The New York Times report offers compelling insight into the opaque and amorphous array of militant groups operating within and alongside official government security forces in Iraq and underscores the assessment in these pages that sectarian militias and criminal militant groups largely represent the greatest long-term threat to Iraq?s security and stability. As Dexter Filkins notes, ?The headlong, American-backed effort to arm tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and officers, coupled with a failure to curb a nearly equal number of militia gunmen, has created a galaxy of armed groups, each its own loyalty and agenda, which are accelerating the country?s slide into chaos.?
The targeted killings of sectarian militias are serving as the drivers of spiraling sectarian conflict, ethno-religious cleansings in certain areas, and lower-grade civil war. Criminal groups have emerged and exploit Iraq?s relatively anarchic environment to run kidnapping rings. Political parties and the 27 ministries of the Iraqi government come equipped with private militias and security forces. Overall, this constellation of quasi-official militant groups has drawn to the fore the driving power groupings in Iraq: an atmosphere of competing political, sectarian, and criminal groupings, all underpinned by their own private militias, and all vying for their own private fiefdoms. Unless the central government and the political parties are able to marshal the political will to disband the most powerful militias, many of which, as Filkins aptly describes, provide their ?street muscle,? and until Iraqi security forces achieve robust operational capabilities?developments that seem unrealistic in the near-term?the majority of these militias will likely persist and grow entrenched and powerful.
On a separate topic, reports emerged in past weeks of the killing of civilians by US Marines in Haditha. As Ellen Knickmeyer and Omar Fekeiki of the Washington Post reported on May 29, 2006, ?U.S. Marine commanders in Washington have warned Congress of grave findings when two military investigations into the killings are concluded in coming weeks.? These reports?and their attendant popular perceptions and rumors, regardless of the ultimate investigative findings?have the potential to stoke outrage among Iraqis and the wider Arab and Muslim communities similar to the Abu Ghraib scandal. In turn, the perception of a massacre of civilians will likely be used by Iraqi nationalist insurgents and the global community of jihadists, including al-Qaeda , to underscore their rationale for insurgent and terrorist activities against the US and its allies.
The incident, like the Abu Ghraib scandal, underscores how missteps in counterinsurgency operations at a local, individual level can resonate through the populace and have major strategic effects. Insurgency and counterinsurgency remain enterprises centered on political and societal warfare, coercion, and ingratiation, and it is at these local, societal levels that both are won or are lost.
