Al Qaeda in Iraq: Assessment and Outside Links
Released: 2008-08-15T00:00:00

Part of the debate over the Bush Administration decision to use military action to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein centers on whether or not that regime was allied with Al Qaeda. In building an argument that the United States needed to oust Saddam Hussein militarily, the Administration asserted that Iraq constituted a gathering threat to the United States because it continued to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that it could potentially transfer to international terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, with which Iraq was allied. This combination produced the possibility of a catastrophic attack on the United States, according to the Administration.

The first pillar of the Administration argument for ousting Saddam Hussein—its continued active development of WMD—has been researched extensively. After the fall of the regime in April 2003, U.S. forces and intelligence officers in an "Iraq Survey Group" (ISG) searched Iraq for evidence of WMD stockpiles. A "comprehensive" September 2004 report of the Survey Group, known as the "Duelfer report," said that the ISG found no WMD stockpiles or production but said that there was evidence that the regime retained the intention to reconstitute WMD programs in the future. The formal U.S.-led WMD search ended December 2004, although U.S. forces have found some chemical weapons caches left over from the Iran-Iraq war. The UNMOVIC work remained formally active until U.N. Security Council Resolution 1762 terminated it on June 29, 2007.

The second pillar of the Administration argument—that Saddam Hussein's regime had links to Al Qaeda—is relevant not only to assess justification for the invasion decision but also because an Al Qaeda affiliate (Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQ-I) became a key component of the post-Saddam insurgency among Sunni Arabs in Iraq. The Administration has maintained that the Al Qaeda presence in Iraq, fighting alongside Iraqi insurgents from the ousted ruling Baath Party, members of former regime security forces, and other disaffected Iraqi Sunni Arabs, demonstrates that there were pre-war linkages. On the other hand, most experts believe that Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters entered Sunni-inhabited central Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, from the Kurdish controlled north and from other Middle Eastern countries. These foreign fighters are motivated by an anti-U.S. ideology and a target of opportunity provided by the presence of U.S. forces there, rather than longstanding ties to the former Iraqi regime, according to this view.

Background on Saddam - Al Qaeda Links

On March 17, 2003, in a speech announcing a 48-hour deadline for Saddam Hussein and his sons to leave Iraq in order to avoid war, President Bush said:

...the [Iraqi] regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained, and harbored terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaeda."

The Administration argument for an Iraq-Al Qaeda linkage had a few major themes: (1) that there were contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Al Qaeda in Sudan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan dating from the early 1990s, including Iraq's assistance to Al Qaeda in deployment of chemical weapons; (2) that an Islamist faction called Ansar al-Islam (The Partisans of Islam) in northern Iraq, had ties to Iraq's regime; and (3) that Iraq might have been involved in the September 11, 2001 plot itself. Of these themes, the September 11 allegations are the most widely disputed by outside experts and by some officials within the Administration itself. Some Administration officials, including President Bush, have virtually ruled out Iraqi involvement in the September 11 attacks while others, including Vice President Cheney, have maintained that the issue is still open.

Secretary of State Powell presented the Administration view in greater public detail than any other official when he briefed the United Nations Security Council on Iraq on February 5, 2003, although most of that presentation was devoted to Iraq's alleged violations of U.N. requirements that it dismantle its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. According to the presentation:

Iraq and terrorism go back decades.... But what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants. Going back to the early and mid-1990s, when bin Laden was based in Sudan, an Al Qaeda source tells us that Saddam and bin Laden reached an understanding that Al Qaeda would no longer support activities against Baghdad.... We know members of both organizations met repeatedly and have met at least eight times at very senior levels since the early 1990s.... Iraqis continued to visit bin Laden in his new home in Afghanistan [after bin Laden moved there in mid-1996].... From the late 1990s until 2001, the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan played the role of liaison to the Al Qaeda organization ... Ambition and hatred are enough to bring Iraq and Al Qaeda together, enough so Al Qaeda could learn how to build more sophisticated bombs and learn how to forge documents, and enough so that Al Qaeda could turn to Iraq for help in acquiring expertise on weapons of mass destruction.

Secretary Powell did not include in his February 5, 2003, briefing the assertion that Iraq was involved in the September 11 plot. Some analysts suggest the omission indicates a lack of consensus within the Administration on the strength of that evidence. In a January 2004 press interview, Secretary Powell said that his U.N. briefing had been meticulously prepared and reviewed, saying "Anything that we did not feel was solid and multi-sourced, we did not use in that speech." Additional details of the Administration's argument, as well as criticisms, are discussed below.

Post-Saddam analysis of the issue has tended to refute the Administration argument on Saddam-Al Qaeda linkages, although this issue is still debated. The report of the 9/11 Commission found no evidence of a "collaborative operational linkage" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. In his book "At the Center of the Storm" in May 2007 (Harper Collins Press, pp. 341-358), former CIA Director George Tenet indicated that the CIA view was that contacts between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda were likely for the purpose of taking the measure of each other or take advantage of each other, rather than collaborating. Others note, however, that some of Tenet's pre-war testimony before Congress was in line with the prevailing Administration view on this question, contrasting with the views in his book. In March 2008, a study by the Institute for Defense Analyses, written for the U.S. Joint Forces Command, and based on 600,000 documents captured in post-Saddam Iraq, found that Iraq during the early to mid-1990s actively supported Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which in 1998 formally merged with Al Qaeda, but that the documents do not reveal "direct coordination and assistance between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda."

