Danger Around Every Corner

ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/GETTY
Soldiers grieve at a service for Specialist Donald Laverne Wheeler Jr., killed by a rocket-propelled grenade while on patrol in Tikrit on Oct. 13

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Who Is Responsible?
In the beginning, the Bush Administration tended to blame the attacks on die-hard Saddam loyalists whom Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dubbed "deadenders." It was assumed that those fighters wanted to see Saddam restored to power. In the Sunni triangle, the remnants of the Baath Party regime are thought to still account for a sizable segment of the anti-American militants. But U.S. officials believe they are making progress against the loyalists, as more figures from the deposed regime are captured or killed. Pentagon officers say the modest scale of the attacks suggests that they are conducted by small cells operating largely on their own. "If they could launch bigger attacks," says a Central Command officer, "they would."

The Americans don't believe that the resistance is organized. Lieut. General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. ground troops in Iraq, says, "We have not established convincingly that there is national-level leadership directing this low-intensity conflict." Instead the conflict may be mutating into a more generalized, popular fight against the foreign occupation by Saddam loyalists, some foreign fighters and citizens who did not support Saddam but now resent America's presence, according to Iraqis close to the resistance. "The anti-American forces don't have any overall strategy," says Lieut. Colonel Brian Drinkwine, commander of the 1505 Parachute Infantry Regiment, which controls Fallujah, the site of many deadly attacks. "They just want America out of Iraq."

It is easy to imagine how some Iraqis would chafe in the presence of the occupying force. Conservative Muslims have expressed anger at the random raids by coalition soldiers who search their houses and, in some of the biggest perceived outrages, rummage through women's wardrobes. Iraqis also resent the roundups that detain civilians, including many innocents, for weeks on end. U.S. troops have fallen into lethal fire fights, like the one in Karbala last Friday, when they clashed with religious groups. And they are alienating poor farmers like Abdel Fattah Naef, who once maintained lush orchards in a town 60 miles north of Baghdad. Soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division bulldozed his farmland last month following a series of ambush attacks on American convoys traveling past it. "If nine people in this area hated the Americans before this," says Naef, "now there are 90."

In addition, there are signs of foreign involvement in the unrest. U.S. officials doubt that Iraqis by themselves had the know-how to pull off assaults like the car bombings. Moreover, a Pentagon intelligence officer in Iraq told TIME, "It is totally against the psychology of the Iraqi people" to become willing suicide bombers. In Washington's view, the troublemakers are foreign terrorists, either al-Qaeda operatives or returning members of the al-Qaeda linked Iraqi group Ansar al-Islam. Many Iraqis blame the big hits on an influx of Arab Islamists bent on holy war. Observers say unknown numbers have slipped into Iraq from Iran, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The declining influence of Saddam's loyalists has apparently emboldened Iraq's Islamist groups to begin coordinating with foreign fighters eager to battle America. "They are coming into Iraq through many gates," says Ali Abdul Ameer, spokesman for the Iraqi National Accord, which is taking its turn this month to head the Governing Council. "We cannot stop them." The U.S. has installed Iraqi police to patrol a frontier as long and as porous as the U.S. border with Mexico, but they number just 2,700, perhaps 10% of what U.S. officials say is required. The U.S. says it is working to stop illegal entry, but bottling up the borders will not be easy.

Whatever their exact affiliation and degree of organization, all the militants are pursuing the same objective: to force the U.S. out of Iraq. Their strategy is to create chaos and destabilize the country. Attacks against the people trying to rebuild the country aim, no doubt, to show Iraqis that the U.S. can't govern the country and convince the Americans that the effort is too costly.