Categoría: Iraq

AN UNSUCCESSFUL AND DEGRADED CALIPHATE II.

(CONTINUATION) 

The Islamic State of Syria, Iraq and Levante (southwest of Asia)

In general, the jihadists groups have failed in actively and firmly joining in a social wide group, which gives coverage and permanent impulse to their «imperialistic social religious movement». Their «catechizing of the violence» allows them to be prepared mental for the glorious and in peace death, and, even for the suicide, in the accomplishment of their punctual tactical actions. But this rage and insanity sermon is not a weapon for the conversion of social groups. And there is a fundamental reason for it,: their «creed» lacks possibilities of acceptance, victory and permanency, out of the vicissitudes of a war. The jihadists groups act with an unnecessary and indiscriminate brutality, which discredits them before the Islam, the Koran and the Sunna or Islamic tradition gathered in the hadises or writed «comments and facts» of Mohamed. This lack of religious legitimacy provokes the absolute absence of venerable, respected and pious ulemas and mufties at their side. Their supposed «Islam ideology» is based on a few favorable verses of the Koran (this has approximately 6200), on some formely historical facts, when the minor Jihad (or violent one) was applicable and useful for the Umma, and not on the totality of the message of the Islam.

The Operational Complications of the Jihadists.

Al-Qaeda acted in Syria in 2011 and 2012 using the Front al-Nusrah for the Liberation of the Peoples of East. This name was and is of inversely proportional length to his real operational capacity. Al-Nusrah was responsible of the great isolated and indiscriminate attacks with bombs in Damascus and other cities. They were seeking to introduce a factor of instability and social fracture in the real parameters of this war. That did not manage to produce for the discontinuity of the attacks and for be knowing the authorship of these insanity assaults against Muslims. In the revolt against the occupation of 2003 in Iraq, al-Qaeda had lines of supplies and recruitment from Syria, which nowadays are used in the other way. From Turkey they were also receiving «internationalists muhaydinnes». And in 2012, part of the liberated in several assaults to Iraqi prisons, joined the Front al-Nusrah, which was fortifying in number and operational capacity.

The differences between the ISSIL and the Front al-Nusrah are born in a personal clash: the ill-will between Abu Abdulah al-Bagdadi, chief of the Islamic State of Iraq (today, the ISSIL), and Abu Mohamed al-Golani, founder of the Front al-Nusrah. Initially, the Iraqis helped the Syrians to establish their own affiliated organization of “the Network”. But, in the spring of 2013 al-Bagdadi announced the creation of the Islamic State of Syria, Iraq and the Levant. And tried to fuse his organization with her of to the-Golani. Certainly, the Front al-Nusrah rejected directly his absorption. The Iraqi al-Baghdadi considers himself to be a direct disciple of Osama Ben Laden. And already in 2010, took the command of the AQI, which inherited from the unsuccessful Musab al-Zarkawi, changing then its name to «Islamic State of Iraq».

The ISSIL is very unpopular in Syria, for his extremism and for having a qualified majority of Iraqis and jihadists from Europe and other parts of the world in his rows. After Yarabulus’s recent occupation, in the north of Syria, they beheaded a dozen of men, and fixed his heads in stakes. And the habitants who could, frightened emigrated to Karkamis, a Turkish locality. The rejection to the ISSIL is such that the Syrian National Coalition, the principal political opponent platform, assures that the organization is supported by the Syrian regime, which theoretically is enemy of all of them. This way, In a communique of January, 2014 it affirmed: «The Coalition believes that the ISSIL is closely linked with the terrorist regime, and serves directly or indirectly, to the interests of the president al-Assad and his lobby. The Syrians’ murder at hands of this group does not leave doubts on the intentions in his creation, his aims and the agendas to which he serves, confirmed by the nature of his terrorist hostile actions to the Syrian Revolution».

On other hand, the Islamic Front is an alliance created in 2013 by seven islamist «radical and moderate» groups, all opposite to the Network. His spokespersons say that they approximately count with 45 thousand fighters. But, we do not believe that reach 10 thousand militias of «light irregular infantry». If the Front is n force in a key point as the frontier position Bab al-Hawa with Turkey, at the level of Hatay’s province, the ISSIL has kept for four months Azaz, the ville of access to Alepo from the Turkish border in Kilis. In the north of Syria operate all the groups, controlling unconnected chunks of ground. The ISSIL killed Abu Rayan, a negotiator of «Ahrar Sham», a group of the Islamic Front, at the end of December. To the murder joined the assault of the ISSIL at the beginning of year to Kafranbel, in the power of the ELS. The clashes between the Islamic Front and the Islamic State of Syria, Iraq and Levant spread to Alepo’s neighborhoods and to the localities Tel Rifat and Maskanah. On Friday, the 3rd of February, an offensive of «Suqur Sham», another group of the Front, prevented the ISIS from send reinforcements near Azaz. Complicating everything, the so called «Army of the Syrians Muyahidins» has just been formed, where gather the adversaries of the ISIL and also joined by the Front al-Nusrah. We verify that the islamist terrorists are generally ideologically, institutionally and strategically divided. Though the rivals bands could offer occasionally support, refuge, information or supplies between them. The reasons are that the chiefs of principal bands always want to be «emirs (princes) and interpreters (doctors) of the Islam.» Their urgencies and organizational and tactical preferences have very mundane and degenerate foundations. «By their actions and fruits you will know them».

A confused, diffuse and schizophrenic strategy…

Keeping a similar strategy in Syria and Iraq by the ISSIL for the creation of his radical salifist independent caliphate has several important mistakes. One is to simultaneously fight in two countries with different strategic approaching. Other is to divide their meagres trained operational forces in two fronts. In Syria, the valid strategic for the heterogeneous, multiple and divided opposition to al-Assad, is to support, at least, the unit in the military strategy. This way, all the military efforts could converge in different, simultaneous or successive, objectives, that decides a military high command, respected by all the present and active groups in Syria. Already we have seen how al-Assad amounts means and efforts to his cause (militias trained of Hezbola, armament, equipments and ammunitions reinstatement, political diplomatic support from China, Iran and Russia). This is allowing him to beat in diverse combats the opposition groups and to expel them from positions that were occupying, some during certain time. Not observance of this strategy, of pure survival, would lead the opposition to his progressive destruction by the SNA.

In Iraq, the strategy of the Sunnis does not try to gain a civil war at the democratic imperfect regime al-Maliki, of Shiite majority. Neither she claims, nor might, expel them from the country by depletion, on having emphasized their disability to finish with the armed rebels and forcing them to assume it. This was the case of many “wars of national liberation” in the colonial countries in the middle of the 20th century. To many of the guerrilla popular movements it was enough to them to resist for some years the floods and onslaughts of the foreign military forces. And, this way, resisting, they tired the metropolis peoples from support a distant, poor assumed and harmful war and enervated their armed forces. Which were often lack of understanding and up to underestimated in their own homes. The Sunnis fight to regionally guarantee the power of their tribes, based on their accepted chiefs, on their «assemblies of equals» of those standing up in them and in the Pashtunwalli or code of honor for their behavior and their individual and collective rights and duties. The Sunnis fight to get rights and concessions from the Shiite majority, which they too obstinately deny to them within the rules of the imperfect inorganic democracy existing in Iraq.

For it, their combats are very measured. And his aims go on through few and successive steps. So, the Sunnis leave certain freedom of action to the Islamic State, provided that they respect their hegemony and do not try to establish strategic guerrilla bases in the tribal zones. Then, in concrete cases, they facilitate temporary refuge, supply and concealment to their «action groups» in their operations. As was the case of the previous concentration of the companies and battalions of the Islamic State for the harassment and the temporal occupation of al-Ramadi and Faluya. The Islamic State has little probabilities of establishing itself and managing to control a more or less great zone in Iraq. Because, both the army and the Sunnis militias would reject his attempts of creating stable bases. Necessary to realize consistent and connected operations, looking for some military and/or social definite and transcendent aim.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

AN UNSUCCESSFUL AND DEGRADED CALIPHATE.

The Islamic State of Syria, Iraq and Levante (southwest of Asia)

Ayman al-Zawahiri disallowed at the beginning of February 2014 the use of the brand “al-Qaeda» by the ISSIL. This organization was using that “seal” as «guarantee of terrorism, robbery and anti-Christian unrestraint», in her raids and assaults in these countries and Lebanon. The mentioned managing director of «Terror International Partners» or “The Network” (al-Qaeda, in Arab) reached his incompetence level on having replaced, by premature and unexpected death, the founder of the «Consortium for the Islamic complete Terror». Lacking the charisma and the capacity of action that had Osama Ben Laden, the direction of al-Qaeda is today more an ideological «think tank», that a respectable and respected «strategic conductive command».

The Geographical Stage of the Islamic State.

This organization acts in a band of 100 thousand Km2., that spreads over Iraq and Syria and that forms a rectangle of 800 km length for 125 km width, from Baghdad up to Aleppo and the mountains of the west center of Syria. The width changes along the tour. The pillaged territory begins in Faluya, approximately 60 km west of Baghdad, and includes the nearby cities of Habbaniya and al-Ramadi. And, following the Euphrates towards the northwest, it reaches the riverside cities of Haditha and Âna, before penetrating in Syria by Abu Kemal’s city. In the middle of the desert of the south and east of Syria, only relieved by the river, is the Dayr al-Zawr city. And continuing for the river, we come first to Raqqa, close to the mouth of the river Belikh in the Euphrates. And then to the al-Assad artificial lake n the great meander of the Euphrates, to continue up to Aleppo and the Kurdish mountains of the west center, in the border with Turkey.

It is not easy to move in these lands, which are infertile, beyond the irrigations of the Euphrates and the lake al-Assad, without leaving a «tactical fingerprint of the march». Here are advised and prescribed the Obama’s drones and the profuse collection of information and analyses of his agencies of espionage. That can carry out a continuous exploration and follow-up labor on the human movements in the whole zone we treat. This, completed with the ground labor of collaborators and allied forces, allows to create a sufficient and constant intelligence on the plans, deployments, concentrations of the ISSIL’s forces.

The grounds of this great area lacks concealments and natural covers, like forests, extensive bushes and mountains. This does that the only refuges and stays for the yihadists groups are the villages and populations along its backbone: the river Euphrates and his banks. For their defense and cover they have to disperse in them, forming one or several «squads of muhaidins» of not more than 35 or 40 men each one. This irregular group is the major one that can be coherently commended by a local «arraez» or chief, with poor discipline and military formation.

