BREMER LABELS ZARQAWI CELLS HARD TO CRACK
en "THE WASHINGTON TIMES" 2-7-04
Por su interés y relevancia,
he seleccionado el informe que sigue para incluirlo en este sitio web.
(L. B.-B.)
Abu
Musab Zarqawi has set up a network so well organized in Iraq it deployed a
Yemeni suicide bomber in a car to blow up a police station just 48 hours after
he entered the country, says L. Paul Bremer, the former top U.S. administrator
in Baghdad.
"He had arrived in the country only two days before, and as analyst of
terrorism for some time now, this was quite revealing to me," said Mr. Bremer,
describing an incident in December when the Yemeni was shot and captured after
his bomb failed to explode.
"It showed a
very high degree of organization that you could have a guy come across the
border and within two days marry him up with a rather elaborate plot. Targets. A
thousand-pound bomb built into his car. He has the car. He knows the target.
It's quite impressive."
Mr. Bremer told the story yesterday to editors and reporters of The
Washington Times to illustrate the tough task the coalition faces in trying to
rid Iraq of the Zarqawi network. Zarqawi is on the run today as the most-wanted
man in Iraq. The Bush administration Wednesday upped the reward for his capture
or killing from $10 million to $25 million.
Mr. Bremer said Zarqawi's terrorists were mostly trained in al Qaeda camps
in Afghanistan. They arrive in Iraq not as undisciplined jihadists, but as
professionally trained killers.
Zarqawi himself has moved in and out of Fallujah, Baghdad and other Iraqi
cities.
"He is actively involved in selecting targets," Mr. Bremer said. "He's quite
careful with his operational security. Sooner or later, he'll make a mistake and
we'll get him."
His network is "in the low hundreds in Iraq, if that many," Mr. Bremer said.
Zarqawi cells are so hard to penetrate that he will likely be active and trying
to kill people in Iraq well after the coalition has defeated other militant
groups, the former administrator said.
"They are non-Iraqis," Mr. Bremer said of the Zarqawi group. "They tend to
be from Yemen. Or Sudan. Some Saudis. We haven't captured a lot of them. We
captured some. So we have some insight into the organization. It's a
professional terrorists organization. It's well done. They have cellular
structure, so information doesn't flow very widely. Makes it difficult to
penetrate. Even if you penetrate, you don't get much information beyond the cell
you've penetrated. It's a very professional operation. Very dangerous. They are
clearly responsible for almost all, if not all, the suicide attacks."
Mr. Bremer talked on the same day that the U.S. military in Baghdad
disclosed that a suspected Zarqawi safe house was bombed by a precision air
strike in Fallujah, a city of 300,000 still not subdued by the coalition. It was
the fourth such air strike on a Zarqawi cell in the past two weeks in that city,
underscoring the United States' desire to put the deadly organization out of
business.
Mr. Bremer said there are three main pillars of the enemy facing American
troops and allies:
•The Zarqawi Tawhid organization, whose main goal is to kill Iraqis who are
allies of the American-led coalition.
•Pro-Saddam Hussein insurgents. These are former regime members, such as
intelligence agents and former members of the Gestapo-like Fedayeen, who work in
independent cells with no overall leader. Their main targets are coalition
troops.
•Foreign fighters. These are loosely knit bands of jihadists who mostly
enter through Syria, organize cells in safe houses and attack coalition troops.
"These are people who either answered the call for jihad at the beginning of
the war itself, in the kinetic phase of the war, or have come in across rat
lines from Syria mostly since then, either answering the call of jihad or just
because they want to come and fight the United States," Mr. Bremer said.
He said the U.S. was not particularly successful in gaining good
intelligence on the overall insurgent groups as attacks escalated. But he
downplayed any problems the Abu Ghraib prisoner scandal may present. Some
analysts have said it has made interrogators reluctant to press detainees for
information.
Instead, Mr. Bremer said, the answer lies in a rebuilt Iraqi intelligence
service acquiring the intelligence needed to finally destroy the Iraqi
militants.
"I think in the end better intelligence will come from the Iraqis' forces
and intelligence service, not better application of interrogation techniques
from our people," he said.
"We've been working with the new Iraqi intelligence service now for three or
four months and it will be very important for it to begin to produce actionable
intelligence. It's always going to be easier for Iraqis to figure what's going
on in a given community than even the best Americans."