Major Themes in the Administration Argument

Some of the intelligence information that the Bush Administration relied on to judge linkages between Iraq and Al Qaeda was publicized not only in Secretary of State Powell's February 5, 2003, briefing to the U.N. Security Council, but also, and in more detail, in an article in The Weekly Standard . Vice President Cheney has been quoted as saying the article represents the "best source of [open] information" on the issue. The article contains excerpts from a memorandum, dated October 27, 2003, from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the then chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The memorandum reportedly was based on research and analysis of intelligence and other information by the "Office of Special Plans," an Iraq policy planning unit within the Department of Defense set up in early 2002 but disbanded in the fall of 2002. The following sections analyze details of the major themes in the Administration argument.

Links in Sudan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan

The "DOD memorandum," as well as other accounts, include assertions that Iraqi intelligence developed a relationship with Al Qaeda in the early 1990s, brokered by the Islamist leaders of Sudan. At the time, Osama bin Laden was in Sudan. He remained there until Sudan expelled him in mid-1996, after which he went to Afghanistan. According to the purported memo, the Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship included an agreement by Al Qaeda not to seek to undermine Saddam's regime, and for Iraq to provide Al Qaeda with conventional weapons and WMD. The Administration view is that Iraq was highly isolated in the Arab world in the early 1990s, just after its invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, and that it might have sought a relationship with Al Qaeda as a means of gaining leverage over the United States and a common enemy, the regime of Saudi Arabia. From this perspective, the relationship served the interests of both, even though Saddam was a secular leader while Al Qaeda sought to replace regional secular leaders with Islamic states.

The purported DOD memorandum includes names and approximate dates on which Iraqi intelligence officers visited bin Laden's camp outside Khartoum and discussions of cooperation in manufacturing explosive devices. It reportedly discusses subsequent meetings between Iraqi intelligence officers and bin Laden and his aides in Afghanistan and Pakistan, continuing until at least the late 1990s. The memorandum cites intelligence reports that Al Qaeda operatives were instructed to travel to Iraq to obtain training in the making and deployment of chemical weapons. Secretary of State Powell, in his February 5, 2003, U.N. briefing, citing an Al Qaeda operative captured in Afghanistan, stated that Iraq had received Al Qaeda operatives "several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poison gases."

According to press accounts, some Administration evaluations of the available intelligence, including a reported draft national intelligence estimate (NIE) circulated in October 2002, interpreted the information as inconclusive, and as evidence of sporadic but not necessarily ongoing or high-level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Some CIA experts reportedly asserted that the ideological differences between Iraq and Al Qaeda were too large to be bridged permanently. For example, bin Laden reportedly sought to raise an Islamic army to fight to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion in August 1990, suggesting that bin Laden might have viewed Iraq as an enemy rather than an ally. According to some accounts, the Saudi royal family rebuffed bin Laden's idea as unworkable, deciding instead to invite in U.S. forces to combat the Iraqi invasion. The rebuff prompted an open split between bin Laden and the Saudi leadership, and bin Laden left the Kingdom for Sudan in 1991. Ideological differences between Iraq and Al Qaeda were evident in a February 12, 2003, bin Laden statement referring to Saddam Hussein's regime—dominated by his secular Arab nationalist Baath Party—as "socialist and infidel," although the statement also gave some support to the Administration argument when bin Laden exhorted the Iraqi people to resist impending U.S. military action.

As noted above, Iraq had an embassy in Pakistan that the Administration asserts was its link to the Taliban regime of Afghanistan. However, skeptics of a Saddam-Al Qaeda link note that Iraq did not recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan when the Taliban was in power during 1996-2001. It was during the period of Taliban rule that Al Qaeda enjoyed safehaven in Afghanistan. Of the 12 Al Qaeda leaders identified by the U.S. government in 2003 as either "executive leaders" or "senior planners and coordinators," none was an Iraqi national. This suggests that the Iraqi nationals did not have the sanction of Saddam Hussein to join Al Qaeda when he was in power. An alternate explanation is that very few Iraqis had the opportunity to join Al Qaeda during its key formative years - the years of the anti-Soviet "jihad" in Afghanistan (1979-1989). Young Iraqis who might have been attracted to volunteer in Afghanistan were serving in Iraqi units during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, and were not available to participate in regional causes.

Ansar al-Islam Presence in Northern Iraq

Another major theme in the Administration assertions was the presence in Iraq of a group called Ansar al-Islam (Partisans of Islam). This aspect of the Administration's argument factored prominently in Secretary of State Powell's U.N. presentation, and is the most directly relevant to analysis of the Al Qaeda presence in Iraq today. Ansar al-Islam is considered the forerunner of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQ-I).