The Jihadists in Syria and their Contradictions.

The deep crisis of the Syrian civil society and the mismanagement produced by a civil war «in crescendo», that already extends for three years, causing approximately 140 thousand deads, have allowed the jihadists groups in the Near East to settle in Syria. Their refuge zones or influence areas are not big, nor continue. They are rather dispersed, nearby between them, but split. And none of them would resist the serious harassment of the NSA (the National Syrian Army) or of the principal rebel forces: the SFA (Syrian Free Army), the recent “Islamic Front”, the newest “Army of the Syrian Mujahidins” anti al-Qaeda or the Kurdish forces, defending their frontier zone with Turkey. The occupied zones form as amorphous and fluent in evolution «spots», from which they withdraw if the military enemy pressure is strong and continued. To establish in alternative, as nearby as possible, positions, which allow them to keep a minimal operational connection with other temporal regional positions.

Since they do not have enough rooting between the Syrian, to leave their temporal positions does not suppose to abandon their habitants to the military or rebel enemies. The habitants of the occupied areas are not gained for the “Holy War”. These settlers are frightened, threatened and, at least, neutralized, in order that they give cover, subsistence and support to the jihadists bands and neither hinder, nor importune them in their activities. Only those that cooperated with the «Enemies of the Jihad» can be in real danger before them. When the jihadists occupy a population, always prepare their evacuation routes towards the suburbs of her, and of retreat, from those to the meeting points established nearby. To go from them to regional positions of reception and/or of occupation.

When they are liberated of the jihadist presence, many habitants, specially in the small towns, try to temporarily flee and shelter in the nearby major populations. The reason is that the imperious, inconsiderate and striking despotism of the jihadists, is joined by the heavy fires of their enemies, used during the recapture of the population. Both the military men and the rebel major groups prefer to avoid their losses and hurrying the eviction of the jihadists, using the aviation (only the government) and the artillery, if they have her. Even, the free flight hollow load antitanks missiles RPG-7V type (the poor artillery), launched in double or triple volleys, cause a devastating effect In the masonry or adobe buildings. This already would serve to make withdraw towards the town interior the security jihadists forces from their advanced and of observation positions, placed in the limits of the town or in adjacent points. And already finally, the military men, very occupied now, usually move back in a short time, to realize other missions; so, the constant, fluid and even reversible character of the irregular military operations; then, the jihadists can return and purge responsibilities. Because of it, many civilians think: «once and not more».

In Syria have proliferated the «groups of supporters» or bands of al-Qaeda. The reasons of which they have not been articulated in an only terrorist Syrian group are different. One is the distance and the lack of control and power of al-Qaeda’s «central core». This is the tails of her operational decentralization, which “the Network” is proud of and with what threatens to reach her timid enemies for half planet. The communist parties, specialists verified in the capture of the Power, always exhibited an ideological, operational and military monolithic unity, proper of warlike filled with enthusiasm monks, in their so called «national liberation fights» for three continents. Another reason is that these «separated brothers» hate between them. The egalitarianism derived from the brotherhood in the salafists sunnies doctrines, soon originates between the «equal ones», a purulent and contagious infection of envy, ill-will and rancor. And vice versa, the existence of a capable, just hierarchy, respected and accepted in an organization, favors the emulation and the ascent of many of the most capable members. A reason is also that the ambition, the audacity, the overflowing aggressiveness and the lack of scruples of his arms chiefs, sheiks, local maliks and peeled leaders, only are equalized by their scanty formation, a poor interpretive knowledge of the Koran and the Sunna and their broken military knowledge. Their first bitter enemy is neither the Army, nor the SFA or the self-defense militias of Kurds, Alauits, Christians or Druzes, according to the regions. Their more hated and fearful enemies are the commands of other jihadists groups of Syria. Because they are the most related, their rivals for the control and command, their competitors for the direction of the jihadist movement in Syria. This way, the foolishness (lack in the knowledge that supposes them and they need) of all the jihadists groups leads them to want to distribute the booty of war, before having put, at least, in reasonable conditions to aspire to conquer it.

On the other hand, touching already the strategies of the 2 groups pro al-Qaeda in Syria, the Front al-Nusrah seeks to establish only an «Islamic radical emirate» in Syria. The ISSIL, born in the guerrilla warfares fights in Iraq after 2003, wants to create a more extensive salafist caliphate. And to install it, for the moment, in Syria and Iraq. Though it has already done punishment assaults to the Lebanese Shiites, in response to Hezbola’s support to al-Assad. The first answers and goes in parallel to al-Qaeda’s strategy of favoring the creation and the functioning of national or regional «representative cores». That from his large physical distance and with the structural laxity of the Network, could be controlled by her, as for orders, strategies and operations and the use of the «al-Qaeda brand». But, the ISSIL looks for a functional independence and, probably also ideological, with «head office core» of the Network. Since it would act as a «leader operational command» in a supranational zone, which might include the whole southwest of Asia. This way, an administrator and absentee high headquarters would immediately be in the way to the ISSIL.

Ayman al-Zawahiri confirmed, as we said, the link of the Front al.-Nusrah with al-Qaeda and denied any relation with the ISSIL. And he had to intervene in other occasions to deprive al-Bagdadi of authority. «The ISSIL must be abolished, whereas the Islamic State of Iraq must continue working», al-Zawahiri declared In November, 2013. «Al-Bagdadi committed a mistake on having established the ISSIL without asking us for permission», and, continued, al-Golani the Syrian «has been wrong on having announced his rejection of the ISSIL, without our permission». Al-Zawahiri ordered then that the Islamic State of Iraq should circumscribe his operations to that country, whereas the Front al-Nusrah is “an independent branch of al-Qaeda, that reports before the general command (as a franchisee)». In addition, he recriminated both «brothers groups» for their violence acts against other Muslims. In response, and in spite that the original group «al-Qaeda in Iraq» (AQI) of Musab al-Zarkawi had sworn loyalty to al-Zawahiri, al-Baghdadi declared himself in rebellion towards him. Producing an important crisis of leadership in the Network, which they tried to relieve separating from al-Bagdadi. This could not less that debilitate the fight against al-Assad, as the jihadists groups were spreading in Syria and the army was centering towards the large populations. And during the recent clashes between the rebels, al-Golani offered to a mediation to the groups, which has not come to fruition, in order to give priority to plant face against al-Assad.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

MODERN WEAPONS: THE DRONE AND THE SUICIDAL MUJAIDIN II.

(continuation)

The explosive Taliban: from the Jihad to the Garden of the Houris, without scales.

The suicidal mujaidin is a personally advanced weapon (just look for who has nowadays the fearlessness of removing itself from life, defending some ideals and a prize at the Other Side), abundant, nearby and cheap. It possesses the highest «combat specific capacity», (according to the parameters established by colonel Trevor Dupuy, which refer to real values of the different armies, calculated in conflicts and wars): many military men, policemen and civil authorities of the enemy are definitive losses for each own loss. And speaking in terms of the universal good administration principle of the scanty available resources, his actions (as «investments») have also a high ROMI; or (military) return over this marginal investment. The suicidal jihadist optimizes this way his asymmetry with the weapon and the highly available enemies. This soldier of «one use» knows, takes advantage of his opportunity, decides and acts. Because he can be a hallucinated fanatic, but he is not an idiot. For his personal and ideological character, his effective action raises the moral, the conviction and the decision of his companions, collaborators and sympathizers. The islamist suicide «appreciates» this way his enemies. Because they are his infallible key to «going out under canopy from this Valley of Tears «.

The explosive fighter is a common weapon of the Talibans. If the explosive charge, her characteristics and the vector are suitable, the sophisticated enemy sensors and the protective jackets are of little use against he. And the armored vehicles and the buildings also do not serve to be protected from he. The “trigger carrying agent” can be man or woman and adult or child. And can cooperate in his suicide attack, a bushes, a goods stand, a donkey, a bicycle or an engine vehicle. A «suicidal fighter of one use», is not a select marksman: he is not necessary to train militarily (basic, technical and tactical knowledge). His other complementary, fearsome and almost unbeatable weapons are the surprise, the freedom of action and the initiative.

The aims preferred by the «explosives sworn-ins» are the enemy security forces, so much «unbelievers» as «traitors», and the Muslims belonging to the heterodox branch of the Islam (the Shiites and Alauites). To the enemy security forces they bring over disguised as recruits in formation, candidates for the enrollment, supplies personnel (outsourced services), companions, «collaborators» of the ISAF and civil innocent prominent figures. Their target is human always, because the property damages hurt less the regular enemy. And they are located in the policemen or the enemy armies agglomerations, in the barracks, recruitment centers and points of obliged and frequent passing and with motive of stops, farewells, ostentations and exhibitions, of those. To the Shiites they bring over taking advantage of their inevitable concentrations: the annual international peregrinations to his holy places, his stopping places in the different stages or the Fridays midday prayers, specially communities, in their mosques. Though the latter assaults take place rather in the bordering countries, Iraq (Shiite majority) and Pakistan (Sunni majority).

The great problem is that is very difficult to fight (to offset, stop or neutralize) against a few enemies, more or less isolated, determined to die and of another etnia and idiosyncrasy. And with the suicides this sharpens up to making it almost impossible to realize «a priori». Because they are combated with modern, technology and trained forces, prepared generally for wars of third generation. That would theoretically face similar forces or of the second generation. And their commands have almost as an unavoidable premise, preserve from physical (the principal thing), mental and moral hurts the men under their orders. The suicide must go unnoticed in the place chosen for the attack, by its age, genre, aspect and attitude. He has also to conceal perfectly his appliance and his equipment. To be able to approach his target and make exploit that one. His passport for the Garden of the Houris is to take with him the major number of dead and mutilated enemies.

The added human and material hurts to Muslims, caused around the explosion point, are “collateral damages”. The Sunnies jihadists looked for an overcomplicated, but sufficient «solution» in the practice, to ignore the Koranic rule «thou will not kill Muslims». On having lacked a clergy and an only religious doctrine, the interpretations of the Islam and, especially, his applications for the daily life, can be multiple. In effect, to calm the repugnances in producing them, an al-Qaeda «ideologist», Abu Yahya al-Libi, developed a «religious» theory about the «not looked hurt». According to her, is allowed to the militants jihadists to kill Muslims, when is inevitable. And, even, when it is useful. And the mujaidins express their desire that the collateral dead men, should also be considered by Allah as martyrs of his «holy war». And to believe this, comes very well to the fanatics who direct the groups and to the insanities fanatics that follow or support them.

