FISK: Insurgents Winning Intel War

Iraqi insurgents ahead in war of intelligence

By Robert Fisk

01/11/05 "The Independent" -- Baghdad: As usual, it was an inside job. Brig Amer Ali Nayef, deputy head of the Baghdad police, and his policeman son, Lt Khaled Amer, were driving to work in an unmarked civilian car, hoping to move through the streets of Dora without being noticed.

But the two carloads of gunmen who approached from behind knew the car, its registration number and its occupants. They blazed away with Kalashnikovs until Nayef, dead at the wheel, drove into a house.

Every day now brings its sinister evidence that the Iraqi security forces - supposedly screened by American military officers - have been infiltrated by the insurgents.

As Nayef and his son were shot dead, a suicide bomber - and there are perhaps 10 suicide bombers immolating themselves every week now in Iraq - blew himself up several miles away outside the Zafarniyah police station in Baghdad, killing four policemen and wounding 10 others.

The police were changing shifts at the time - as the bomber must have known, thereby increasing the casualties - and the killer was driving a real police car.

Last week, gunmen assassinated the governor of Baghdad, Ali al-Haidari, who was taking a pre-arranged security route to his office. Six of his bodyguards were also shot dead. The roads on which his convoy was driving were supposedly known only to the police.

Al-Haidari - who once famously announced that he planned to pull down many of the security walls in Baghdad because the city was becoming safer - even had a second route ready in case his bodyguards chose to change his journey at the last moment.

And all this is because the growing army of insurgents across Iraq intends to prevent the holding of the January 30 elections.
In the West, it probably makes sense: men dedicated to the overthrow of any possible democracy in Iraq want to destroy the country's first free election.

To the citizens of Baghdad it can seem as if the poll is being held more for the benefit of foreign political agendas - not least those of Tony Blair and George Bush - than for the well-being of innocent Iraqis.

Copyright: The Independent