SOWING UNREST:

US Forces Arrest Key Insurgents in Iraq (Al Pessin, 09 May 2005, VOA News)

The U.S. military says it has arrested two key members of the Iraqi insurgency led by Abu Musab Zarqawi. And military officers say those two men, and other captured insurgents, are providing a wealth of information about the insurgency, information that is being used in counter-insurgency operations, including a major offensive in northwestern Iraq.

The military says the recent high-level insurgent arrests have provided "significant insight" into the terrorist network's operations, logistics, and locations. One result is the offensive in al-Anbar province involving more than one-thousand coalition troops, mostly from the U.S. 2nd Marine Division.

And the division's chief of operations, Colonel Bob Chase, says newly captured insurgents are providing still more information about their operations, resulting in an expansion of the offensive's objectives. "We have found with a lot of these so-called fighters that once you capture them, they are very quick to turn to save themselves," he said. "And they are giving us a lot of information which is providing us more places to go ahead and attack and go ahead and develop target packages on."

Colonel Chase reports that the mid- and higher-level insurgent leaders are more likely to provide information than lower-level insurgents, who, he says, are often more ideologically committed than their leaders. "These are not ten-feet-tall dedicated, die-hard terrorists for the most part, particularly the higher in the level," he said. "Certainly, the low level (insurgents) appear to be people that are dedicated to a cause, but the mid- and high-level (insurgents) are very quick to turn on each other."

One of the benefits of televising confessions and releasing stories like this is to get these guys looking at each other with distrust.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 10, 2005 12:07 PM