The motivations of these “explosive sworn-ins” are simple. An effective material motivation is their chronic loss of the basic natural needs: sustenance, family, safety, refuge and cover, expectations and reasonable progress. It is an effective spur to induce the employment of the liberating violence by a part of the society, specially the idealistic young men. The «positive» motivation would be the economic prizes that Talibans give to the families of the martyrs. And these are so much the fallen in combat as the suicides. The religious motivation is the powerful mean of persuasion and conviction. The suicides of the Jihad are methodically and intensely catechized. The Koranic verses related with the Jihad, are known by heart by them. The other suicides «example» surrounds them in their daily life. In the way of photos, manuscripts, testimonial videos and destiny companions. Their preachers clarify their doubts and encourage them to prematurely reach the Paradise. That is destined specially to the martyrs of the Jihad. Everything is like to the initiation functioning of a toxic sect: that destroys the personality of the lowest members. The universal character of the Muslims’ community, facilitates the flow and the insertion of «internationalist voluntaries» suicidal fighters from other countries.

The operational key of the Taliban are their innumerable local chiefs, with their small bands of radical irregulars. They are the persons in charge of intimidating, teaching or catechizing, scaring, attacking and occupying more or less temporarily some of the numerous settlements and hamlets, on both sides of the border. The Taliban movement follows a constant elementary cycle of «teaching, training, supporting and delegating» between the small «sheiks» and his deputies. So that they obtain a certain rotation in the command and in its exercise. These local «maliks» are practically immune to the assault of the «drones» of the ISAF. That explore, attack the irregular enemy and execute his evident, it is supposed, out-standing commands.

The drones cannot follow and attack so many minuscule and evasive targets. From an enemy network that turns out to be profuse, diffuse and confused. They cannot substitute, as is claimed by extrapolation from a few first successes, the ground active and aggressive patrols of exploration or combat. That, together with the military units and the civic and political action groups, are destined to dispute and gain his “bases refuges” to the enemy and, later, the popular majority support. Like the «American saturation bombardments» could not cut the Route Ho Chi Minh, supplying the Vietcong and the regular North Vietnamese forces in the «zone demilitarized» and at the south of this. Going from North Vietnam across Eastern Laos to South Vietnam. And all was because their air attacks, were not accompanying a «ground action» over that Route. That was complementary, systematic and constant, not necessarily exhaustive, of the air action of pure attrition.

And waiting in peace death from sky does not scare, even not worry sufficiently the mentally normal people. This only happened to the imaginary chief of Asterix’s Gallic village. And is something like what Ramon Gómez de la Serna was saying to his acquaintances and less intimate friends in Buenos Aires: «Here I am, waiting for the cancer». The intimidating threat, which could change the conduct of an enemy chief, must be something real (that is tended to magnify), sufficient, felt and immediate or near. Like the sirens installed in the Stukas. In order that his precise diving bombardment terrifies in land all his possible human targets, which were not yet veterans. Or as the explosive mujaidins, whose behavior is for the enemy like a “gas”, without own volume or form and that can reach all the available sites.

The Islamic Jihad and the Suicide.

The suicide is a favorite weapon of the Islamic Jihad. The suicide is for the Islamic Jihad a cheap, sufficiently abundant, effective and very asymmetric, technical and economically, weapon. The sophisticated enemy sensors are of little use against her. The protective jackets also are of little use. The armored vehicles and the buildings are of little use to protect from her. If the explosive load, her characteristics and the vector are the suitable ones. The starting carrying agent can be man or woman and adult or child. A donkey, a bicycle or a motor vehicle can cooperate in his suicidal assault. It is not necessary to militarily train too much (basic, technical and tactical trainings) a suicide.

The modern violent Muslim Radicalism.

The radical Islamic insurgents devoted themselves between the 60s and 80s in last century, to attack those that they were qualifying of corrupt and false Muslim, socialistic or liberal pro occidental, governments. Their fortune was small for all the effort done: the retreat of the Soviets from Afghanistan, with the logistic western support, and the capture of the power in Sudan, guided by al-Turabi, after they infiltrated and got strong in his Army, which is still a unique case. From 90, their terrorist aims are Western developed countries.

Their present operative characteristics are:

1) Their unnecessary and indiscriminate brutality, which discredits them before their religion.

Sura 2, aleya 10 «When it is said to them: Do not commit disorders (voice with which the crimes are defined) in the Earth, they answer: Far from it, we introduce in it the good order (the Good)».

2, 11 (12) «Alas!, they commit disorders, but they do not understand it».

28, 77 «Like Allah does the Good, also make you the good and do not foment the corruption (the Evil)» (murder of innocent and of peoples that receive you- the lands of dar-el-Ahd-, drunkenness, drugs, unnecessary damages of the things).

This way they despise and not comply with important moral aleyas, without Allah had changed these for them. Sura 2, aleya 100 «We do not abrogate any verse of this Book, nor we will make erase any one of your memory, without replacing it by other one equal or better».

2) The absolute absence of venerable and pious ulemas and muftíes in their side.

3) Their great operative decentralization owing to the universality of the Umma, which goes beyond the idea of nation or race. But that prevents them from obtaining strategic aims, though their punctual actions are important, painful and fearsome.

4) Their failure in joining actively and firmly to a social wide group, which gives coverage and permanent impulse to their movement. The most mentally ill activists are in the habit of being isolating progressively of the society (at least, emotional and ideologically) though they «live» inside it, for the sake of their violent methods, to which they sacrifice everything for the efficiency. They follow a process of segregation, purification (in their improvised and not orthodox rites, they fast, use water from Islam´s sacred places and green banners with inscriptions of the aleyas that favor their cause), consecration and radicalization. Up to coming to the death and even to the suicide in their limited actions. And then they become extinct, as weak, sterile and deviant that are, far from the Umma and her real interests.

5) The Islamic terrorists are in many places deeply ideologically and strategically divided. Though the rivals bands could occasionally offer between themselves, support, refuge, information or supplies. The Gaza strip is dominated for years by Hamas, radical fundamentalist Palestinian group of sunní orientation, in direct and violent rivalry with the Palestinian government of al-Fatah in the Jordan West Bank. In Gaza, two branches organizations of al-Qaida, Ansar al-Sunna and Ansar al-Islam, a few derisory groups, face also violently Hamas for the influence on her habitants. The Pakistani Taliban, principally the Tehrik e-Taliban group, and the independence cachemirs, periodically realize attempts against the chií minority of the country. In Iraq, al-Qaida dedicates to attack the chiís that come in peregrination from the country and Iran, to the annual acts of this religion in their sacred places of Samarra, Nayaf and Kherbala. Also did that the sunníes radical Iraqi (former public officials of the Baas and ex-members of the armed forces, generally purged without neither processes nor judgments, and regional tribal groups). That were in rebelliousness against the majority chií governments, before the so called «the sunní wake up», promoted by the general David Petraeus, who transformed them into self-defense national militias.

6) Their zeal of publicity, to which the West contributes insensitively, stupid (is not to know what should be known) and glad.

7) Their present aim is to strike any government, since the radical and aggressive caliphate in dar-el-Islam does not exist nowadays.

What is and what does mean the Jihad in the context of the Muslim revelation?

The Islam is the submission of the men to God. In its simpler meaning, is a simple faith, with external and social well definite, easy to follow and fulfill rites. The rites are canonize actions by a religion and necessary in order that it imbues in the personal and collective soul of its believers. In the Islam there exist 5 great rites, which are symbolized in its iconography by an opened hand:

The faith profession, short declaration that opens anyone the entry to the Islam. The 5 daily invocations (the Salat) to Allah. The fasting during the Ramadan´s month (the Roza). The charity (the Zakat) with the helpless, disabled and poor (in this order) of the Umma (Muslim universal community). And the peregrination to Mecca or the Hajj at least once in the life, if there are possessed enough resources, which is realized in community, congregating nowadays simultaneously several million persons, between the seventh and the tenth day of last month of the lunar calendar, Dhul i Hijja.

The Jihad, as holy war, the blooding effort in Allah’s path, is directed against those that threaten the Umma. These can be whether the hostile external unfaithful persons, as the not Muslims which coexist in dar-el-Islam, the lands where the Umma rules politically, and that have broken their «protection agreement» with it. The Jews and the Christians have theoretical right to it, as peoples mentioned in the Koran and that hold some of the books considered also as prophetic by the Islam. The Jihad is considered to be a practically equal obligation to one of the so called Five Pillars of the Islam, already mentioned.

The religious Hierarchies in the Islam. Their principal activities and roles.

In the Islam does not exist an institutionalized, universal and rigorous clergy, formed in a same way and equal in the whole Umma. To be responsible of the orthodoxy and homogeneity of the ideas, procedure and dogmas. So much it is, the official belonging to the Islam is achieved by the pronunciation of the faith profession: «there is no any more God (in Arab, Allah) that God and Mahoma is his Prophet».

As for the prominent figures, we have the ulemas or studious experts in the law of the Islam and the muftíes or lawyers entrusted to interpret the sharia or Islamic civil and penal law. Though both are totally imbricated, since the Prophet, with his hadices and other traditions or Sunna, took charge for divine inspiration giving procedure for almost all the occasions in the daily Arabic life of the 7th century.

The ulemas council, that is something like an episcopal conference, would be in every country or region the maximum Muslim authority. The most prestigious, by their formation, would come from the University of Al Azhar, in Cairo.

Next, the imames or chaplains would be entrusted in presiding the prayers in the mosques. They place for it opposite to the indicative niche, placed in the west (Mecca) wall and looking at their public. Finally there would be the muezzin or sacristans, who call five times a day, from before the dawn up to well entered the night, in order that the Muslims do their prayers of adoration and of acceptance of God’s will. The formation of the imames is totally different inside a country and not necessarily deep. Their principal skills are a good empathy with their public and a certain speech faculty. Let’s remember that the terrorist of March 11, 2004 so called The Chinese presided, as was said then, several times the prayer in the mosque of Madrid in the 30 (before M-30) street …

The fatawa (plural of fatwa) are properly the juridical decisions expressed by the mufties, in interpretation of the different situations or cases came up in the Umma. And not necessarily presented to them, as they can be dictated them on their own initiative. They would acquire this way a sense of jurisprudence body of the sharia, if really they depart from religious authorities recognized by their doctrine and knowledge sound.

