have from news reports, Iraqi civilians constitute only a small proportion of resistance targets each month -- never exceeding 20% and typically falling well below 10%. In December 2005, they accounted for just 8% -- about 200 -- of the 2,500 attacks. .
The overwhelming target of such attacks -- in a typical month around 80% of them -- was the American military and its coalition allies, mainly the British. Last December, the figure was a little over 70%; some months it reaches 90%. The Iraqi armed forces (integrated, as they are, into the American command) account for another 5-10% of the targets. 
Until now, at least, the war in the Sunni areas of Iraq has largely been between the Americans and the guerrillas. The Iraqi government itself is not a factor in this confrontation, and consequently is rarely mentioned -- even in a pro forma way -- in news accounts of the battles, negotiations, and other elements of the war.
How then, as best we can tell, is the Sunni resistance organized in the many cities in the four provinces in central Iraq and in Baghdad where the war is an ongoing part of life?
Though it is divided into two ideologically contrary groups -- the guerrillas who target the occupation and the jihadists who tend to seek out civilian targets -- and within those divisions into many grouplets, the Sunni resistance is coherent enough to be another contender for sovereignty, at least in its own areas. It has tied down and exhausted the U.S. military, forcing strategic and tactical alterations in American policy. It continues to influence both national and local Iraqi politics, even as its internal contradictions increasingly set jihadists and guerrillas against each other.
The role played by the Sunni resistance can best be understood by briefly reviewing the situation in Falluja before its recapture by American forces in November 2004. In April of that year, after an abortive attempt to seize the city, the U.S. military had withdrawn, leaving it in the hands of the "Falluja Brigade," made up mainly of Baathist army veterans. They were assigned the job of pacifying the city. Instead, the Brigade gave its support to a group of local religious leaders allied with the insurgency that soon evolved into a local government. Borrowing its organizational skeleton from the rich community organizations traditionally connected to Sunni mosques (including their Shari'a courts), it used the resistance fighters as a police force. Perhaps not surprisingly, the structure that developed was similar to those that had already formed in Shia cities like Basra.
During the period from April to November, Falluja had only the most tenuous ties to the national government in Baghdad. Nir Rosen, an independent journalist, produced remarkable descriptions of the city in this period (for the New Yorker and Asia Times). His pieces give a sense of the developing tensions between the jihadists, who wanted to establish Falluja as a safe rear area for their larger operations, and the local resistance, determined to keep the Americans out but uninterested in going on the offensive. The new government also heightened tensions by enforcing cultural customs similar to those adopted in Basra: head scarves for women, facial hair for men, and the abolition of liquor and western music. In these months, street crime disappeared, as did armed confrontations of any sort. They would prove the most peaceful in Falluja since the fall of Saddam's regime. 
As this interlude indicated, in the Sunni areas local clerics already constituted a proto-government-in-waiting, quite capable of enforcing "law and order" if not challenged by the occupation military. The fighting in Sunni cities comes and goes with the arrival and departure of the occupation military. When the occupation forces enter a city (or a neighborhood in Baghdad), the IEDs begin to explode, snipers fire away, and hit-and-run attacks start up. As soon as they withdraw to pacify another town, the city in question, in a more battered state, falls back into the hands of local clerics and their allies among the guerrillas.
At no time does the Iraqi government figure significantly into this process. Occasionally, it may appoint a governor or police chief, but these functionaries quickly discover (like their counterparts in Basra and Kirkuk) that they have little choice but to work with the local power structure, resign in protest over their lack of authority, or become assassination targets.
In a sense, the difference between Sunni cities -- most of which have been wracked by fighting -- and their Shia or Kurdish counterparts has been the determination of the American military to pacify them.
The Guerrilla War in Baiji
The experience of Baiji illustrates how little leverage the Iraqi government has over events on the ground in Sunni Iraq. As the site of the largest oil refining plant in the country, it is a more important city than its population of 70,000 might suggest. During the Hussein years, its 98% Sunni inhabitants were supported by well-paying jobs in a government-owned industrial district that grew up around the oil-refining facilities.
After the American-led invasion, however, Baiji fell on hard times. Thanks to one of the first executive orders issued by L. Paul Bremer, the Bush-appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority that was then ruling from Baghdad, all government-owned enterprises, with the exception of the oil industry itself, were shuttered. This was in preparation for a privatization program considered crucial by American economic planners. Unemployment swept through Baiji, generating bitterness, inspiring a variety of protests, and eventually energizing what had until then been an exceedingly modest resistance to the U.S. presence.
In late 2003, in response to this growing discontent, the U.S. initiated what Washington Post reporter Ann Tyson characterized as "heavy-handed sweeps through Baiji… [that] left many people angry, frightened and humiliated." She quoted Adil Faez Jeel, the director of the oil refinery, saying that the sweeps only solidified support for an armed resistance: "Most of the people fighting the Americans tell me they do nothing for us but destroy the houses and capture people… There are no jobs, no water, no electricity."
By late 2004, Baiji's guerrillas were strong enough to take control of the town in response to the American conquest of Falluja. In addition to skirmishes with U.S. troops and Iraqi police, the guerrillas began to sabotage pipelines around the refinery and to attack oil trucks. At one point, they launched a mortar attack against a mixed American and Iraqi National Guard patrol in the center of town, triggering two days of running battles. A doctor at the local hospital told the Agence France Press that at least 10 civilians were killed and 26 wounded in the ensuing melee.
Commentary 
In the first of a two-part dispatch, 
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