Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PSYOPS IN IRAQ 2003-6
Al-Qaida set to launch psychological warfare in Iraq by E Schechter 
Al-Qaida set to launch psychological warfare in Iraq Erik Schechter, Jerusalem Post online, Nov. 9, 2003 Al-Qaida is not only operating in Iraq against coalition forces, it is preparing for the next stage of guerrilla warfare: winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqi Sunnis and wearing down the will of the American public. According to terrorism expert Lt.-Col. (res.) Moshe Marzuk, the camera will be the next weapon used by anti-coalition forces. "They recognize that they need to capitalize on their military successes," said Marzuk. "So they are looking at the media." He cited an Iraqi Web site affiliated with al-Qaida ( ) that on October 4 posted an essay discussing the need to use public opinion against coalition forces. The militants see this as a response to pressure on Arab cable networks in Iraq to stop broadcasting anti-coalition speeches and threats.
In late July, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz accused the cable network stations al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya of "false reporting" and "inciting violence against our troops." Two months later, the two affiliates were temporarily banned from covering official activities by the US-backed Iraqi Governing Council. And in October alone, al-Jazeera employees had been detained by authorities on four separate occasions, said the international lobbying group, Reporters Without Borders. Before the war, the Bush administration took great pains to make a connection between Iraq and the terrorist organization responsible for the September 11 atrocities, which killed close to 3,000. However, experts remained unconvinced. Since the official end of the war on May 1, 149 American soldiers have been killed in attacks first attributed to "dead-enders" - ex-Ba'athists and Sunni tribal allies who had the most to lose with the end of Saddam Hussein's regime. However, after five months of guerrilla warfare, some began to wonder how these holdouts have managed to persist. On October 30, US defense sources named Gen. Izzat Ibrahim al-Dour, the former commander of the 1st and 5th Army Corps (and the ace of clubs in the deck of cards issued to US troops), as the mastermind behind anti-coalition violence. It was said that al-Dour commands a loose confederation of militias, including foreign volunteers and the Ansar al-Islam, a small Kurdish group that has ties with al-Qaida. Others have doubted that the sickly 61-year-old is up for the task, and even the US Defense Department spokesman said that "there was not enough proof to argue that there is any overall coordination with the resistance." But whatever the real level of the ex-Ba'athist threat, the US has ironically found what it sought for so long in Iraq: al-Qaida. "In the three most recent Osama bin Laden video cassettes, he refers repeatedly to Iraq," said Peter Bergen, an al-Qaida expert. The support is not only rhetorical. Bergen added that Dr. Saad al-Fagih, a London-based Saudi radical, told him that, in June and July, 3,000 Saudis went to fight in Iraq - just as many Arab volunteers once streamed into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. "For them, as well as many others in the Muslim world, fighting in Iraq is the classical defensive jihad," he said. |