The recapture of Fallujah has not broken the insurgents’ will to fight and may not pay the big dividend U.S. planners had hoped — to improve security enough to hold national elections in Sunni Muslim areas of central Iraq, according to U.S. and Iraqi assessments. Instead, the battle for control of the Sunni city 40 miles west of Baghdad has sharpened divisions among Iraq’s major ethnic and religious groups, fueled anti-American sentiment and stoked the 18-month-old Sunni insurgency. Those grim assessments, expressed privately by some U.S. military officials and by some private experts on Iraq, raise doubts as to whether the January election will produce a government with sufficient legitimacy, especially in the eyes of the country’s powerful Sunni Muslim minority. Full Story
About OODA Analyst
OODA is comprised of a unique team of international experts capable of providing advanced intelligence and analysis, strategy and planning support, risk and threat management, training, decision support, crisis response, and security services to global corporations and governments.