A Famous Victory
The early reporting on this battle near Najaf today looks pretty implausible. See the Washington Post, the Daily Star and the Boston Herald for starters. I can buy the idea that there were Sunni insurgents gathering to attack Ashura pilgrims in or near Najaf. I can buy the idea that the Iraqi police caught on to the plan and that “U.S.-backed Iraqi troops” attacked an orchard where insurgents were hiding. The following early claims by the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior and provincial government officials, are hard to accept in combination:
1) There were 400-500 insurgents gathered in the orchard for the operation.
2) Iraqi police found “250 bodies” while capturing 10 gunmen.
3) US “support” for an operation of this size was limited to a couple of helicopters.
4) The insurgent force combined members of Al Qaeda in Iraq with, per the Daily Star’s compilation of wire service reports, “Shiites loyal to a cleric called Ahmad Hassani.”
Let’s take these in order: If 400+ Sunni guerrillas can gather for such an operation, then the US is not just losing politically but militarily: it means the Sunni insurgency is increasing its command and control capability over time. If there were that many dead bodies and that few prisoners at the end of the operation, and no mention of wounded, it means that someone was massacring prisoners. I confess to not having heard of Ayatollah Hassani before. He appears to be an anti-US and anti-Iran cleric who only recently got into the militia business. Zeyad of Healing Iraq briefly profiled Hassani and his movement back in August. The usual transliteration and name-convention problems bedevil googling him.
Given that the attack on the orchard appears to have been spearheaded by police from the famously corrupt Najaf force, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Badr Corps, it may turn out that there wasn’t even a plot to speak of. It could be that Hakim’s boys roped the US Army into helping it wipe out some followers of a rival cleric. It may turn out to have been a land grab – ethnically cleansing a valuable orchard of Sunnis who used to live there. Or it may, miracles happen, be some version of what everyone’s claiming: a counterterrorist operation against a plot to kill Shiite pilgrims. If that’s what really happened, I expect that the count of bodies will be closer to 25 and the total force size of the plotters to have been 50-100. (The same Daily Star story that repeats the “250 bodies” claim quotes the governor of Najaf province as saying that the police attacked “200 Sunni gunmen.” Those are some dangerous police. But 200 is getting toward a believable figure.)
Stay tuned. It’s the Samarra police raid of 2003 all over again.
Comment by Derek Copold —
January 28, 2007 @ 8:08 pm
To steal a quote: Every word from Centcom is a lie, including the “and’s” and “the.”
Comment by Jim Henley —
January 28, 2007 @ 8:27 pm
Interestingly, Centcom isn’t much quoted in the stories. Instead we’re getting the Iraqi interior ministry’s version of events, which is even less reliable.
Comment by srv —
January 28, 2007 @ 8:37 pm
Isn’t it nice that the Sunni are aggregating in such huge numbers in open and unpopulated areas?
Killing fields, anyone?
Trackback by Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator —
January 28, 2007 @ 9:04 pm
Heavy fighting reported near Najaf…
U.S.-backed Iraqi troops on Sunday attacked insurgents allegedly plotting to kill pilgrims at a majo…
Comment by Happy Jack —
January 28, 2007 @ 9:31 pm
It could be that Hakim’s boys roped the US Army into helping it wipe out some followers of a rival cleric.
I seem to remember Hakim visiting DC, so the possibility exists that we weren’t roped, as far as that scenario is concerned.
By the way, al-Hassani appears to have been around since the beginning.
Comment by Alex —
January 29, 2007 @ 6:07 am
Not that surprising. Somebody managed to concentrate a battalion-sized force to go into Al-Amarah after the British force there was withdrawn, and I can think of company-sized insurgent ops going back to 2004.
Comment by Jim Henley —
January 29, 2007 @ 8:24 am
Alex, still the trend over time is Sunni insurgent groups being able to coordinate larger and larger ops, no? Assuming this was a Sunni insurgent group.
H-Jack: Sure. Al-Hassani was a prominent Iraqi cleric all along. He even popped up in the occasional news story. But he’s way below the American public radar most of the time.
Comment by Alex —
January 29, 2007 @ 8:40 am
Yeah. Personally, I reckon we should recruit this “cult” – it’s cross-sectarian and apparently militarily competent.
Comment by Pug —
January 29, 2007 @ 9:02 am
What happened in Najaf is still not clear but it looks like a rival Shi’ite group was trying to put a hit on Sistani.
Hakim’s boys wiping out followers of a rival cleric looks to be most likely what happened.
Comment by Barry —
January 29, 2007 @ 9:25 am
“If there were that many dead bodies and that few prisoners at the end of the operation, and no mention of wounded, it means that someone was massacring prisoners. ”
Or that the group was so well disciplined that it carried away almost all wounded, despite suffering 50% or more casualties. That’s the sort of explanation that’s been offered up before.
Comment by Jim Henley —
January 29, 2007 @ 9:32 am
Indeed it has!
Of course, it was a crock then too.
Comment by matthew hogan —
January 29, 2007 @ 3:35 pm
The numbers really smell, and they seem to be Iraqi not US figures. You’d have to pound a good portion of a city to get that many. In an orchard? Sounds greatly exaggerated.