Ansar al-Islam formed in 1998 as a breakaway faction of Islamist Kurds, splitting off from a group, the Islamic Movement of Iraqi Kurdistan (IMIK). Both Ansar and the IMIK were initially composed almost exclusively of Kurds. U.S. concerns about Ansar grew following the U.S. defeat of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in late 2001, when some Al Qaeda activists, mostly Arabs, fled to Iraq and associated there with the Ansar movement. At the peak, about 600 Arab fighters lived in the Ansar al-Islam enclave, near the town of Khurmal. Ansar fighters clashed with Kurdish fighters from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two mainstream Iraqi Kurdish parties, around Halabja in December 2002. Ansar gunmen were allegedly responsible for an assassination attempt against PUK "prime minister" of the Kurdish region Barham Salih (now a deputy Prime Minister of Iraq) in April 2002.

The leader of the Arab contingent within Ansar al-Islam was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an Arab of Jordanian origin who reputedly fought in Afghanistan. Although more recent assessments indicate Zarqawi commanded Arab volunteers in Afghanistan separate from those recruited by bin Laden, Zarqawi was linked to purported Al Qaeda plots in the 1990s and early 2000s. He allegedly was behind foiled bombings in Jordan during the December 1999 millennium celebration, to the assassination in Jordan of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley (2002), and to reported attempts in 2002 to spread chemical agents in Russia, Western Europe, and the United States.

In explaining why the United States needed to confront Saddam Hussein's regime militarily, U.S. officials maintained that Baghdad was connected to Ansar al-Islam. In his U.N. presentation, Secretary of State Powell said:

Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants.... Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization, Ansar al-Islam, that controls this corner of Iraq.... Zarqawi's activities are not confined to this small corner of northeastern Iraq. He traveled to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, staying in the capital for two months while he recuperated to fight another day. During this stay, nearly two dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there.... From his terrorist network in Iraq, Zarqawi can direct his network in the Middle East and beyond.

However, some accounts question the extent of links, if any, between Baghdad and Ansar al-Islam. Baghdad did not control northern Iraq even before Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), and it is questionable whether Zarqawi, were he tied closely to Saddam Hussein's regime, would have located his group in territory controlled by Saddam's Kurdish opponents. The Administration view on this point is that Saddam saw Ansar as a means of pressuring Saddam Hussein's Kurdish opponents in northern Iraq.

The September 11, 2001, Plot

The reputed DOD memorandum reportedly includes allegations of contacts between lead September 11 hijacker Mohammad Atta and Iraq intelligence, including as many as four meetings between Atta and Iraq's intelligence chief in Prague, Ahmad Samir al-Ani. The DOD memo says that al-Ani agreed to provide Atta with funds at one of the meetings. The memo asserts that the CIA confirmed two Atta visits to Prague—October 26, 1999, and April 9, 2001—but did not confirm that he met with Iraqi intelligence during those visits. The DOD memo reportedly also contains reports indicating that Iraqi intelligence officers attended or facilitated meetings with Al Qaeda operatives in southeast Asia (Kuala Lumpur) in early 2000. In the course of these meetings, the Al Qaeda activists were said to be planning the October 12, 2000, attack on the U.S.S. Cole docked in Aden, Yemen, and possibly the September 11 plot as well.

As noted above, Secretary of State Powell reportedly considered the information too uncertain to include in his February 5, 2003, briefing on Iraq to the U.N. Security Council. President Bush did not mention this allegation in his January 29, 2003, State of the Union message, delivered one week before the Powell presentation to the U.N. Security Council. President Bush said on September 16, 2003, that there was no evidence Saddam Hussein's regime was involved in the September 11 plot; he made the statement in response to a journalist's question about statements a few days earlier by Vice President Cheney suggesting that the issue of Iraq's complicity in September 11 is still open.

There is dispute within Czech intelligence that provided the information on the meetings, that the Iraq-Atta discussions took place at all, particularly the April 2001 meeting. In November 2001, Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross said that Atta and al-Ani had met, but Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman subsequently told U.S. officials that the two had discussed an attack aimed at silencing anti-Saddam broadcasts from Prague. Since 1998, Prague has been the headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-funded radio service that was highly critical of Saddam Hussein's regime. In December 2001, Czech President Vaclav Havel said that there was a "70% chance" the meeting took place. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) eventually concluded, based on records of Atta's movements within the United States in April 2001, that the meeting probably did not take place and that there was no hard evidence of Iraqi regime involvement in the September 11 attacks. Some press reports say the FBI is more confident than is the CIA in the judgment that the April 2001 meeting did not occur. Al Ani himself, captured by U.S. forces in 2003, reportedly denied to U.S. interrogators that the meeting ever happened.

Al Qaeda and the Iraq Insurgency

Whether or not Al Qaeda leaders and Saddam Hussein had a relationship, a major issue facing the United States is the degree to which Al Qaeda elements are threatening the U.S. effort to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Commenting on the Iraq insurgency in its early stages, President Bush said in a speech on September 8, 2003, that "We have carried the fight to the enemy.... We are rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization, not on the fringes of its influence but at the heart of its power." In his January 20, 2004, State of the Union message, President Bush said, "These killers [Iraq insurgents], joined by foreign terrorists, are a serious, continuing danger." Similar statements followed in subsequent years as the Administration sought to assert that Iraq had become the "central front" in the broader post-September 11 "war on terrorism," and that it is preferable to combat Al Qaeda in Iraq rather than allow it to congregate elsewhere in the region and hatch plots inside the United States itself. In a January 10, 2007, major speech announcing the U.S. "troop surge," President Bush made similar points:

... we will continue to pursue al Qaeda and foreign fighters. Al Qaeda is still active in Iraq. Its home base is Anbar Province. Al Qaeda has helped make Anbar the most violent area of Iraq outside the capital. A captured al Qaeda document describes the terrorists' plan to infiltrate and seize control of the province. This would bring al Qaeda closer to its goals of taking down Iraq's democracy, building a radical Islamic empire, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad.

