2 pictures emerge of militants' power

BAGHDAD -- Top American military officials said in interviews that they won't shy from an all-out confrontation with militants in Fallujah, and they expect victory over a nationwide insurgency that they described as fragmented, weakened, and losing popular support.

But on the ground, a different picture of the resistance is emerging. Military statistics indicate that insurgents across the country have killed more Americans with every passing month since June, even as the number of attacks has fluctuated widely.

And the outpouring of pro-resistance sentiment in the streets and Sunni Muslim mosques of Baghdad over the past few days suggests that a full US ground invasion of Fallujah could further embolden opposition to the government and the United States, while unleashing a wave of popular anger like that which gripped Iraq in April, when Marines briefly entered the rebel-held city.

The picture of an insurgency whose ranks are growing and whose attacks are increasingly lethal is starkly at odds with the official US military assessment of a desperate, fractious array of fighters presented to a reporter in a recent background briefing.

Senior military officials disputed Iraqi assertions that the insurgency has deep roots among nationalists across the country who support armed resistance to US forces but vehemently oppose terrorist groups like Tawhid and Jihad, which has beheaded two Americans and a Briton.

"I think it's wrong to call this a nationalist insurgency. They aren't nationalists," said US Army Brigadier General John Defreitas III, deputy chief of staff for intelligence of the Multinational Force-Iraq. "I don't see anything positive that's being offered by the former regime elements."

But at Sunni mosques across Baghdad on Friday, and across the western Anbar Province where guerrillas have operated freely out of headquarters in Fallujah and Ramadi, clerics exhorted Iraqis to prepare for a showdown in Fallujah with US and Iraqi government troops that most Iraqis view as imminent and inevitable. Since Thursday, US forces have escalated operations around the city, bombing suspected insurgent targets, closing roads into Fallujah, and seizing rebel checkpoints on its outskirts.

"God has chosen Iraq to be the graveyard of the Americans, just as he chose Afghanistan to be a graveyard for the Russians," cleric Abdulsalam al-Kubaisi said at Friday prayers at the Mother of All Villages Mosque in the capital.

Defreitas discussed the insurgency in an hourlong conversation at the Iraqi Presidential Palace, which now serves as the US headquarters. The official dismissed insurgent threats to wreak mayhem on Iraq's government and its economic infrastructure if US forces launched a full-scale invasion of Fallujah.

"There's no way the insurgents can stand the power we bring to the table," said Defreitas, the top US military intelligence officer in Iraq. "They will be defeated."

A senior military intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said US forces stood to gain if insurgents chose to fight in Fallujah, rather than melt into the surrounding countryside.

"Let them mass because then they are definitely going to fulfill their jihadist dream of going to heaven, because they're going to die pretty quickly," the official said.

Defreitas said the insurgency had much less power than the Iraqi public thinks, as evinced by what he described as successful US-led clearing operations intended to reestablish government control in the so-called Triangle of Death, an area south of Baghdad rife with insurgents and bandits, as well as in the Sunni Triangle city of Samarra.

"I think we're at a tipping point," he said. "I think the insurgency has been strengthening over time. But I think the current strategy is having an effect on the insurgency. It's slowing it down."

But popular Sunni clerics such as Sheik Abdul Sattar Abdul Jabbar, of the nationalist Association of Muslim Scholars, said US officials, through wishful thinking, have conflated Iraqi anger over terrorism with a drop in support for the resistance.

Tawhid and Jihad, led by Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has claimed responsibility for beheading foreigners and sending suicide car bombers across Iraq to strike mainly at Iraqi police and national guard recruits.

Clerics like Jabbar, who make no secret of their support for the resistance, have fallen into Zarqawi's crosshairs because they openly criticize his tactics and targets, declaring that killing foreign civilians and Iraqis is wrong, as is hostage-taking.

In his office desk drawer, Jabbar has three pistols -- "the new necessities of life," he said with a sigh -- on top of his business cards. He has received eight death threats, "probably from resistance groups that have become terrorists."