This way, directly, Jomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie lacked legal value, since England or France were not lands where it was possible to apply the sharia, on not having been a part of dar el islam. This improper extension supposed a dangerous and shameless interference in the political and civil matters of countries that were receiving in peace the Muslims, a part of dar el ‘ahd. Another thing is that some Muslims were ready to argue in this way and to defending it. Especially between peoples who do not know nothing about their schemes, parameters and interests.

A very serious accusation exists likewise in the Islamic doctrine, the takfir, which stems from kfur or ungodliness. With this term is designated unbeliever someone who is or tries to be a Muslim and is to be exiled of the Umma. This term is related to other one, the jahiliyya, which designates the existing barbarism previous to the Islam. On the violent destruction of the Arabic jahiliyya, the Prophet built the incipient Islamic state.

The ulemas, the law doctors, would be the ones to employ the institution of the takfir. To defining those who incur this disgrace and anathema. But the great dispersion of schools and the absence of a common universal orthodoxy (for a religion, the not negotiable only thing is the dogma), have advised that its use should be restricted. Since it might lead, in specially virulent epochs, to an extreme situation of mutual and extensive anathema, which would damage seriously the Umma.

Nevertheless, the Islamic violent fundamentalists, when it has been convenient for them, have not doubted of use the takfir. It happened in the decade of the nineties, in Algeria, between the different fundamentalist groups of the FIS, the GIA and other minor sub trends, that sometimes lasted only while their crazy guide was living. A curious thing was that the origin of many of impassioned were generally the urban poor classes, heiresses of the rural emigration. For whom the religion could have very earthly goals, and not the pious Muslims classic classes and the merchants.

The Koran and the Jihad.

We give a selection of the aleyas of the Noble Koran that treat on the Jihad. We don not use the sunna (tradition) of the Prophet, which can be an object of controversy, about its legal legitimacy, with the Chiís and other minor Islamic groups.

Sura 2, aleya 186 «Do the Holy war for Allah’s reason against those who make the war to you».

2, 187 «Kill them anywhere that you find them and expel them wherefrom they have expelled you (Andalusia, Sicily, the Balkans? But, perhaps did they come first there?)».

2, 189 «Attack them (the unfaithful persons) until there is not presently idolatry and all adoration is given to Allah». It repeats almost exactly in 8, 40 (39).

2, 212 «The war has been prescribed to you and you have taken distaste of it».

2, 214 «The temptation of the idolatry is worse than the slaughter. The unfaithful persons will not stop doing the war to you, while they have not made you resign your religion, if they can».

2, 215 «Those who leave their country and fight in Allah’s path (the Jihad) can wait for His mercy».

4, 7 «Those who obey Allah and to His Messenger will enter in the society of the righteous, of the martyrs, of the virtuosos, whom Allah has filled with His benefits».

4, 74 «That fight in Allah’s way those that change the life in this world, for that in the Last one. And that who fights in Allah’s path, as dies or turns out to be victorious, We will give him an enormous remuneration».

4, 79 «…have exclaimed: Lord, why do you order us the war? …Answer them: The possession of the life here below is small thing; the future life is the real good for those who fear Allah. Here they will not cheat you even in a filament».

4, 105 «And do not weaken in chasing these people. If you feel sorry, also they feel sorry, but you expect from Allah what they cannot hope».

9, 39 «If you do not go to the battle, Allah will punish you with a painful punishment: He will replace you by another people».

9, 92 «The weak persons, the patients, those who do not have means, will not be forced to go to the war, provided that are sincere respect of Allah and His Messenger». (This makes fall practically the obligation of the Jihad in the Umma, which must contribute this way a suitable number of muhaydins).

9, 124 «Oh, believers!, attack the unfaithful persons who surround you: that they always find in you a rough reception».

47, 4 «When you find unfaithful persons, kill them up to the point of doing with them a slaughter and put chains strongly on the captive ones to prevent them from fleeing».

47, 37 «Do not show cowardice and do not call the unfaithful persons to make the peace, when you are the strongest».

All those verses that prescribe and encourage the armed struggle in Allah’s path can be used as absolute, direct and repeated religious “indications” or orders. That employed by an “imam” or preacher, which directs the prayers and Koran readings in the mosque, and which credentials are not so much an exquisite Islamic formation of several years in a credited madrassa (Koran school), but rather to possess an empathy with his community and a certain oratory gift, can turn out to be subversive and incendiary.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

The defense of the military positions in the asymmetrical counterinsurgency warfare.

The effective defense of the billeting, redoubts and military camps from the attack and harassment of the irregular armed rebels is based on three operative qualities: the initiative, the mobility and the offensive action. These, in turn, are directly determined by the mentality and the combative disposition of the military men (which depend fundamentally on them) and by the military capacity or available means in the operations zone (that depend fundamentally on the politicians and the public managers).

The countless military, social, ethnic and economic guerrilla targets in an asymmetrical conflict.
Almost by definition, the military and police available means in a war against the irregulars are very scanty, and even they can be scandalously insufficient. And this does not depend so much of them not on the established authorities, but it is a direct function of the strategy inherent in a guerrilla right development process. The number of possible, potential goals and targets, which offers an organized modern, more or less developed society, to the operative solvent strategy of an armed insurgency is almost countless and inexhaustible.
Let’s see an expressive, but not exhaustive relation:
Attempts on civil and religious authorities and on isolated members or little groups of the armed forces and policemen.
Destruction and sabotage of the plants and energetic networks: thermal plants, dams, combined cycle plants, wind fields, refineries, fuels deposits, crude oil and gas pipelines, electric transformers and high tension lines and their centers of control and distribution.
Assaults to the lines of communications: television and mobile telephony repeaters, broadcasting stations, radio antennas, telegraphic wires, bridges, tunnels and viaducts, halts and railway stations, railroad track and catenary parts, trains and buses, great tonnage trucks and distribution transport vehicles, temporary obstacles in the roads and railway tracks, covered or not by indirect or direct fire.
Destruction or incapacitation of directly economic means of all sizes and importance: mines, plantations, industries, shops, hotels and resorts, groups of tourists. In these cases the insurgency must value the direct loss of working places and the probable alienation of part of the popular sympathy towards it; the effect is similar if there gets depressed the economic activity, but the employment is not destroyed directly.

The biased political intervention in this kind of social irregular military conflicts is a plague for the military struggle.
Sun Tzu is the real or supposed name of a Chinese author, who wrote The Thirteen Chapters on the Art of War, between 400 and 320 BC The style unit and its originality allow to affirm that it is neither a collective work nor a summary. And the use of the cross-bow did not generalize until 400 BC and the cavalry was not incorporated into the army before 320 BC And, what does Sun Tzu say on the military missions and the political spurious interference on them?
«Normally, when the armed forces are employed, the general first receives the general orders from the sovereign. Later he assembles the troops, and makes the army a quite homogeneous and harmonious unity and installs it in its camp”. Chapter 7, verse 1.
«It is necessary to know the sovereign has three ways of taking his army to the disaster. They consist in proceeding as follows:
To ignore that the army must not advance and order that it should advance, or, to ignore that it must not withdraw and arrange a retreat. This is what is called «to put the army in a difficulty». Chia Lin’s commentary: «there is no major calamity that the orders of a sovereign that resides in the court».
To ignore all the military matters and to take part in its administration. This disorients the officials.
To ignore all the problems of the command and to take part in the exercise of the military responsibilities. This destroys the spirit of the officials » Chapter 3, verses 19 to 22.
«That who has competent generals and protects them from the interference of the sovereign, will be the victor”. Ibid, verse 29. Hsi Ho Yen’s commentary: «In the war hundreds of changes take place in every stage. To say that a general must wait for all the orders from his Superiors is like to inform a Superior that you want to extinguish a fire. Before the orders come the ashes will be cold. And it has been said that in such circumstances it is necessary for  him to consult the General Inspector of the Army! To tie shortly a competent general, while he is asked to suppress a crafty enemy, is like to hold the Black Greyhound of the Han and later give it the order to  catch unattainable hares»
«There are cases in which the orders of the sovereign do not have to be executed necessarily. Chang Yu’s commentary: «The king Fu Chai has said: ‘ If you know which is the conduct to follow, go on; do not wait the instructions».
A general who possesses a perfect knowledge of his trade, knows how to handle the troops. Chia Lin’s commentary: «The general must be sure of being able to exploit the situation in his profit, according to its circumstances» Chapter 8, verses 8 and 9.

A vivid example of a right camp defense taken from the Vietnam’s war.
2 º battalion of the 28 North American infantry regiment carried out in March, 1966 the operation Cocoa Beach, of “search and destroy” units of the Viet Cong, in the Ben Cat district, Binh Dueng province of South Vietnam. The battalion, at lieutenant colonel Kyle M. Bowie’s orders, moved afoot on March 2 from the base of its brigade in Lai Khe up to the Lo Ke rubber plantation. There it established a strong defensive perimeter, in a flat and free of bushes area, except for some hedges and elephant grass spots. West of the plantation a thick jungle was raising. The time was good.
The following day, the companies A and B initiated their missions, remaining the company C in garrison. In its return, company B located an enormous trench of several km, which was passing in North and North-East directions from the US camp. And that had been occupied recently by an important enemy force, as the new excavations in it were proving.
Colonel Bowie supposing that a great Viet Cong force was in the vicinity, coordinated with the 3 ª brigade to assure himself the air and artillery supports. The fighting positions of his men in the camp were improved and protected everything possible. Bowie also established three observation and combat positions, each for a reinforced section, advanced by each company, at approximately 500 m. out the camp perimeter.
Around 06:00 on March 5, the second lieutenant Robert Hibbs, company B, in positions with his section on the perpendicular crossing of the routes Blue and Red, at the northwest of the camp, observed a group of armed women and children carrying ammunition. They were moving slowly through the Red route (parallel to the trench) and stopped at approximately 100 m. from the patrol.
Immediately he detected a company of the Viet Cong advancing from north to south in the Blue route, which stopped at approximately 50 m. of his position. Three Viets went to the group of civilians. The patrol used the delay to direct all her Claymore grenades on the Blue route. Finally, the guerrilla company continued the march. When its main body was at approximately 6 m. of the patrol, this one detonated her Claymore and threw hand grenades, dispersing finally the rest of the Viets with the fire of the M-16s. On having heard the explosions colonel Bowie ordered Hibbs to return. In her way of return, the patrol reached the rear of another enemy company, deployed already to attack. The American patrol attacked the enemy and crossed its assault deployment, routing it totally. Hibbs died trying to recover with his sergeant a wounded straggler. Before falling down definitively, hurt several times, he destroyed his night vision devices. Honor’s Medal of the Congress was granted to him.
The patrol of the company A was operating south of the camp. Soon she was totally surrounded by Viet Cong columns, which ignored her presence and which were going towards the American battalion. The patrol stuck at the end of an enemy squad, to go approaching the perimeter. Already near it, this way out was made initially shooting and launching grenades over the nearby guerrillas, slipping towards the camp.
Bowie withdrew patrol C. Around 07:00 the battalion was occupying his defense positions almost in full force.
The opportune detection of the enemy intention, the premature dislocation of part of his attack deployment, the precise support by the brigade heavy fire and the defensive positions in depth of the battalion were decisive. Around 12:00 the enemy assault, by the 272 regiment of infantry of the Viet Cong, reinforced by a heavy weapon battalion in war subordination, had vanished with the most serious losses.

