Does anyone have a link showing al Qaeda in Iraq only about 7%?

[jenmito]

I'm trying to show that fact to a Repub. who needs "proof." Thanks in advance! :hi:

[EVDebs]

1. Will keep looking; USA Today reports tiny percentage

Infighting is seen as splitting enemy in Iraq
Local insurgents are turning against fighters for al-Qaida, U.S. intelligence officer says
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060126/NEWS06/601260460/1012

"Zahner said the insurgency consists of 12,000 to 15,000 hard-core Iraqi fighters and supporters, as well as 1,000 militants loyal to al-Qaida in Iraq, of which about 10 percent are foreign."

and Rolling Stone puts the numbers this way:

"The Sunni insurgency is larger and more homegrown than the Bush administration acknowledges. American forces, after first insisting that the resistance was composed of no more than 5,000 foreign fighters with ties to Al Qaeda, now hold more than twice that many prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and Camp Cropper -- and admit that as many as 20,000 well-funded fighters remain at large. "We're facing a well-developed, mature insurgency with the support of the local population," Maj. John Reed, stationed outside the city of Husaybah, said recently."

The Quagmire
www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7287564/the_quagmire/

[jenmito]

3. Thanks for the info.!

:hi:

[EVDebs]

7. See post #6, wikipedia has some good info and a poll

from British intelligence.

[LynnTheDem]

2. There is NO al Qaeda in Iraq. Do you mean "foreign fighters" that are

NOT wearing US military uniforms?

Yep got a ton of links to that...including the US military;

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.html

Insurgents Are Mostly Iraqis, US Military Says

The 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 (only 350 "foreigners")

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.

Foreign detainees are few in Iraq
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-07-05-detainees-usat_x.htm

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

Nationalism drives many insurgents as they fight U.S. (imagine that...ain't just 'mericans who love thier own country. Amazing.)

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

Poll: Iraqis out of Patience (what would YOU do, if it were YOUR country invaded & occupied?)

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

There is no "al Qaeda" in Iraq; al Zarqawi was NEVER "al Qaeda". He's Ansar al Islam, whose leader lives a free man to this day.

[jenmito]

4. I know the vast majority are Iraqis...

so they were also lying when they said the small number of foreign fighters were al Qaeda? Figures! Thanks for the info.! :hi:

[LynnTheDem]

5. The US "msm" likes to call al Zaqawi "al Qaeda". He is not, he never was.

He is Ansar al Islam, sworn enemy of Saddam Hussein, and whose group lived for years in Kurdistan, under US CONTROL, until bush's invasion.

Zaqawi's Ansar al Islam group is the one bush 3 times refused to allow the US military to "take out" prior to bush's illegal invasion, coz bush wanted to trick the American people by calling Zaqawi "al Qaeda"...the US "msm" never bothered much to point out the wee fact that Ansar was;

1. NOT al Qaeda or al Qaeda-affiliated

2. NOT in Iraq, but rather in northern Kurdiastan under US CONTROL for over a decade.

3. Was Hussein's enemy.

4. Whose leader is a free man, after several FBI interviews.

Just like the US "msm" always refers to al Sistani as an Iraqi; he isn't. He's the most powerful Shi'ite in the world & lives in Iraq. He's IRANIAN.

Gotta laugh at the US "msm".

Anyhoo, need links for the above lemme know & I'll go look em up. :)

[jenmito]

8. Thanks, LynntheDem! I don't need links...

I've known these facts and argued them with many Bush followers who claimed Zarqawi, who they claim was an al Qaeda member, was being harbored by Saddam in Iraq before the invasion. I told them all the things you said. When I'd tell them Bush let Zarqawi remain free so he had a stronger argument to invade Iraq, they'd say, "HA-so al Qaeda WAS in Iraq!" Then I explain the things you did. Thanks again, though! :hi:

[EVDebs]

6. Wikipedia says 'including al Qaeda' but I won't argue with you...

""Foreign Islamist fighters including al Qaeda, largely driven by the similar Sunni Wahabi doctrine, as well as the remnants of Ansar al-Islam; ""

from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_insurgency

I'm just trying to get a handle on the size of the insurgency, not an argument over semantics.

The wikipedia site also shows this,

"" A later 2005 poll by British intelligence concurred that 45 per cent of Iraqis support attacks against coalition forces, rising to 65 per cent in some areas, and that 82 percent are "strongly opposed" to the presence of foreign troops.<38> Demands for U.S. withdrawal have also been signed on by one third of Iraq's Parliament.<39>""

With any occupation, without winning the hearts and minds of the locals, no sustainable presence can be maintained.

In less than 25 years (world oil reserves at 1 trillion barrels vs. world daily consumption currently at 84 million barrels and projected to rise to 120 million per day with India/China increasing consumption) the world will deplete the last stocks of the precious commodity. The war torn Middle East will no longer be of any use to Western oil interests anyway. Any military presence will be futility anyway if you look at this in the 'long view'.

Winning the Oil Endgame www.oilendgame.com by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute shows us the way out, just as he did during the late '70s and early '80s.

[EVDebs]

9. Poll: Many Iraqis support attacks on US troops

New WPO Poll: Iraqi Public Thinks US Plans Permanent Bases in Iraq
Iraqis Want Timetable for US Withdrawal
Half of Iraqis Approve of Attacks on US Forces, Including 9 Out of 10 Sunnis

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/165.php?nid=&id=&pnt=165&lb=hmpg1

This more recent poll backs up the poll done by British intelligence mentioned in the wikipedia article on the Iraqi insurgency.

Furthermore, it appears that Bush's Iraq policies mimic the Nixon era plans for seizing the Saudi oilfields in the '70s, see

British spies warned of U.S. plans to invade Arab states
Friday, January 2, 2004
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/01/01/britain.nixon.ap/

same plans, different oilfields. This is identical to the plotline of the movie Three Days of the Condor, btw, strange how life imitates art -- or is it the other way around ?

In any event, a world with finite oil resources of 1 trillion barrels being depleted at a rising rate, currently 84 million barrels per day and soon to be 120 million barrels per day, means that in 25 years there won't be any oil left to fight over anyhow. The Muslim world will have what it wants, no Western presence in "its" part of the world; they will be welcome to it.

The West, for its part, will be forced into what Amory Lovins calls 'the oil endgame', see www.oilendgame.com for a downloadable book that normally goes for $40. Such a deal ! Lovin's ideas on conservation is what got us through the last oil price shocks...and is primed to do it again.