Pressure builds on Iraq's insurgents

Ranstorp says that the most effective interrogators of Al Qaeda groups are masters of the theological debate. "They can point out wrong interpretations [of Islam] that further delegitimize what [militants] are trying to do."

Relying on military means, US and Iraqi forces have made some progress in areas where they have applied the stick. But since the Fallujah invasion last November - billed as the attack that would "break the back" of the violence - the insurgency has flared again and again.

Insurgents who did not stay to fight in Fallujah raised their flag in the northern city of Mosul and in Baghdad. US operations have since sought to push them out of Ramadi, and more recently Qaim, on the border with Syria. This week they targeted Abu Ghraib and, beginning at dawn Wednesday, the western city of Haditha.

Earlier this month in Haditha, four US troops were killed in an attack launched from a hospital.

"The Fallujah operation certainly, at least for a limited period of time, did provide better security," says the US diplomat of the invasion in which the US Marines cleared tens of thousands of houses, and heavily damaged the city. "The other lesson I would draw is, you have to maintain the pressure, all of the time."

The same shift has occurred in Baghdad. US and Iraqi troops regained control of the insurgent stronghold of Haifa Street this spring, only to see violence move to Sunni districts of Adhimiya and Doura.

"Some [insurgents] were killed. Some were captured. And some ran away," says Maj. Fouad Issa Saleh, commander of the Delta Company of the Iraqi Army's 1st Battalion, which now controls Haifa Street. "Iraqi forces are starting to learn how to deal with the streets, and the Americans are slowly, slowly beginning to pull back."

But success in one place often just shifts the problem to another. "It's like toothpaste: You squeeze somewhere, and it just pushes the insurgents somewhere else in Iraq," says Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. "It would work if you had enough people to cover the ground."

The test will be in Baghdad in coming days, as police and military forces fan out. Officials already know that, despite Zarqawi's Jordanian lineage - and the belief that almost all suicide bombers are foreign militants - the main targets are Iraqis once loyal to Saddam Hussein, or those who adhere to a radical strain of Sunni Islam.

"The majority of people blowing up things ... assembling car bombs [and] financing the blowing up of Humvees or attacks on police stations - they are Iraqi," says the US diplomat. "There is [also] a foreign element, unquestionably a very pernicious foreign element, which is one of the reasons it's so difficult to degrade it."

For most Iraqis, the issue is constant insecurity. "The price is too heavy, and it's not improving," says an Iraqi doctor, shaking her head as she sits with her family.

"If they let Saddam die naturally, it would take 15 years," adds her husband. "But it would have been easier than the last three years."

• The new Iraqi government was sworn in on May 3, 2005.

• US troop strength: 138,000, down from February's high of 155,000.

• Non-US coalition forces: 23,000

• Iraqi military forces currently operational: 75,782 and climbing steadily.

• US Military combat fatalities:

May 2005 63

April 52

March 36

• Car bombings:

May 2005 93

April 135

Match 69

• Crude oil production

Target: 2.5 million barrels/day

Current: 2.0 million barrels/day

Prewar: 3.0 million barrels/day

• Power generation

(Avg. daily megawatt hours)

Target: 120,000

Current: 85,450

Prewar: 95,000

• Schools rehabilitated to date: 2,457

• Secondary school teachers trained: 33,000

• Total USAID assistance to Iraq 2003-2005: $4,928,810,106

Sources: USAID, The Brookings Institution

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