In a July 24, 2007, speech specifically on the issue, President Bush said:

... Our troops are....opposing ruthless enemies, and no enemy is more ruthless in Iraq than al Qaeda. They send suicide bombers into crowded markets; they behead innocent captives and they murder American troops. They want to bring down Iraq's democracy so they can use that nation as a terrorist safe haven for attacks against our country....

Critics of this view maintain that Al Qaeda or pro-Al Qaeda elements were motivated by the U.S. invasion to enter Iraq to fight the United States there. According to this argument, the U.S. presence in Iraq has generated new Al Qaeda followers—both inside and outside Iraq—who might not have become active against the United States had the war against Iraq not occurred. This view draws some support from the unclassified "key judgments" of a July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that said:

...we assess that [Al Qaeda central leadership's] association with AQ-I helps Al Qaeda to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for homeland attacks.

Other critics maintain that the Administration has emphasized an "Al Qaeda" component of the insurgency as a means of bolstering U.S. public support for the war effort in Iraq. According to this view, the Administration has repeatedly attempted to link in the public consciousness the Iraq war to the September 11 attacks in part because of consistent public support for a military component of the overall war on terrorism.

AQ-I Strategy and Role in the Insurgency

In analyzing the debate over Al Qaeda involvement in Iraq, a major question is the degree to which AQ-I has driven the insurgency against U.S. forces and the government of Iraq. Few dispute that there has been, from almost the inception of the insurgency in mid-2003, a "foreign fighter" component. In November 2003, early in the insurgency, one senior U.S. commander in Iraq (82 nd Airborne Division commander Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack) said, in response to reports that foreign fighters were key to the insurgency: "I want to underscore that most of the attacks on our forces are by former regime loyalists and other Iraqis, not foreign forces." At that time, other commanders emphasized the foreign fighter role in the insurgency by asserting that the high profile suicide bombings that occurred were having a significant impact in undermining U.S. and international confidence in the U.S. ability to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. As examples of such attacks that caused doubt in the U.S. ability to stabilize Iraq, commanders cited the August 19, 2003 bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the August 29, 2003, bombing of a major mosque complex in Najaf that killed the leader of the large Shiite faction Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Mohammad Baqr Al Hakim. (The group renamed itself in June 2007 as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, ISCI).

As a result, the United States has consistently focused on combatting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, his foreign fighter network in Iraq, and his successors. On March 15, 2004, his Ansar al-Islam group was named as "Foreign Terrorist Organization" under the Immigration and Nationality Act. On October 15, 2004, the State Department named the "Monotheism and Jihad Group"—the successor to Ansar al-Islam—as an FTO. The designation said that the Monotheism group "was...responsible for the U.N. headquarters bombing in Baghdad." Later that month, perhaps in response to that designation, Zarqawi changed the name of his organization to "Al Qaeda Jihad Organization in the Land of Two Rivers (Mesopotamia - Iraq)—commonly known now as Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQ-I. The FTO designation was applied to the new name.

Along with the designations came stepped up U.S. military efforts to find and capture or kill Zarqawi. There were several reported "near misses," according to press reports. However, on June 7, 2006, U.S. forces were able to track Zarqawi to a safe house in Hibhib, near the city of Baqubah, in the mixed Sunni-Shiite province of Diyala, and an airstrike by one U.S. F-16 mortally wounded him.

A related group is Ansar al-Sunna, an offshoot of the Zarqawi network that was operating in northern Iraq, including the Kurdish areas and areas of Arab Iraq around Mosul. It was named as an FTO as an alias of Ansar al-Islam when the latter group was designated in March 2004, and Ansar al-Sunna remains on the FTO list. Ansar al-Sunna changed its name back to Ansar al-Islam in November 2007; however, the group has always maintained some distance from AQ-I. For example, it did not join the AQ-I umbrella group called the "Islamic State of Iraq."

In its most significant attack, the group claimed responsibility for February 1, 2004, twin suicide attacks in Irbil, northern Iraq, which killed over 100 Kurds, including some senior Kurdish officials. Another major attack—attributed to Ansar al-Sunna by the State Department "Country Reports on Terrorism: 2006" (released April 2007 by the State Department Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism)—was the December 2004 suicide bombing of a U.S. military dining facility at Camp Marez in the northern city of Mosul, which killed 13 U.S. soldiers. The State Department terrorism report for 2007 said that Ansar al-Sunna/Islam "continues to conduct attacks against a wide range of targets including Coalition Forces, the Iraqi government and security forces, and Kurdish and Shia figures."

