Anna Mulrine, US News and World Report, July 25, 2007:
As President Bush continues to stress al Qaeda as the chief threat to Iraq’s stability — a reprised effort to establish a link between al Qaeda in Iraq and the 9/11 attackers — U.S. military forces on the ground in Iraq are fighting a complex war in regions with vast networks of overlapping loyalties — and few foreign fighters. Most members of al Qaeda in Iraq, say commanders on the ground, are local Iraqi outcasts.
“I can count them [foreign fighters] as a total I have engaged, dead or alive, in the 10 months I’ve been here on one hand,” says Col. David Sutherland, the U.S. commander of coalition forces in the hotly contested area of Diyala province, an insurgent stronghold region some 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. There, Sutherland says, those involved in al Qaeda are largely dispossessed locals, not jihadists who have come from elsewhere. “The recruiting program is [that] al Qaeda may send five or eight individuals into a village. They recruit from those who have no power base, no place in society,” including, he adds, former male prostitutes and the mentally ill.
Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, November 5, 2004:
[I]t was easy for us to provoke this administration and to drag it [after us]. It was enough for us to send two Jihad fighters to the farthest east to hoist a rag on which “Al-Qa’ida” was written — that was enough to cause generals to rush off to this place, thereby causing America human and financial and political losses, without it accomplishing anything worthy of mention, apart from giving business to [the generals’] private corporations. Besides, we gained experience in guerilla warfare and in conducting a war of attrition in our fight with the iniquitous, great power, that is, when we conducted a war of attrition against Russia with Jihad fighters for 10 years until they went bankrupt, with Allah’s grace; as a result, they were forced to withdraw in defeat, all praise and thanks to Allah. We are continuing in the same policy — to make America bleed profusely to the point of bankruptcy, Allah willing. And that is not too difficult for Allah.
