U.S. Now Finds That Insurgents Are Mostly Iraqis The battle for the city of Fallujah is giving U.S. military commanders an increasingly clear picture of this country's insurgency, and it is the portrait of a
home-grown uprising overwhelmingly dominated by Iraqis, not by foreign fighters.
Of the more than 1,000 men between the ages of 15 and 55 who were captured in intense fighting in the center of the insurgency over the past week, just 15 are confirmed foreign fighters, Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. ground commander in Iraq, said Monday.
American commanders said their best estimates of the proportion of foreigners among their enemy was about 5 percent.http://middleeastinfo.org/article4833.htmlInsurgents Are Mostly Iraqis, US Military SaysThe insistence by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and many U.S. officials that foreign fighters are streaming into Iraq to battle American troops
runs counter to the U.S. military's own assessment that the Iraqi insurgency remains primarily a home-grown problem."They say these guys are flowing across
and fomenting all this violence. We don't think so," said a senior military official in Baghdad. "What's the main threat? It's internal."
U.S. military officials said the core of the insurgency in Iraq was — and always had been — Hussein's fiercest loyalists, who melted into Iraq's urban landscape when the war began in March 2003. During the succeeding months, they say, the insurgents' ranks have been bolstered by Iraqis who grew disillusioned with the U.S. failure to deliver basic services, jobs and reconstruction projects.
It is this expanding group, they say, that has given the insurgency its deadly power and which represents the biggest challenge to an Iraqi government trying to establish legitimacy countrywide.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0928-21.htm
US, Britain holding 10,000 prisoners in Iraq
350 foreigners are among about 10,000 detainees being held in US-run prisons in Iraq, Iraq's Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin Over says.
"US forces told us on December 23 that they are holding 353 foreign terrorists,"
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s1273053.htm
353. Out of 10,000. My own small town in Nowhere Texas has far more "non-Americans" than that.
Iraq battling more than 200,000 insurgents
Intelligence chief says most are former baathists
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=11487
Poll: Iraqis out of Patience
A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted in March concluded, “The insurgents...seem to be gaining broad acceptance, if not outright support. If the Kurds, who make up about 13 percent of the poll, are taken out of the equation, more than half of Iraqis say killing U.S. troops can be justified in at least some cases.”
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-04-28-poll-cover_x.htm
As much as bush and the bush-bots lie and deny, the majority of the "insurgents" in Iraq are Iraqis.
Edited to add another article originally posted by Ms. Clio;
Nationalism drives many insurgents as they fight U.S.
But a wide range of interviews with Iraqis and U.S. officials here paints a starkly different portrait -- a growing, intensely nationalist resistance determined to remove U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies.
Iraqi politicians do not dispute that foreign fighters are in their country. Posho Ibrahim, Iraq's deputy justice minister, said in an interview this month that the U.S. military has about 100 accused foreign fighters in custody. But they do not see the foreigners as the driving force behind the resistance.
Sharif, who was among the exiled Iraqi opposition figures who initially supported the U.S. invasion, said the typical resistance fighter is a young man with a military background who opposes the occupation...
Wazan said the resistance is led by 20 to 30 armed groups across the country.
"This (insurgency) is a justified action for any people whose country is under occupation," he said.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/10/26/MNG659G46T1.DTL
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