One example from the Iraqi counter insurgency war. The  Spanish base in Diwaniya
On August 28, 2003 an Spanish infantry brigade assumed the control of the sector centered in Diwaniya, as part of the Hispanic Polish division, deployed in the south center of Iraq. Diwaniya, city of approximately 100 thousand inhabitants, is the capital of Al-Qadisiya’s province.
Scarcely come to the power in April, 2004, one of the first orders of the Spanish Chief of the Government Rodríguez was the retreat of our forces of Iraq. The following one was to grant the Great Cross of the Military Merit to the minister of Defense, for the above mentioned withdraw operation. The shame of his family made resign Mr. Bono the above mentioned high decoration. On May 21 were transferred officially the control of our three barracks, Spain, Al-Andalus and Santo Domingo, in Diwaniya to the North American forces.
The North American command initiated this April an offensive in this zone against the so called Army of the Mahdi (the guided by Allah) of the imam chií Muqtada al-Sadr (see our article » Iraq Hoy” in this blog) and they requested the active Spanish help. As our forces did not have a Parliament “mandate” to take part in attack operation, the continuity of their mission in the reconstruction and stabilization of Iraq was staying in precariously indefinitely.
The situation had deteriorated so much that the Iraqi governor of Al-Qadisiya, more extensive than Estremadura Spanish province and with approximately 800 thousand inhabitants, had just deserted and to form a band of approximately 40 followers, to make worth) his master of the war’s rights.
Diwaniya’s facilities, where were lodging our more than thousand men, remained turned into Fort Apache’s imitation. Because the Iraqi rebels are not in the habit of estimating these subtleties like: «I am here, but I do not attack you» or «I am white, rich and use Kevlar helmet, but I am not Yankee». We were an easy and comfortable target for their fury and hatred to a not Islamic democracy and to the winning Christians occupants.
During more than one month the irregular rebels chiíes realize a permanent harassment of our barracks, tremendously defended (sensors, pits, wire fences and fortifications) against the islamist suicides assault bombs. But it happens that these suicides, who are illuminated but not silly fanatics, attack enemies groups not protected sufficiently, searching as passport to the Houris Garden, to take with them the major possible number of dead or mutilated enemies. There was not even a suicidal attempt against us.
The majority of the days of wait up to the announced retreat, our billetings were scourged by automatic fire of light weapon and mortar shells, with an average of 10 grenades for assault. In order to remove the origin of the indirect fire, our forces realized assaults with limited aims, expelling the irregular mortars up to the other side of the river. In the encounters and ambushes suffered, we killed approximately 20 rebels. We suffered a dozen of injured men in the whole process and several Arabic collaborators died. We do not have any news or help from the chií battalion of the Iraqi Army that we were training. And whose colonel was asking formally us not to return to Spain.

Some possible right fighting missions for this type of defense.
The gravity center of the active defense of the military fixed positions resides in the observation and the control of the approximation routes. That in rural zone can be a semi flooded rice field; in mountainous area, a heights line below the military crest; in urban zone, the streets orientated towards them, from certain distance, and in a road, a verge. All this compounded by the climate and the day hour.
The observation and fighting positions can consist from the couple of snipers up to a platoon, according to the characteristics of the area and the intentions and capacities of the enemy. Those are apart of the perimeter defense and of the patrols who cross it randomly, that constitute a part of the camp static defense.
The enemy is in the habit of exploring, at least initially and also in fluid fighting conditions, by observation. It is important to locate and to eliminate these reconnaissance positions. The patient observation is the way. Bearing in mind that if the exigency is intense, every 30 minutes the observer must be replaced, because he looks, but already not sees.
If additional means exist for it and as complement, it is very necessary to use the energetic patrolling (see our article “Irak, hoy” in this blog) against the enemy, moving away much more.
A passive defense, limited to rejecting the assaults, with the initiative and the election of the moments in hands of the enemy, is almost the most solvent of the combat morale that can experience a force, leaving apart a defeat. Ask about it to the Frenchmen who were defending multitude of redoubts and positions in Indochina before Dien Bien Fu in 1954 and to the nationalistic Chinese until 1949.

The urban guerrilla war in Iraq

Stalingrad (1942) and the Iraqis cities (2007). Are they two «parallel battles»?

In the description that follows, our intelligent reader will be able to see the similarities and the differences of these urban battles. And to extract his conclusions and possibilities. They are separated in the time by 65 years, but they are sensitively equal in the fighting forms. In they the defensive starts with a qualitative advantage. Only they are really separated by the different commands´ intentions and the capacities of both defenses.

Stalingrad.

In the summer of 1942, 6 º German army, advancing in the direction Volga, initiated the assault of the city of Stalingrad. The sweeping German advance through the wide Soviet steppes (of Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine) during the good time, was stopping to take Stalingrad. Placed in the right bank of the low section of the Volga, near the river mouth but without controlling it, Stalingrad was lacking the strategic importance of the Caucasus, as crude oil production zone, or Moscow, as the most important railroad communications hub in the USSR, at the west of the Urales.

Promptly Hitler is going to concentrate obsessively on its occupation. Probably as result of his decisive leading role in the direction of the war, from his armchair general’s place, many hundreds of km from the running drama. From the Wehrmatch’s headquarters or from the wolf’s shelter or the Alpine fortress, the supreme command was not perceiving the differences of equipment, motivation and combative availability between the armies of the Axis deployed in the European USSR. In the maps of general situation, the units and big units of the different national armed forces, were only distinguished by the color of the representative figures or flags, that were indicating their geographical deployment. In certain occasion, the Spanish ambassador Agustín de Foxá, count of Foxá, was present at an invitation in Rome. During it, the count Ciano, son-in-law of the Duce and Italian Secretary of State, with the distorted intention of treading on ourselves and to laugh, asked him: «Certainly, Foxá, when does Spain think to finally join the international struggle against the Bolshevism, which we are supporting?» Don Agustín answered him: «Count Ciano, do you believe that the Reich can permit to have another military ally?» The following day Foxá was indicated that he should leave Italy.

As consequence of all this, 6 º German army, the major «great unit» of its class of the whole Wehrmatch or German armed forces, is going to waste its operational advantages of movement with flexibility and agility. Which were allowing it to keep the freedom of action and the initiative in its offensive actions, as strategic decisive principles. And it in exchange for using only tactically its fire and of combat in the close distances capacities, to reduce an enemy arranged already fiercely not to yielding any more land, to resisting up to the death in the defense of the city. An enemy whose chiefs and high commands were encouraged only by the hope that their Stavka or high central staff get time to assemble and deploy the enough reserves, to crush the insufficiently protected flanks of the German strategic deployment, around 6 º army, defended by the 3 º and 4 º Romanian armies. A hard and tough enemy, to support the tremendous efforts and hardships, by the fatalism, the sobriety and the conformity of his Slavic idiosyncrasy, represented in the motto chosen by his commands, «there is no land for us beyond the Volga».

At the end of August, 1942 the German forward guards began to operate against Stalingrad. Two months later the Soviet positions in the city were diminishing to a few isolated zones, full of debris and rubbles, of not more than 275 m. in depth, hugged to the right bank of the Volga. These resistance islands, purified in the oven of the privations and the resistance to numerous German assaults, turned in uncompromising. Two were their structural secrets: the Germans never managed to isolate the city from the left bank of the river and in the mentioned zones the rigid defense was anchored in buildings of metal framework, covered with metallic plates. The grains elevator close to the trains station (too narrow and isolated to resist indefinitely), and several factories Red October (of light infantry weapons), Barricade (of artillery tubes of great calibre) and Dzerzhinski (of tractors, reconverted to make the T-34 model 41), from south to north, are the examples. The 6 º army became exhausted. The campaign ended on February 2, 1943, with the surrender by Fieldmarshall von Paulus of the remains of his army, turned into an enormous mass of armed men without operational capacity.

The confronted rivals in the cities of Iraq.

In Baghdad, Samarra, Faluya and other Iraqi populations confront two very unequal and different enemies. The American troops are prepared to fight against a military regular enemy, endowed with a masses army or even more modern, with means technologically more elaborated and men better trained, to support the loneliness and tensions of the current battle fields. Definitively, its «environment», its performance space, is the direct and opened clash in presence of a great profusion of probable enemy targets. Its instrument is the attrition, the destruction of the targets that the enemy shows and that could be detected and acquired in all the depth of his march, assemble, defense or attack deployments. The last two enemy echelons, nowadays increasingly remote or deep, are reached by the long range tactical support aviation or with the ballistic or of free flight rocketry of medium range.

But, what does happen with a weaker in means and equipment rival, always evasive by need and method and with another cultural and social idiosyncrasy? That is not worry if he needs to move back or to hide in front of a superior enemy. Without for it feeling unworthy, loser or defeated. in these frustrated and incomplete combats. But he avoids the fighting that is unfavorable for him, waiting for a better opportunity to use his sparing and effective means with 40 years of design. Knowing that his enemy tomorrow will continue presenting numerous targets, more or less easy to scourge, irritating and hurting. Since the vehicles and the military patrols swarm everywhere, looking for a kind of «zone saturation», but generally measuring the used times, in labors of vigilance, escort, billeting and successive marches, almost routine, evident and too massive all. A rival who does not seek to win so much battles, but erode and spoil, to be a nuisance and to enervate finally. And that knows that the time is working in his favor in his own land. And that only has to resist and wait, keeping a critical volume of military annoying activity, which could confirm before all, native and foreign, inside and out of Iraq, his presence in force and his determination in the fighting struggle. Acting as a harmful, odorless and colorless gas, subtle and light by its physical nature, that everything it reaches, penetrates and damages.