AQ-I Strategy

Before his death, Zarqawi had largely set AQ-I's strategy as an effort to provoke all out civil war between the newly dominant Shiite Arabs and the formerly pre-eminent Sunni Arabs. In this strategy, Zarqawi apparently calculated that provoking civil war could, at the very least, undermine Shiite efforts to consolidate their political control of post-Saddam Iraq. If fully successful, the strategy could compel U.S. forces to leave Iraq by undermining U.S. public support for the war effort, and thereby leaving the Shiite government vulnerable to continued AQ-I and Sunni insurgent attack. The strategy might have been controversial among Al Qaeda circles, as evidenced by a purported letter (if genuine) from the number two Al Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Zarqawi, in July 2005. In that letter, Zawahiri questioned Zarqawi's strategy in Iraq by arguing that committing violence against Shiite civilians and religious establishments would undermine the support of the Iraqi people for AQ-I and the Sunni "resistance" more broadly.

To implement its strategy, AQ-I under Zarqawi focused primarily on spectacular suicide bombings intended to cause mass Shiite casualties or to destroy sites sacred to Shiites. Several suicide bombings were conducted in 2005 against Shiite celebrations, causing mass casualties. The most significant attack the February 22, 2006, bombing of the Shiite "Golden Mosque" in Sunni-inhabited Samarra (Salahuddin Province), widely attributed to AQ-I. The attack largely destroyed the golden dome of the mosque. It touched off widespread Shiite reprisals against Sunnis nationwide and is widely considered to have started the "civil war" that raged from the time of the bombing until late 2007, when it began to abate. On several occasions, President Bush has said that Zarqawi largely succeeded in his strategy, although he and other senior Administration officials did not, even at the height of the violence in late 2006, characterize the Iraq as in a state of "civil war." AQ-I's most lethal attack, and the single deadliest attack of the war to date, was the August 2007 truck bombings of Yazidi villages near Sinjar, in northern Iraq, killing an estimated 500 persons, mostly Yazidis.

By the end of 2006 and in early 2007, most senior U.S. officials were identifying AQ-I as a driving force, or even the driving force, of the insurgency. In his "threat assessment" testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 27, 2007, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Gen. Michael Maples called AQ-I "the largest and most active of the Iraq-based terrorist groups." On April 26, 2007, at a press briefing, the overall U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, called AQ-I "probably public enemy number one" in Iraq. On July 12, 2007, US. military spokesman in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, said that AQ-I was responsible for 80 to 90% of the suicide bombings in Iraq, and that defeating it was a main focus of U.S. operations. Some U.S. commanders said that, while most foreign fighters going to Iraq become suicide bombers, others are contributing to the overall insurgency as snipers, logisticians, and financiers. However, other U.S. commanders noted—and continue to note—that these major bombings constituted a small percentage of overall attacks in Iraq (which in early 2007 numbered about 175 per day), and that most of the U.S. combat deaths came from roadside bombs and direct or indirect munitions fire likely wielded by Iraqi Sunni insurgent fighters.

2007 Iraqi Sunni "Awakening" Movement/U.S. Operations and "Troop Surge"

In January 2007, President Bush articulated a new counter-insurgency strategy developed by Gen. Petraeus and others, based on assessments within the Administration and outside, that U.S. policy was failing to produce stability. The deterioration in the previous U.S. strategy was attributed, in part, to the burgeoning sectarian violence that AQ-I had helped set off. The cornerstone of the new strategy was to increase the number of U.S. troops in Baghdad and in Anbar Province in order to be able to protect the civilian population rather than conduct combat operations against militants. The U.S. "troop surge" reached full strength in June 2007.

The U.S. troop surge was intended to try to take advantage of a growing rift within the broad insurgency that was being observed by U.S. commanders in Iraq as early as mid-2005. The Zarqawi strategy of attempting to provoke civil war, and some of its ideology and practices in the Sunni areas, were not universally popular among Iraq's Sunnis, even among some Sunni insurgent groups. Strategically, Iraqi Sunnis have discernible political goals in Iraq, and some AQ-I tactics, such as attacks on Shiite civilians, were perceived as preventing future power sharing compromise with the Shiites. AQ-I fighters have broader goals, such as defeating the United States and establishing a Sunni-led Islamic state in Iraq that could expand throughout the region. Iraqi Sunni insurgents believed that attacks should be confined to "combatant" targets—Iraqi government forces, most of which are Shiite, Iraqi government representatives, and U.S. and other coalition forces.

Other Iraqi Sunnis resented AQ-I practices in the regions where AQ-I fighters congregated, including reported enforcement of strict Islamic law, segregation by sex, forcing males to wear beards, and banning all alcohol sales and consumption. In some cases, according to a variety of press reports, AQ-I fighters killed Iraqi Sunnis who violated these strictures. Other Sunnis, particularly tribal leaders involved in trade and commerce, believed that the constant fighting provoked by AQ-I was depriving Iraqi Sunnis of their livelihoods. Others believe that the strains between AQ-I and Iraqi Sunni insurgent fighters were a competition for power and control over the insurgency. According to this view, Iraqi Sunni leaders no more wanted to be dominated by foreign Sunnis than they did by Iraqi Shiites or U.S. soldiers. During 2003-2006 these strains were mostly muted as Iraqi Sunnis cooperated with AQ-I toward the broader goal of overturning the Shiite-dominated, U.S.-backed power structure in Iraq.

