Iraq: A ‘limitless’ insurgency

The fighting in Ramadi, some 100 kilometers west of the capital, erupted after Marines sealed off a section of the city to conduct a pre-dawn search of houses for bomb-making equipment, said Captain Sean Kuehl.
“We have known for some time that the area was a hub for IED [improvised explosive device] making”.
Fifteen Iraqis were detained during the operation, he added.
At Ramadi’s main hospital, Dr. Amer Obeidi said two dead Iraqis had been received and five wounded people admitted, including a policeman, following the clashes.
Another American officer said the conflict was sparked by insurgents who opened fire on the Marines as they were conducting the house search. Adding to the tensions in Ramadi, a car bomb exploded in front of a mosque in the path of a US military, said police Lieutenant Abdelsattar Dulaymi, while the Marines said mortars were fired at a local government building.
Marine Lieutenant Lyle Gilbert that “Marines are conducting increased security operations in the city of Ramadi”.
The Sunnite Muslim bastion is a frequent scene of attacks against Iraq’s security forces and US Marines, who have been based there since mid-March.
Kuehl said the Marines had killed an estimated 700-800 insurgents in the unrest since their arrival, noting that they faced a “limitless” opposition. “There’s a limitless pool of manpower these guys can draw on; it’s bottomless”, he remarked.
Ramadi lies about 50 kilometers west of the rebel stronghold of Fallouja, around which American and Iraqi troops have massed. Meanwhile, American troops came under fire around Baghdad and Mosul.
Expectations of an all-out military assault on Fallouja were mounting as the government struggles to restore calm to Iraq for national elections in January.

Explosives
A human rights group said last week it had warned US-led military forces repeatedly about very large stocks of loose weapons in Iraq, but was ignored.
“In May 2003, Human Rights Watch provided US and British forces with specific data, including precise... coordinates, on unsecured weapons stockpiles around Baghdad and in Basra”, the New York-based group said in a statement. But “coalition forces took little or no action to secure the stockpiles”.
“Immediately after the fall of Baghdad, our researchers were finding massive stockpiles of weapons and explosives throughout Iraq”, said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW). “But when we informed coalition forces, they told us they just didn’t have enough troops to secure these sites”.
HRW said the researcher had found a massive stockpile of warheads, anti-tank mines, anti-personnel mines and other weapons at the unsecured Second Military College, on the main road between Baghdad and Bakouba “The weapon stocks were in the process of being looted”, the statement said. The researcher repeatedly went to the coalition headquarters over several days to report the looting, the group said. “But US coalition forces did not move to secure the site”.
The rights group statement came as American officials hastened to explain reports that tons of high explosives had gone missing from a Saddam Hussein-era warehouse in Iraq.
A UN nuclear weapons monitoring group said that it had put under seal some 377 tons of high explosives before the invasion 19 months ago. Critics have said those explosives may have been looted for lack of US vigilance.
The explosives were estimated to be able to provide material for thousands of bombs. The issue has become a hot topic in the American presidential election campaign, with Democrat candidate John Kerry accusing the Administration of President George Bush of gross negligence.
In a separate development, the US downplayed charges by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi of “negligence” by members of the multinational force in Iraq after 49 recruits for Iraq’s new army were massacred.
The State Department said that according to Allawi aides the Iraqi interim government was not referring to anyone in particular and saw terrorists alone as being to blame. “Let’s put the blame where the blame belongs. That’s not on the coalition forces or on Prime Minister Allawi. The blame is squarely on those who did this, these murderers, these terrorists”, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on CNBC.
“Now, we have to look in to see whether or not there were some lapses in security, but I think it’s premature to blame anyone for this other than the terrorists who committed the act”.
In one of the worst strikes against the country’s fledgling security forces, 49 army recruits and three drivers were shot dead as they traveled home after completing a training course in Northeast Iraq.
“I think it was because of gross negligence by some elements within the multinational forces”, Allawi said about the ambush, without giving details. “The killings represent the epitome of what could be done to hurt Iraq and the Iraqi people”, he told the interim legislature, adding that a special investigation had been launched.

‘100,000 civilian deaths’ since the invasion
Around 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, according to a study published by the British medical weekly The Lancet.
The research was conducted by a US-Iraqi team led by experts from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
Their figure was based on interviews in 988 households from 33 randomly-selected neighborhoods in Iraq. Families were asked to give the number of deaths since January 2002, the date and cause and, if a violent death was involved, the circumstances.
The mortality rates for the 14.6 months before the invasion were then compared with those for the 17.8 months after it, and a nationwide estimate was then extrapolated.
“Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq”, the authors said.
“Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths”.

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