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Resistance in Iraq Is Home Grown

Nationalists and Islamists are among diverse groups joining the attacks. Foreign fighters are present in moderate numbers.
By Tracy Wilkinson
Times Staff Writer

September 2, 2003

BAGHDAD - The men attempting to recruit a former soldier in the Fedayeen Saddam militia for today's war against the Americans took him to a bearded sheik seated in a pickup truck.

They appealed to the mortar expert's sense of nationalism and then to his religious conviction. The Americans have done nothing for Iraqis. They defile the homeland. Attacking the American occupiers is the only way to make them leave, the recruiters argued.

In their shadowy guerrilla war to drive American forces out of Iraq, hundreds of insurgents have organized into cells, especially in Al Anbar province west of Baghdad and Diyala province to the northeast, both strongholds for Saddam Hussein, the Sunni tribes that supported him and Wahhabi and other Islamic fundamentalists.

Despite the U.S. government's insistence that Iraq has become the new battlefield of global terrorism, most of the resistance is home grown. The guerrillas are militants from the deposed regime, but they are also ordinary Iraqis opposed to occupation. They are ex-intelligence officers and farmers, militiamen and merchants, bombers and fishermen, according to more than a dozen interviews with Americans and Iraqis.

Added to this mix of Iraqis are the Islamic fundamentalists, especially Sunnis who have stepped into the power vacuum created by the war and its aftermath to take leadership roles in the resistance. Foreign fighters from Syria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia have infiltrated in moderate numbers, working alongside some of the Iraqi groups. The first arrests in last week's bombing of the Imam Ali Mosque in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, for example, were said to be of two Saudi nationals allied with two Fedayeen militiamen.