The first evidence of strains between AQ-I and Iraqi Sunni insurgents emerged in May 2005 in the form of a reported battle between AQ-I fighters and Iraqi Sunni tribal militiamen in the western town of Husaybah. Still, U.S. commanders had not, at this point, articulated or developed a successful strategy to exploit this rift. Meanwhile, Zarqawi was attempting to counter the strains developing between AQ-I and Iraqi Sunni political and insurgent structures. In January 2006, AQ-I announced formation of the "Mujahidin Shura Council"—an umbrella organization of six groups including AQ-I and five Iraqi Sunni insurgent groups, mostly those with an Islamist ideology. Forming the Shura Council appeared to many to be an attempt by AQ-I to demonstrate that it was working cooperatively with its Iraqi Sunni hosts and not seeking their subordination. To further this impression, in April 2006, the Council announced that an Iraqi, Abdullah Rashid (aka Abu Umar) al-Baghdadi, had been appointed its leader, although there were doubts as to Baghdadi's true identity. (In July 2007, a captured AQ-I operative said Baghdadi does not exist at all, but was a propaganda tool to disguise AQ-I's large role in the insurgency. ) Iraqi Sunni insurgent groups dominated by ex-Baath Party and ex-Saddam era military members apparently did not join the Mujahidin Shura. AQ-I continued to operate under the Mujahidin Shura umbrella at least until Zarqawi's death.

The shift to increased integration with Iraqi Sunni insurgents continued after Zarqawi's demise. After his death, Abu Ayub al-Masri (an Egyptian, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir) was formally named leader of the Mujahidin Shura Council (and therefore leader of AQ-I). According to the State Department terrorism report for 2006, al-Masri "continued [Zarqawi's] strategy of targeting Coalition forces and Shi'a civilians in an attempt to foment sectarian strife." In October 2006, al-Masri declared the "Islamic State of Iraq" (ISI) organization under which AQ-I and its allied groups now claim their attacks. ISI appeared to be a replacement for the Mujahidin Shura Council. In April 2007, the ISI named a "cabinet" consisting of a minister of war (al-Masri), the head of the cabinet (al-Baghdadi), and seven other "ministers."

The "Awakening" Movement Against AQ-I

The AQ-I efforts to improve cooperation with the Iraqi insurgents did not satisfy the entire Sunni community, even though that community remained resentful of the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and its perceived monopoly on power. In August 2006, U.S. commanders began to receive overtures from Iraqi Sunni tribal and other community leaders in Anbar Province to cooperate with U.S. efforts to expel AQ-I and secure the cities and towns of the province. This became known as the "Awakening" (As Sahawa). In September 2006, 23 Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar, led by a tribal sub-leader named Abd al-Sattar Al Rishawi, formed an "Anbar Salvation Council." The Council initially recruited about 13,000 young Sunnis from the province to help secure Ramadi, Fallujah, and other Anbar cities. The Council survived the September 13, 2007 killing of Rishawi by a suicide bomber believed to belong to AQ-I. Rishawi's brother (Shaykh Ahmad al-Rishawi) later took over the group and, along with the governor (Mamoun Rashid al-Awani) and other tribal figures from Anbar, visited Washington D.C. in November 2007 and in June 2008 to discuss the security progress in their province.

The U.S. "troop surge" included the addition of 4,000 U.S. Marines in Anbar Province. This additional force apparently emboldened the Anbar Salvation Council to continue recruiting Sunni volunteers to secure the province and purportedly convinced Anbar residents to increase their cooperation with U.S. forces to prevent violence. U.S. commanders emboldened this cooperation by offering funds ($350 per month per fighter) and training, although no U.S. weapons, to locally recruited Sunni security forces. These volunteers are now referred to as "Sons of Iraq" – there are about 103,000, of which about 80% are Sunnis. The 20% who are Shiites are opposed to Shiite extremist groups such as that of Moqtada Al Sadr. To retain the loyalty of the Sons of Iraq, U.S. officials are trying to fold them into the official Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), which would then pay their salaries. However, the Shiite-dominated Maliki government fears that the Sunni fighters are trying to burrow into the ISF with the intent of regaining power in Iraq, and have only agreed to accept about 35,000 Sons of Iraq fighters onto the ISF payrolls, not all of which are Sunni. U.S. commanders say that this hesitation by the Maliki government risks driving the Sunnis back into insurgent ranks and back into cooperation with AQ-I. Some Sons of Iraq have already abandoned their positions out of frustration, particularly in Diyala Province, although they have not necessarily resumed insurgent activity.

By June 2007, at the height of the U.S. troop surge, Gen. Petraeus called security improvements in Anbar "breathtaking" and said that security incidents in the province had declined by about 90%. He and other commanders reported an ability to walk incident free, although with security, in downtown Ramadi, a city that had been a major battleground only months earlier and which U.S. military intelligence experts reportedly had given up as "lost" in late 2006. General Petraeus testified in April 2008 that he estimates that Anbar Province could be turned over to Provincial Iraqi Control by July 2008, although the handover has been delayed by a power struggle between the Awakening tribal figures and the more urban, established Iraqi Sunni parties such as the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP).

