US fights shifting Iraqi foes

"We had a pretty good windfall of intelligence in December, not just the capture of Saddam but also operation Iron Hammer was very, very successful,'' says General Hertling, who says the demonstrated will to go after the Baathists brought more informants out of the woodwork. "A lot of Iraqis started coming forward and told us 'you should have done something like this a long time ago.' "

US forces have had less obvious success against the Islamist militants, but they say many successes haven't been reported, in part because they don't want to compromise ongoing intelligence operations. Devan describes the arrest of a terrorist cell recently composed of Yemenis, Saudis, and a Moroccan.

But there has been little apparent progress made into investigations of the suicide bombings. Attacks ranging from one on the UN headquarters last August to multiple police-station bombings and a series of hotel attacks across Iraq have gone unsolved.

Officials here say that there usually isn't enough human intelligence to uncover the cells that supported the attacks and the forensic evidence is usually difficult to exploit. For instance, in stable countries investigators can usually figure out who owned the vehicle used in car-bomb attacks within days by using serial numbers from engine blocks. But with few centralized records in Iraq, such information is next to useless.

Even when foreign fighters are arrested, unlike the Baathists whose information discipline wasn't as good, they've little of value to yield to interrogators.

"This is an atomized force working against us, composed of at least four to five different groups broken down even further into small cells,'' says Martha Kessler, a retired US intelligence officer and expert on the Middle East. "They know the steps necessary to minimize the damage from forced debriefing from those captured. They know how to compartmentalized information. And they are near genius at employing low-tech communication, weapons, and guerrilla tactics."

Devan points out that with so many civilian hotbeds of anger, like the town of Fallujah, where US Marines fought house to house against locals for hours last Friday, insurgents can still find safe places to hide. He compares the challenges investigators face to the relative ease with which investigators in Madrid arrested suspects within days of the train attacks there earlier this month.

The key there, he says, was the almost universal support of the local population, which yielded information on the movement and location of suspicious men shortly before the attacks. But he points out that Spain has struggled to make progress against another form of terrorism - that tied to Basque separatists - because they, like the terrorists in Iraq, have pockets of local supporters who will hide them.

In the long run, Colonel Lang says international terrorists within Iraq may be easier to deal with than domestic insurgents. "The suicide attacks are mostly pointed at us, as part of the worldwide jihadi objective against the US, but they're likely to subside" if the internal political situation can be resolved.

That leaves the military and intelligence officers redoubling their efforts as June 30 approaches, seeking to limit the damage of attacks that are strategically insignificant from a military standpoint, but politically very dangerous. "There are people here who want to prevent a representative government from ever taking root," says Hertling.

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