Doug Lorimer
As the number of US troops killed in Iraq steadily climbed toward 500, Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer claimed that guerrilla attacks had fallen dramatically in the wake of Saddam Hussein's capture on December 13.
"In the last three or four weeks we've seen a rather dramatic reduction in the number of attacks on the coalition. They are down by about 50%", Bremer told CBS television on January 13.
In fact, US officials have claimed that the number of guerrilla attacks on US troops had fallen "significantly" even before Hussein's capture. On December 14, General Ricardo Sanchez, the top US military commander in Iraq, told reporters that the average number of daily attacks on US troops in Iraq had dropped to "around 20" from the November average of 35 a day.
However, an average of 20 attacks a day is still almost double the number of attacks mounted by the guerrillas prior to their Ramadan offensive, which began with the October 26 rocket attack on Baghdad's al Rashid hotel while US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying there.
Sanchez attributed the drop in daily guerrilla attacks to the US military's adoption of intensified "counter-insurgency" tactics.
The December 8 Christian Science Monitor reported that, beginning in early December, the US occupying forces had started employing tactics that "bear striking similarities to those used by the Israelis against Palestinian militants in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — a greater use of air power, surface-to-surface missiles, round-the-clock surveillance by unmanned aerial vehicles of suspected guerrilla centers, large-scale search-and-seize operations, cracking down on a sullen, increasingly hostile civilian population".
According to Robert Fisk, writing in the December 21 British Independent daily, "Only in Samara, north of Baghdad, the scene of persistent guerrilla attacks on the US 4th Infantry Division over the past month, has fighting died down, because the Americans have soaked the city with troops and because local Sunni Muslim clergymen — appalled at the large number of civilians killed and wounded by US soldiers — have called upon the resistance movement not to stage ambushes in areas where civilians will be hurt."
In early January, Iraqi guerrillas launched a series of mortar and rocket attacks on the occupation forces.
On January 8, a Black Hawk medivac helicopter in Fallujah was shot down by a surface-to-air rocket, killing all nine US troops aboard. According to official reports, at least 14 US helicopters have crashed or been shot down in Iraq since Bush declared on May 1 that major combat operations had ceased.
The day Bremer gave his interview to CBS, the US death toll in Iraq reached 495 when a roadside bomb in Baghdad killed a US soldier and wounded two others. The attack brought the total number of US troops wounded in Iraq as a result of guerrilla attacks to 2482.
Also on January 13, a roadside bomb exploded near a US Army convoy in Ramadi, a town west of Baghdad, and at least two mortars exploded near the Baghdad Hotel in the centre of the capital.
A January 13 Associated Press report quoted Brigadier-General Mark Hertling, a deputy commander of the US Army's 1st Armoured Division, as saying that the number of daily guerrilla attacks on US troops in Baghdad has not declined since Hussein's capture. "From the Baghdad perspective, we've been staying about the same in casualties", Hertling said.
From Green Left Weekly, January 21, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.