The positive trends observed in Anbar encouraged other anti-AQ-I Sunnis to join the Awakening movement. In May 2007, a Diyala Salvation Council was formed in Diyala Province of tribal leaders who wanted to stabilize that restive province. In early 2007, Amiriyah was highly violent, but was stabilized by the emergence of former Sunni insurgents now cooperating with U.S. forces as a force called the "Amiriyah Freedom Fighters." Other Baghdad neighborhoods, including Saddam stronghold Adhamiyah, began to undergo similar transformations. In Baghdad, the U.S. military established supported this trend in the course of the Baghdad Security Plan ("troop surge") by establishing about 100 combat outposts, including 33 "Joint Security Stations" in partnership with the ISF, to clear neighborhoods of AQ-I and to encourage the population to come forward with information about AQ-I hideouts. Prime Minister Maliki said on February 16, 2008 that AQ-I had been largely driven out of Baghdad, and assessment that has not been subsequently contradicted by U.S. officials.

Gen. Petraeus attempted to increase the momentum of the Awakening Movement and the Sons of Iraq program with extensive U.S.-led combat against AQ-I and its sanctuaries. The large scale operations included those related to the troop surge in Baghdad, and two other large operations—Phantom Thunder and Phantom Strike. Operation Phantom Thunder (June 2007), was intended to clear AQ-I sanctuaries in the "belts" of towns and villages within a 30 mile radius around Baghdad. Part of the operation reportedly involved surrounded Baquba, the capital city of Diyala Province, to prevent the escape of AQ-I from the U.S. clearing operations in the city. A related offensive, Operation Phantom Strike, was conducted in August 2007 to prevent AQ-I from establishing any new sanctuaries.To maintain pressure on AQ-I, in January 2008, the U.S. military conducted Operation Iron Harvest and Operation Iron Reaper to disrupt AQ-I in northern Iraq.

Current Status of AQ-I

General Petraeus appeared before four Committees of Congress during April 8-9, 2008 to discuss progress in Iraq. He testified that the assistance from the Sons of Iraq, coupled with "relentless pursuit" of AQ-I by U.S. forces, had "reduced substantially" the threat posed by AQ-I. On May 10, 2008, CIA Director Michael Hayden said Al Qaeda is on "the verge of a strategic defeat in Iraq" because of its reduced presence and activity in large parts of Iraq. On August 10, 2008, Gen. James Conway, Commandant of the Marine Corps, told journalists that AQ-I had permanently lost its foothold in large parts of Iraq, that it is no longer welcomed by Sunni populations in Iraq, and theat AQ-I fighters had begun to shift their focus to Afghanistan where their efforts against the United States might be more effective. In late July 2008, a reputed AQ-I leader in Anbar told the Washington Post that AQ-I leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri had left Iraq to go to Afghanistan, or to the border areas of Pakistan where Al Qaeda leaders are believed to be hiding.

On the other hand, General Petraeus testified and has said in other settings that AQ-I remains highly active in and around Mosul, and views Mosul as key to its survival in Iraq, because it is astride the entry routes from Syria. He testified that AQ-I is "still capable of lethal attacks" and that the United States must "maintain relentless pressure on the organization, on the networks outside Iraq that support it, and on the resource flows that sustain it." He also testified that Al Qaeda's senior leaders ..."still view Iraq as the central front in their global strategy" and "send funding, direction, and foreign fighters to Iraq." On August 12, 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats, Ted Gistaro, in prepared remarks, told a Washington, D.C. research institute (Washington Institute for Near East Policy) that

Despite setbacks in Iraq, AQ-I remains Al Qaeda's most prominent and lethal regional affiliate. While Al Qaeda leaders likely see the declining effectiveness of AQ-I as a vulnerability to their global recruiting and fundraising efforts, they likely continue to see the fight in Iraq as important to their battle with the United States. [Osama] bin Laden and [Al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman ] al-Zawahiri since late 2007 have issued eight statements to rally supporters, donors, and prospective fighters by publicly portraying the Iraq jihad as part of a wider regional cause to "liberate" Jerusalem.

Estimated Numbers of Foreign Fighters

Although there have been differences among commanders about the contribution of the foreign fighters to the overall violence in Iraq, estimates of the numbers of foreign fighters have remained fairly consistent over time, at least as a percentage of the overall insurgency. As early as October 2003, U.S. officials estimated that as many as 3,000 might be non-Iraqi, although, suggesting uncertainty in the estimate, Gen. Abizaid said on January 29, 2004, that the number of foreign fighters in Iraq was "low" and "in the hundreds." A September 2005 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that there were about 3,000 non-Iraqi fighters in Iraq - about 10% of the estimated total size of the insurgency. The State Department report on terrorism for 2007 (Country Reports on Terrorism: 2007, released April 30, 2008) says AQ-I has a "membership" estimated at 5,000 - 10,000, making it the largest Sunni extremist group in Iraq. This estimate is somewhat higher than what many experts might expect in light of the official U.S. command assessments of the weakening of AQ-I by U.S. operations and strategy.