Mr. Bremer, who left Iraq on Monday after turning over power to a new Iraqi
interim government, believes self-rule will go a long way toward defeating the
old Saddam supporters.
"I think that things will go better now because the occupation is over," he
said. "They should become more effective against at least the insurgency part. I
don't say they're suddenly going to break the code on Zarqawi. That's hard, a
really hard target. But on the insurgency, they ought to be with better
intelligence and better military forces more effective.
"An Iraqi government has the capacity to by being strong, [to] also offer to
those sort of supporters on the fringes of the insurgency some kind of role in
the political future of the country, by broadening the political base in way
that would be difficult for non-Iraqis to do.
"So you could imagine that in the next few months and indeed I expect in the
next few months — I don't think it will happen overnight — you'll begin to see
better effectiveness against the insurgency."
BREMER HAILS SADDAM'S COURT APPEARANCE
THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3-7-04
Por su interés y relevancia,
he seleccionado el informe que sigue para incluirlo en este sitio web. (L.
B.-B.)
Former
Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer said yesterday's televised images of Saddam
Hussein arraigned before an Iraqi judge in a Baghdad courtroom marked a
milestone for the fledgling government.
"It's hard if you haven't been there to realize the emotions that surround
Saddam among Iraqis," Mr. Bremer told editors and reporters of The Washington
Times in an hourlong interview conducted at the Old Executive Office Building.
"It's an
extremely emotional thing for Iraqis to see Saddam as they saw him today, facing
a justice that he denied his own people."
As the trial progresses and the new government finds its feet, "hopefully it
will start to drain some of the poison out of the system" left by Saddam's
quarter-century of misrule, he added.
Dressed in a dark suit and sporting conventional dark loafers instead of the
tan combat boots he favored in Baghdad, Mr. Bremer spoke three days after he
oversaw the stealthy transfer of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi authority in
Baghdad.
He defended many of the controversial decisions of his Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA), conceded that the new government still faced major security and
economic problems, and said he remained optimistic that life in Iraq will
improve gradually as the new government settles in.
"To me there's no argument — Iraq is an infinitely better place today than
it was 15 months ago," he said. "I don't think anybody can seriously argue
that."
Iraqi opinion polls showed a deep dislike of the CPA and of the U.S.
military presence in general, but Mr. Bremer said Iraqis remained deeply
grateful for the overthrow of Saddam's regime.
"We did not conquer a country here. We conquered and threw out a hated
regime," he said.
"Here we come in and throw out a government that they were unable to throw
out, and throw it out in three weeks. And the Iraqis say, 'That's great, now why
don't you go away?' So I understand the problem."
He staunchly defended two of the most hotly debated decisions of his tenure
— not recalling the Iraqi military after it disintegrated in the aftermath of
the war last year and the widespread purge of officials from Saddam's ruling
Ba'ath Party from the postwar government and military.
Critics argued that the two moves created a vast pool of Iraqis alienated
from the U.S.-led occupation forces, making them prime recruiting targets for
the insurgency that has bedeviled the country since the combat phase ended.
But Mr. Bremer said if he had to do it all again, he again would reject
efforts to reconstitute Iraq's shattered army. "I stand by my decision," he
said.
He argued that massive looting had destroyed all the former military
barracks. Trying to preserve the army could have "set off a civil war" with
Iraq's Kurds and Shi'ite Muslims, both of whom deeply distrusted Saddam's
military forces, he added.
Mr. Bremer said the CPA's original "de-Ba'athification" policy had been
designed to ensure that the top four ranks of Saddam's party — a total of 25,000
to 30,000 people out of 2 million party members — did not get jobs in the public
sector.
"The implementation of the policy by the de-Ba'athification council under
the Iraq Governing Council went much further, and I think it hurt" Iraqi
education and health care in particular, he said.
He defended a wide-ranging series of edicts he issued as CPA administrator,
touching on everything from the creation of an Iraqi supreme court to
regulations on tax rates, foreign investment policy and an independent central
bank.
On balance, Mr. Bremer said, huge strides have been made toward the
establishment of a representative government, the rule of law, protection of
minority rights and a free-market economy.
"These changes to fundamental political and economic life are vital," he
said.
But he expressed disappointment that the CPA had not tackled the huge,
inefficient state-owned companies and the oil and other subsidies set up under
Saddam. He said reforms of the state sector were considered too dangerous to
undertake at a time of high unemployment and unrest.
"It was a tactical
decision," he said.