The Iraqi society.

In Iraq, the Islam is a principal factor of social cohesion and national integrity, independently of the sunn’i or chií Islamic branch that people belong to. The Islam is, in its simpler and popular meaning, a simple faith provided with external and social definite well rites, that integrate the individuals in it, easy to follow and observe. An Islamic democracy, always based on the Umma or social religious community, the Koran or direct revelation from Allah, the sunna or the Prophet tradition and the Sharia or its derivative civil and penal laws, is not equal to the western democracies. Where scarcely resists and survive today in day some moral or social value, facing the all-powerful asymmetric avalanche of the individualized freedoms, dedicated as source of Law, without any juridical consideration of the duties.

The obedience is a personal and social quality very established in the Islamic societies. The sheik or chief of the families of the clan is obeyed in the attaining things to the social order. The familiar chief or father is obeyed within the family. And the God’s will is obeyed and respected as a vital rite in the Islam. This social obedience is wealth-producing and protective, not solvent or sickly by itself. In the madrasas, the Koran is learned by memory, with constant recitation throughout the years of education. Since it is the God’s Word got down from Allah, where it existed from always, there is neither slanted interpretation nor malicious acceptable critique, out of its literal. It is possible that the Muslim modern societies are envious of the economic western development. But also they despise sincerely the loss of real human values that the Christian and lay societies have unnecessarily suffered, in their way towards it.

Finally, we must not forget the structure of tribes, regional and local clans and families, which supports the Iraqi society. That one gives the real value and practical sense to the loyalties and the interests, always relative and still opportunists, of the Iraqis. Graphical, synthetic, paradoxical (for going abreast against the real Islam education) and always excessively, we might express it this way: «My tribe and I, against the world; my clan and I against the tribe; my family and I, against the clan; my brother and I, against the family; I, against my brother».

The different armed Iraqi insurgents types.

Depending on their religious ideology and their active membership in one or another armed rebel faction, the insurgents act of very different forms.

Across Syria they are infiltrating (since they avoid the controls or they disguise themselves) more than half of the suicidal muhaydines. These are very angry sunnis, persuaded for their short role, very little militarily trained and devious religiously fanatical. Soon they leave the struggle and do not look for the armed clash, but the individual and redeeming action. That assures them a passport to the «Houri’s garden», far already of this » tears’ valley», with the visa of «causing the major possible number of dead and mutilated enemies».

The smallest and worse organized bands, that are the great majority, though they are belonging to the big rebel groups, cannot aspire to face openly the soldiers. Their offensive actions consist of scourging, kidnapping, torturing and mutilating, putting bombs and detonate them from distance, to do sabotages, to damage the small enemy units and to hurt or to kill isolated authorities, military men and policemen. Deciding the timing moment to act on the weakness, the carelessness and the negligence of their enemy and having always a high probabilities of fleeing and vanishing. They protect themselves mixing with the civil submissive population, favorable or compelled. They defend themselves from the military unexpected or deliberate assaults, trying to elude them and slipping from the threatened zone, which, till now, is never occupied permanently by the troops. To shelter temporarily or to be established in the surroundings: another neighborhood, another small population in the region or province.

In Iraq the rebel bases are always in the cities and populations most favorable to the activity of the different rebel armed groups. And surrounded or mixed by the military local and foreign forces and allies. In January, 2004, the North American intelligence intercepted a memorandum of 17 pages written by Abu Musad al-Zarqawi (the previous regional chief of Al-Qaida) and directed to Osama bin Laden, in which he was expressing to Osama his worry for his survival: «In Iraq there are not mountains where we could shelter, nor forests in which thickness we could hide. There are spies eyes everywhere. Our backs are exposed and our movements are realized in view of all». For it, not all the populations are defensible of the powerful military means, not even the rebels have the intention of doing it. Here do not exist Numantine or die-hard ways of military fighting without hope.

The urban active defense of the insurgents positions in Iraq.

It is not easy to use and defend the urban zones of repulse. Its employment demands high requirements to the rebel combatants:

A sufficient motivation, which encourages them to follow the arms way and risking their lives for its cause, and appeases and rationalizes them the inevitable fear of the fighting in the nearby distances with a superior enemy, until the seniority offers to them new impulses.

A good training in the infantry fights, which gives them trade and confidence. A successful cooperation between the small units that garrison the zones, that guarantees them a cohesion without fissures in their tenuous and lean deployment and that allows and facilitates the command conduction and the accomplishment of his plans. To get iron nerves tempered by everything previous, that accustom them to fight in solitary or in small groups, refusing to flee in face of the implacable threat of the heavy military fire. For all this, among the few tens of thousands of armed rebels existing, not more than 15 % of them can in these moments use this kind of defensive fight.

These urban irregular enemies are protected extending their defensive positions beyond the necessary in a conventional defense, covering this way a major occupied surface. In the defense zone they establish delaying points, more or less reinforced. These protect the most critical positions of the zone, incorporate in the defense the buildings with steel structure , specially resistant, and form fire bags for the enemy that gets through. The resistance nests have here more importance, provided that the occupation of the zone of defense is more tenuous, they cannot strengthen the positions too much, the sights are more short and exist numerous approximation routes. They depend on the delaying points and to them they fall back if are invaded or destroyed. Numerous alternative or extras positions exist, more of the habitual in this kind of fight. This allows to deceive the military enemy about the forward limit of the defense position, its real extension, the limits of the sectors that form it, the intentions of the rebel command of the zone about its defense and to disperse the heavy fire of the attacker. In the edges of the urban zones they never establish these fixed positions. Those are occupied by combat advanced parties which mission is to receive the possible explorers or civil observers, to avoid surprises and to deceive about the tracing of the defensive zone. The occupants of combat advanced positions, distributed in pairs of sentries and some very small mobile patrol, fall back in their moment towards the more interiors delaying points.

These «fortresses» are diffuse, secret and imperceptible for the strangers. In a few hours the previous works are reinforced and occupied. It is necessary to enter the houses to detect perforated walls and to find alleys under a furniture or a carpet. Its communication routes need more working time to get done, but also are less evident. These positions are not complex. They need a few interlaced firing sectors, an immediate protection against the enemy irruption in mass or with commands, a few covers against the heavy normal fire and a sufficient concealment that conceals them from the sights of the enemy probable successive positions and his approximation avenues. The obstacles and the mines, even false in certain percentage and always distantly to not betray them, will serve to break the enemy assault and to offer to them more static targets, for example for the mortars, which will have registered its fires. The destruction that generates the wide heavy fire support without aiming a precise target, reinforces the rebel combat positions, surrounding them with debris that divide and impede the accesses of the military, except when they are reached by a ordnance direct impact. To operate this defensive structure the rebels have prepared numerous and narrow tunnels, dragging trenches and gaps in garden walls and interior walls of the buildings. In such a way that, away from the enemy sights, allow them to occupy the combat and observation positions at wish, to defend them more or less time or not, to move among them and to reinforce the most threatened or pressed.

Generally they try to shoot from the front, with isolated or couples snipers armed with the SVD sniper rifle, at individual and small groups of enemies. And to attack from the flank or the rear at the enemy units that penetrate in their defensive zone, which already are disintegrated in squads or platoons with one or two armored vehicles. Those prepared communications allow them to appear, always in small number, behind or at the flanks of the units, while these stop, regroup, ask or receive instructions, or decide where to advance, and to erode them, causing some casualties. For example, from a basement or a floor, through an irregular hollow in a yard or garden wall, under a parked or destroyed vehicle in the street, where it emerges a narrow tunnel with a covered and disguised mouth. From these positions the armed rebels throw some RPG-7V rockets or several short blasts, always aiming, of the RPK light machine gun or the obsolete RPD. The interior houses courts serve them to place the mortars, which constitute their the only «heavy fire» source, protected by an infantry position. They fired them with the maximum angles on the abundant, large and always excessive military concentrations. The usual mortar is the 82 mm. Russian modern M-1937 model. Here that the attacker presents three times more men (in means the proportion must be 20 to 1) neither favors nor facilitates their labor. But this offers the persecuted defender more targets to be able to use his exiguous fire power. Especially because, in a given moment, is small the attackers’ proportion that are putting in real distress the defenders.

Also they possess an effective and increasing anti-aircraft defense of short range. From other courts and roofs, always protected by a nearby infantry resistance nest, several teams of light anti-aircraft rocket shoulder launchers carriers are arranged. Their location in the deployment is done depending on the most probable and most dangerous aircraft approximation directions for the defense. If they are sufficient and shoot skilful, they could use two nearby, but not contiguous launchers, whom form a team, and that shoot successively and rapidly (the SAM-18 flies at 2 Mach) against an aircraft or towards an enemy air formation in immediate approximation to its target. A typical rocket would be the soul-air n º 7, called «grail» and «strela» (arrow) in not Cyrillic Russian. It had successive improvements and today is replaced in the military arsenals by the soul-air missile n º 18 former mentioned, that has a useful attack height of 3,5 km (the double), and guides, a fuel rocket, an explosive head and a bait detector improved. Its appearance among the Iraqi rebels would indicate, almost surely, that they were facilitated by Syria. The shoulder carrier limits himself to direct the launcher already loaded towards its target, wait until the missile confirms the target’s acquisition and then squeeze again the trigger. And going hide.

The crucial moment for the defense comes when the zone commander decides to evacuate it, after having stopped and delayed the enemy for some time. Trying to cause him losses as high as possible, but without been exposed excessively to a fighting in the close distances, or to be outflanked or to lose his freedom of action. This is inexorably tied to the transfer of space to the military enemies. For it the rebels avoid in opportune moment the direct assault of their enemy, not his extensive or vague bombardment. The rebels have sufficient exit tunnels directed to not very nearby buildings (often official and even respectable (mosques), offices, companies and some housings) or dry riverbeds (wadis) and not evident bushes in the open land. From there they could disperse through the outside in very small groups towards friends reception positions, in the first moments. The protection of the evacuation is therefore vital and both entrances or exits from these tunnels are always covered by resistance nests, which take to end their rigid defense.