Another issue is the rate of flow of foreign fighters into Iraq. U.S. commanders said in July 2007 that approximately 60-80 foreign fighters come across the border every month (primarily the Iraq-Syria border) to participate in the Iraq insurgency. Press reports say that U.S. commanders estimate that the flow slowed to about 40 in October 2007, in part because of a U.S. raid in September 2007 on a desert camp at Sinjar, need the Syrian border, that was the hub of operations to smuggle foreign fighters into Iraq. General Petraeus testified in April 2008 that about 50 - 70 foreign fighters were still coming across the Syrian border into Iraq, and that Syria "has taken some steps to reduce the flow of foreign fighters through its territory, but not enough to shut down the key network that supports AQ-I." In June and July 2008, U.S. commanders estimate the flow at about 20-30 fighters per month.

Another issue is the specific nationalities of the foreigners. One press report in July 2007, quoting U.S. officials in Iraq, said that about 40% of the foreign fighters in Iraq are of Saudi origin. The November 22, 2007 New York Times article, cited above, says that Saudi Arabia and Libya accounted for 60% of the 700 foreign fighters who came into Iraq over the past year. That article was consistent with the findings of a study produced by the Combating Terrorism Center of West Point (Al Qa'ida's Foreign Fighters in Iraq), based on records of 700 foreign nationals who had entered Iraq, and whose papers were found in Iraq by U.S.-led forces near Sinjar, along the border with Syria, published in February 2008. The Sinjar records indicated that, of the 595 records in which a country of origin was stated, about 245 were of Saudi origin; about 110 were of Libyan origin; about 48 were of Syrian origin; 47 were of Yemeni origin; 45 were of Algerian origin; about 40 were of Moroccan origin and a similar amount were of Tunisian origin; about 20 were or Jordanian origin; about 8 were of Egyptian origin; and 20 were "other."

Linkages to Al Qaeda Central Leadership

If the reports of significant AQ-I relocations to the Pakistan tribal areas bordering Afghanistan are correct, this would suggest that the links are tightening between AQ-I and Al Qaeda's central leadership as represented by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Both Al Qaeda leaders are widely believed to be hiding in areas of Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, and many assessments since 2007 say that Al Qaeda is enjoying increasing freedom of movement and action in the border regions. If Al Qaeda's ranks are now augmented by an influx of AQ-I fighters from the Iraq battlefront, it could be argued that Al Qaeda's overall capabilities to attack the U.S. homeland, or to undermine U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, have been increased. U.S. commanders in Afghanistan say they are seeing growing signs of Al Qaeda involvement in the insurgency in Afghanistan, beyond financing and logistical facilitation, although it is not certain whether any of this added assistance to the Afghan insurgency is coming from fighters recently relocated from Iraq. The issue of how the United States is combatting the Afghan insurgency, both in Afghanistan and increasingly through direct action on the Pakistani side of the border, is discussed in CRS Report RL30588, Afghanistan: Post-War Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy , by [author name scrubbed]. On the other hand, as noted above, the fact that AQ-I fighters and leaders are leaving Iraq represents a blow to Al Qaeda and could weaken its ability to recruit new adherents.

The links between AQ-I and Al Qaeda's central leadership might be tightening, but they are not new. As discussed above, on July 24, 2007, President Bush devoted much of a speech to the argument that AQ-I is closely related to Al Qaeda's central leadership. The President noted the following details, including:

In 2004, Zarqawi formally joined Al Qaeda and pledged allegiance to bin Laden. Bin Laden then publicly declared that Zarqawi was the "Prince of Al Qaeda in Iraq." President Bush stated that, according to U.S. intelligence, Zarqawi had met both bin Laden and Zawahiri. He asserted later in the speech that, according to U.S. intelligence, AQ-I is a "full member of the Al Qaeda terrorist network." After Zarqawi's death, bin Laden sent an aide named Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi to help Zarqawi's successor, al-Masri, but al-Iraqi was captured before reaching Iraq. That a captured AQ-I leader, an Iraqi named Khalid al-Mashhadani, had told U.S. authorities that Baghdadi was fictitious. In July 2007, Brig. Gen. Bergner, a U.S. military spokesman, told journalists that Mashhadani is an intermediary between al-Masri and bin Laden and Zawahiri. That AQ-I is the only insurgent group in Iraq "with stated ambitions to make the country a base for attacks outside Iraq." Referring to the November 9, 2005, terrorist attacks on hotels in Zarqawi's native Jordan, President Bush said AQ-I "dispatched terrorists who bombed a wedding reception in Jordan." Referring to an August 2005 incident, he said AQ-I "sent operatives to Jordan where they attempted to launch a rocket attack on U.S. Navy ships" docked at the port of Aqaba.

Some experts believe that links between Al Qaeda's central leadership and AQ-I have been tenuous, and that the few operatives linking the two do not demonstrate an ongoing, substantial relationship. Others point to the Zawahiri admonishment of Zarqawi, discussed above, as evidence that there is not a close connection between the two. Still others have maintained that there is little evidence that AQ-I seeks to attack broadly outside Iraq, and that those incidents that have taken place have been in Jordan, where Zarqawi might have wanted to try to undermine King Abdullah II, whom Zarqawi opposed as too close to the United States. Since the 2005 attacks noted above, there have not been any attacks outside Iraq that can be directly attributed to AQ-I.