The Counterinsurgency War in Iraq

 Possibilities and Faults of the Conflicting Rivals. Why can win the Iraqi authorities?
The whole virulence and force estimated in the Iraqi insurgency are ballasted by his divisions, his divergent or opposite interests, his scanty real combative capacity and his problems to join combative major effective units. The people is neutral in these moments and only a certain degree of constraint, at least suggested, inclines it punctually and temporarily in favor of one or other. The Iraqi army is lacking experience, spirit of body and combative interest; but it is native, not occupant, and does not depart from zero and with the skill and professionalism of his advisors and cadres, it can advance stages rapidly. The cost to pay for all is the time, prolonged in an internal painful and costly struggle.

The Iraqi insurgency and his political-military characteristics.


The Iraqi rebels constitute a strange and not miscible miscellany. Among other factions or groups, they are present: Al-Qaida groups of with nearly autonomous character, coordinated by Abu Ayyub al-Masri; this nickname wants to say, «father of Ayyub, alias The Egyptian», very slightly identifying, except in villages and places in the field. Loyal Baazists (the party had militias that were activated militarily very little before the assault on April, 2003) to Saddam Hussein and former members of his army and administration. Islamic volunteers of several countries. Members of the intelligence agencies of, at least, Syria and Iran. The Sunnis and Chiís social religious local and regional militias. The national resistance Sunni net, principally formed by previous members of the Iraqi administration and army, opposite to the ex-president, but dismissed with excessive wisdom and hurry by Paul Bremer, which are joined now by patriots and religious Iraqis and irritated young unemployed men, before the prolongation of the occupation and the good work of the Coalition forces. Not very much time ago, there were detected common criminals bands. Local groups of clans chiefs and masters of the war, making be worth his political and economic rights.
The Iraqi rebels do not have to win a war. Its principal strategic goal is to remain active with a sufficient wearing intensity. Its forces do not have to return to home. All those of the coalition, yes. Simply not retiring, not losing, they compel the Coalition forces to keep its onerous struggle for a vague, indefinite time or to withdraw and return to house.
Something similar happened in Cyprus. The National Organization of Cypriot Fight or Ethniki Organosis Kipriahou Agonos or E.O.K.A., commanded by general Georgios Grivas, alias «Dighemis», took to end a difficult guerrilla warfare, because the scanty of the field, the force of the enemy and the lack of good hiding places, for the independence of the island against the British domination. Finally, the Enosis or political union with Greece was not obtained, but the independence of the island. Grivas, in his «General Plan for the Revolutionary Action in Cyprus» was emphasizing, «it is not necessary to believe that we, by means of these form and procedures, will get a material and total defeat of the English forces in Cyprus. We rather look for his moral defeat, harassing and upsetting them in such a way that, ultimately, we obtain the goal of the struggle. That one was until the end our strategic goal. We owe the success to the fact of having stuck firmly to it».
The propaganda constitutes a strategic basic aim of all the Iraqi rebels, with which the agencies and the western communications means collaborate filled with enthusiasm. Any rebellious assault successfully and showy is immediately broadcast to the world. This always debilitates the will of permanency of the USA and his allies. His legions called by his families, want to return, to enjoy the varied and superfluous consumption goods and the exotic vacations. The Spartan mothers, something unthinkable nowadays, were saying to her children when they were going out in campaign, when the benign station came and they leave the winter barracks: «you shall return with the shield or on the shield». When they were fleeing, the big and heavy shield of the Greek hoplite, capable of resisting the tremendous blows of the Sarisas or long lances of 5 m., principal weapon of their phalanxes, was a hindrance and they were rejecting it.
The insurgents know that the fight will not finish simply with the returning home of the forces of the coalition. This makes that some Iraqi groups, more worried by the serious and always unforeseeable consequences of a social chaos that could be established then, could be attracted with political and civil arrangements to leaving the weapons. Also, a great majority of the Iraqis do not want the return to the power of the Baaz party and its exclusive repressive methods of government and permanency in power. On the other hand, it is necessary to explain and convince the Iraqi people that the best way, in order that the military foreign presence stops, is the disappearance of the armed general revolt. The constant improvements in trade, services, supply of energies are having positive effects and must be exhibited emphatically by the National administration. Reciprocally, its destruction or sabotage by the rebels must be capitalized always against them by the communications means and agents of the Iraqi state.
The existential and ideological dispersion of the armed rebels does that its military co-ordination is difficult and only temporal, partial and for convenience. This dispersion, in turn, makes very difficult the political fight of the Iraqi government and his foreign allies against an insurgency with multiple and yet opposite interests and political and social aims.

Its operative characteristics.

The armed rebels are elusive, defending themselves by the concealment and, in less measure, with a certain local mobility. Also they possess a higher availability or combative alert during the offensive actions that they tackle. Let’s remember that any military set, from the crew of a tank up to an army, spends most of his time not deployed or ready to fight. His time passes doing labors and operations that will allow him to fight in the chosen moment. So much if he is training, embarking, moving, being equipped, being supplied, being reorganized, waiting or resting, any unit is not in full combat availability.
An autonomous advanced Iraqi band, depending on a chief of sector, consists of ambush groups, execution and kidnapping groups and sabotage groups. His functions are evident. Every functional specialty has a coordinating chief, who depends on the former one. In the cities and related road ways, the components of each group are not numerous, as maximum a few teams. They try to support its communications across a communications point, functionally dependent on the headquarters, which acts as intermediary in them to avoid enemy detection. The “effective modern” electronic follow-up of the mobile phones is deceived with corridors and couriers. In this auxiliary group of the command (a primitive and without logistics S-4, which depends on a civil parallel organization of supply), a primary service of health joins, carry out by male nurses. The most serious cases go to hospitals or particular loyal doctors, if they exist in the zone.
The insurgents nets are secret or latent and operate aggressively only against the mobility of the army and the police, which they surprise, are a nuisance, cause damages, kill and mutilate. The assault from several directions creates bags of fire and enfilade zones on the enemy. This produces besides a synergetic and enervating effect in the attacked one. That is similar to the result of multi traumatism or to that of multiple nº 8 or 9 pellets in a minor hunt piece. They lack of enough punch to give decisive blows or to finish off an important enemy. They erode a military unit (not a small unit or isolated elements), but they do not annihilate it.
Against the prepared military positions established in depth they are not effective, though it exists afraid of the guerrillas and a lot of money is expended protecting them. Their bands lack important combat capacity and are also easily canalized towards approximation avenues with registered heavy fire and medium grazing fire. For the moment, they lack engineers’ training, which would allows them the punctual break of the static protector barriers. And of superior training, to use the crawling individual approximation, without time limitation, in their diverse missions out and inside the military and police camps and facilities.
The logistics is a great disadvantage, especially the supply of equipment and no handmade goods. They possess many small active rears or bases, many full surrounded by their enemies, which activities can be detected always. The supply of the bands is provided by the support organization.

To win the battle for the favor of the Iraqi people.
The rebels, by force or thanks to their popularity, are capable of being mixed and to be diluted in the civil population. And to hide safe in houses, stores, garages, buildings, caves, etc. Though a part of the population is with them, a degree of constraint exercised by armed rebels exists always. If the Iraqi army is capable of permanently protect a neighborhood or population from the assaults or the presence of hostile irregulars, it also can progressively demand the due national loyalty to its inhabitants. What is inadmissible is that the civil local populations are intermittently subject to the armed pressure of one and another rival. So demanding from them a loyalty that does not offer safety to them. The clearly hostile recalcitrant elements in the different places, can be temporarily re-located in zones assured by the government, to neutralize them. The collective punishments of the populations are never suitable. Probably these are only justified, at least largely, by the immediate safety of the military forces. In any case, it is necessary to explain well the reasons for its application.
The rebels are tactics and operatively semiautonomous. The communications between the bands are moderated and even scanty, both the explicit ones and, especially, the tacit ones. They win the combats fitting their advantages with the weaknesses of the enemy army. The techniques of feigning retreats and establishing ambushes are useful to they against non skilled forces and still not too much motivated. They can choose the place and the moment of their attacks and carry out the necessary training to dominate the skills to be used in those.

Command, control and communications of the bands.
Its high dispersion exercises a considerable tension in its command structure (principally in the middle and high commands), because of its extensive and flat flowchart.
At the same time, this spatial extension allows them to cut temporarily the lines of communications of the enemy, with a psychological important negative effect. The systems of command, communications and control are slightly primitive at the moment, which impedes the regional concentration of bands or groups for more important actions. Its effective real command is divided by the dispersion of the chiefs and groups and the disparity or the antagonism of interests.

The Iraqi Army and its allies.

The abuses against the civil population are always counter-productive in a counterinsurgency struggle and more in an internal revolt. Sometimes, the hurries to form new troops lead to a deficient or incomplete training of these. They are not vaccinated against the stress, specially here the mental one, nor against the frustration of the not fulfilled plans or of the ungrateful enemy surprises. This leads to discharge almost inevitably the anger and the enervating impotence in the civil population, intermingled voluntary or by force with the rebels.
The wars against the armed irregular are by its Nature long, painful and difficult. The prolong character originates from the need that a popular force, departing almost from nothing, develops and spreads. And managing to moral or militarily defeat a regular own or of occupation army. The difficulty and the cruel evil arise from the high civil component that takes part in them. They are wars located in the home courtyard, in the own or occupied rear.
It is necessary, therefore, to avoid the prolongation of the conflict, which is mining the conviction of the own forces and allowing that the enemy should spread, strengthen and prevail.
The basic problem of the new Iraqi army is its lack of democratic convictions in the western style, in order to defend the new regime. It operates, as much, as a civil Police, which is not forced to die in its trade and which normally acts in its operations with overwhelming means superiority. If they do not feel and assume some values, it is not possible to accept the commitment with them. And acquire this way the necessary availability to work actively for them or to die in its defense. Already there have entered in active service several hundred thousands of Iraqi military and police men formed by the North Americans. But they are fundamentally destined to surveillance, custody and garrison labors. Their frame of mind and combative disposition are low and unequal, according to their origin. This is now a mass army.

The American military doctrine. Has it effective application here?
The massive employment of the heavy fire capacity continues being the principal «argument» of the US Army. Its doctrine (Field Manual 100-5, Operations, last edition of 1986) does not emphasize the initiative and rests in reacting to the enemy action from covered positions in the whole operations zone. One of the operative principles that gets force in this renewed doctrine is that of the simultaneity. This one establishes to beat at the same time, with heavy fire of artillery and aviation, the first and the second enemy assault echelons and even its reserve, using then aviation and tactical rocketry. The infantry and tanks forces are designed, in a secondary employment, to counter-attack this beaten enemy in all its depth, to assure the decision.
Here the detection and the selective attack to the enemy weak points don’t exist. Nor the general saving of means (that the contributors pay to the industrial corporations) and human lives. Nor the skilful, risky and fruitful maneuvers of functional or positional dislocation of the enemy forces. The Marshall Von Hindenburg invented the adage: «A battle without Schwerpunkt (principal effort) is like a man without character». Acting the North American army evokes a heavy, forceful mace, hammering and excessive. The Afrika Korps, on the contrary, remembers us an elegant, agile, unforeseeable, sufficient and effective foil.
The pompously so called fourth generation wars are the counterinsurgency wars or guerrilla warfare or irregular wars or armed revolts or liberation wars or organized banditry, which always have existed, coexisting with the conventional variants of warfare. They are those that the USA has lost or not gained lately: Vietnam, The Lebanon (peace disembarkation of “marines”, then demolished in their barrack) and Somalia (the uncontrollable and unforeseeable wasp’s nest of «all against all» by the local lords of the war and the Islamic militias). They are uneven wars (they call them now «asymmetrical warfare») against an enemy of lower technological military level relative to the regular enemy forces, always rooted in the own or occupied civil population and slight militarily intense but very extensive in the space and the time.
With embarrassing frequency, when the human or technological North American «sensors» detect some probable rebellious Iraqi or from the foreign “muyaidin” activity, first they devastate the building, the «block», the zone. Then they go to sweep up and to do the corpses inventory, the «body count», because they are very scrupulous with their statistics. Sometimes among the rubbles they can meet the corpses of an Arabic innocent and numerous family. They abuses of the attrition, which is indiscriminate and perverse when the enemy fuses with the civil ones. They neglect the active, unexpected patrolling, which needs proportionally less material and human means, but more trade, moral courage, freedom of action and creativity in the low and intermediate commands and NCO and in the men.

Effective counter insurgents operations in Iraq.

A complex operation of search, location and combat and destruction of the bands will demand successively to the military forces: to locate them, to converge on the zone, to attack and to defeat them, to be reorganized and reequip and to be dispersed. These seemingly unconnected operations of numerous small units, coordinated by the intention and aims of the high command and by the responsibility in the execution way of the direct commands, they enjoy great initiative, rapidity and maximum flexibility. This allows to the national army to take the freedom of action and to keep the initiative and a high relative mobility with the enemy, during all the offensive decided operations. Technique, tactical and operatively, the Iraqi military men must be, by trade and capacities, more professionals, more actives, better equipped, more lethal, more effective, that the irregular forces to which they search and fight.
During long time yet the air and spatial North American means, as spy satellites, not crewed planes and planes of the system Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), will have serious limitations for the detection and monitoring of small ground forces, even regular ones, in the difficult crossing areas and with possibilities of concealment, as mountains, jungles and forests, marshes and urbanized zones (industrial, of storage and distribution and of housings). These not only offer concealment, but also covered from the heavy and light fire up to the close distances of combat.
An observation and of combat patrols’ net constitutes the fighting system adapted and advised for this type of irregular warfare. Carry out against an enemy trained (it has been given sufficient time for do it), with aroused fanaticism, re-grown by the successful or believed successes and improved by a natural selection (the most clumsy and worse are falling down first, and let’s not say the suicides of only one use, who immediately leave the fighting), but that still has not matured structurally nor operatively. They constitute the natural sensors to detect the operative rebellious activity previous or between offensive actions, so as that the civil Iraqi population accepts and supports moderately well its own army.
In January, 2004, the North American intelligence intercepted a memorandum of 17 pages written by Abu Musad al-Zarqawi (the former Al-Qaida local delegate chief, which has passed away to the Houris Garden) and directed to Osama bin Laden, in which he was expressing to him his worry for his survival: «In Iraq there are no mountains where we could shelter, nor forests in whose thickness we could hide. There are spies on eyes everywhere. Our backs are exposed and our movements, in view of all».

Locating, deceiving and penetrating them.
A necessary complement of the regular net are the false rebels bands. These would be destined to operate in zones inclined to the insurgency, from where some of their members  come from. Their activity and concealment would be favored by the decentralized character of the rebels groups. Their missions would be to obtain information, to prove the loyalty of the civil ones and to annihilate small enemy groups or lone suicidal terrorists. They should not be bigger than a reinforced squad or section, except in combat special occasions.
The false rebels bands were used by enough success in the fighting against the kikuyos of the Mau-Mau in Kenya, against the Soviet guerrillas by the Germans during the World War II and against the Hukbalahap communists of Luis Taruk, the Supreme, in The Philippines by the Philippine army. In Spain the so called «counterparts» were used between 1946 and 1949. Their operative scope was minor. It was a question of «neutralizing» the rural population of the zones where the forces of the hostile «groups” were operating, by means of visits of the simulated guerrillas to the villagers. There came a moment that in the villages all were distrusting of the not habitual bands, that were coming in search of food and other helps, since it was not known if it was a counterpart.
The patrols’ and small military positions net has three operative purpose: to deny the initiative and the mobility to the guerrillas; to cut their communications with their bases, with their collaborators’ net and between the groups; and to frighten away them, like to the hunt, from their protective civil bases and their isolated redoubts.
The official net operatively covers a wide extension and so is capable of receiving the sensitive information. The knowledge of the rebels of its neighborhood and of its zone can be one of its major assets. Their refuges and depots would end located. The present impunity conviction of the rebels would disappear. With the advantage of being a native army, its initial weapons must be the discretion, the silence, using more the knives and hand grenades than its assault guns, the relative mobility with the enemy, with the night as collaborator and shelter in its operations.

The necessary ideal supply system.

The difficulties of supply in a great extension area, «empty» of enemies and without «hard» targets, can be overcome with: an anticipating logistics (a good calculation of the foreseen necessary supplies, with the commitment of the commands users); endowed with smaller and nearby pre located depots; using heavy fire pre located bases for support covering the operations zone; using all the possible common parts in equipment, food (caring of religions influence), etc.; and using small mobile armored units (minimum the reinforced interarm platoon provided with light vehicles, which could rapidly reinforce the normal military patrols). The utilization of gun and transport helicopters centralized directed, allows to rapidly create, once clarified the situation, a gravity center of the counterinsurgency effort and to supply rapidly and provisionally the most committed small units.

Lightness, mobility and relative speed in operations.
The necessary mobility of the regular forces in the fighting against the hostile irregulars of all kind prefers light combat vehicles. The Abrams tanks and the VCI Bradley need re supply every 8 hours in constant actions and are not silent, but very evident in their operations. They are designed to act massively by the fire, maneuver and shock in a gravity center of the effort against enemy regular modern forces. Also they can serve to crush a civil enemy population, as the Israelis did in Gaza, during the operation of rescue of their captured soldier.
But here we are trying to eliminate diverse guerrillas, intermingled with the Iraqi people. The armored light vehicles type Mowag 25 Piranha (14 Tm.) of Swiss design and with several manufacturing plants and the new American armored Humvee (4 Tm.) might mark the superior and low limits for the military armored vehicles to be employed in this counterinsurgency struggle.

To surround, to disperse the enemy rejection, to disturb its command and its plans and to destroy them.

Also they (the net) can react to the rebel detected activity, establishing rapidly way controls, and sufficiently sealing a more or less extensive zone. While the hermetic ring is closed next with other nearby troops or with heliborne forces. This simultaneity of initial actions has a synergetic effect that protects the small isolated military units, with exposed vulnerable flanks, in their initiative.
The surprise, besides, is a fundamental principle of this war. The relative rapidity neutralizes the alert notices that their civil Iraqi friends can pass to the bands. In Cyprus, the scanty British helicopters (it were the 50s in last century) were turning irrelevant the communication efforts of the collaborators’ net of  the E.O.K.A. about the movements of the British troops.
The best effect on the detected boxed band is achieved here by the concentric and inconsiderate attack (maximum impulse or quantity of used movement) with limited aims, by some advance spears with enough combat capacity (minimum, the reinforced platoon with heavy infantry weapons) over the interior of the siege. Since the sweep of the siege area from one or two directions is more laborious and gives the enemy, specially individual or by teams, a slip away chance. The static military forces can then be contracting by successive jumps the internal or both perimeters, according to the cases, established of the siege.

To gain the struggle through the time.
The patience must be a characteristic of all the implied ones in this war. Also it is necessary for to be effective, to reach a minimum of trade and seniority. In the zones most favorable to the bands, it is very easy that the operations of search and siege are initially closed in emptiness. It is necessary to go gaining and selecting their zone population, as we have said before, in order that the military trade and the people loyalty combined should produce its military and social incomes. The successive victories of the Iraqi army will be gaining to it the favor of the people, because all they want to be emotionally with the winning side. And because the interests of the Iraqis are volatile, unlike and yet contradictory, based on the loyalty to the family, to the clan and to the tribe.
In this type of war the armed forces cannot defend from the enemy all its possible targets. Besides, never there would be enough remaining troops to keep the initiative and to carry out a multiple, flexible and mobile offensive action against the armed rebels. Here there are no fronts to establishing and cozy, protective and supplying operative rears. What exists are armed enemies groups, their logistic support and information groups and many groups of sympathizers with them. That are integrated all according to the different personal courage of their different members. And all of them widespread and established through a big territory without limits or classic rears.
To liberate sufficient forces, the Iraqi army has to defend only its strategic objectives and its operative communications. The defense of towns and minor objectives, specially out of the Sunni zone (in the center and south center of the country), must fall in local units of police and of loyal civil self defense. These supported by military mobile units of its sector. With help of the heavy fire and the airborne mobility of the North Americans, even with the support of some of its elite units (rangers, marines, armored), the Iraqis can be trying to carry out major actions of siege and annihilation of bands and groups of them. To increasing the confidence and the respect of the own population and its experience in the resolution of its challenge of pacification of the country.