"Who do you think defends Fallujah? The jihad in Fallujah has nothing to do with Tawhid and Jihad," Jabbar said. "Everyone is ready to put aside their differences to defend the city."

Militants already have threatened a campaign of bombings and assassinations if American troops set foot in Fallujah, whose city limits they have not crossed since the bloody clashes in April. Groups such as Jabbar's and the network of mosques that mobilized donations of food and blood during the April fighting are preparing a campaign of civil disobedience across the country if an all-out battle erupts in Fallujah, a city of 300,000 about 40 miles west of Baghdad.

Even Shi'ite Muslim clerics continue to broadcast support for anti-American resistance in the Sunni Triangle, despite profound sectarian differences between Sunni and Shi'ite militants.

The Iraqi government has tried to capitalize on an increasingly public split inside Fallujah between Iraqi guerrillas and foreign Arab jihadis, hoping to convince the public that even the majority inside Fallujah opposes the guerrilla fighters. The power struggle has prompted intramural killings between the two factions.

But the prospect of a full-scale confrontation between US forces, backed by the Iraqi government, and the constellation of militants in Fallujah, has galvanized even those Iraqis who consider the Fallujah resistance to be dominated by foreign jihadis and criminals.

"I feel proud and happy when I see a force standing up to the Americans, because only this show of force will make them listen to our voices and understand us," said Mohammed Faleh, 32, a wholesale distributor of home appliances in Baghdad.

A comparatively wealthy merchant, Faleh said he lives in fear of being kidnapped by the Fallujah-based gangs that have kidnapped many leading Baghdad businessmen, releasing them for ransoms as high as $100,000.

His hope to see US forces humbled outweighs his distaste for the situation in Fallujah, where gangsterism has flourished side by side with the nationalist and Islamic fundamentalist insurgencies in the city.

It made no tactical difference, Defreitas said, whether Americans were fighting nationalist Sunni Iraqis or foreign Arab fighters on a suicide mission -- even while Iraqis are increasingly distinguishing between a "patriotic resistance" that targets US forces and "terrorists" who target Iraqis and foreign civilians for kidnapping and suicide bomb attacks.

"The idea that two groups are arguing over the best way to kill coalition forces is something that I find difficult to differentiate," the officer said. "If one thinks it's better to kill and not behead, and the other group thinks it's better to kill and behead, it has the same effect on our forces."

The military's numbers contradict its assertion that insurgent attacks are waning. While the number of attacks per week declined from August to September, a fact that military officers tout at almost every public announcement, insurgents killed more US personnel and more Iraqis in September than the previous month.

In fact, while the number of attacks has fluctuated widely since April, rising from 400 attacks a week in July to 800 attacks a week in August before falling again to 500 attacks per week, the US death toll has grown every month since June, when 42 were killed. Last month, insurgents killed 80 Americans.

The US military plans to establish "local control" across the entire country by December, said US Air Force Brigadier General Erv Lessel, the deputy director of operations for Multinational Force--Iraq and the top spokesman for US forces here. That goal requires driving insurgents out of strongholds across the country, including huge swaths of Baghdad, the entire western Sunni Triangle, including Fallujah and Ramadi, and a list of cities including Baqubah, Kirkuk, Mosul, Mahmoudiah, and Latifiyah.

"The question in Fallujah is how much resilience the insurgents and terrorists have and their desire to make it their final stand," Lessel said.

By US estimates, the insurgency across the country numbers at least 12,000 fighters, not including the so-called "weekend warriors" who occasionally take part in armed operations or those who supply arms, money, and logistical support to fighters.

In the area south of Baghdad, insurgents demonstrated their might and resilience this month by blowing up a municipal building in Iskandariyah just days after US Marines, with much fanfare, deployed 3,000 troops in a joint series of counterinsurgency sweeps and raids.

And unlike the insurgent-controlled areas where the US forces have tested the water, Fallujah has been in rebel hands almost continuously since April 2003, giving the fighters considerable time to stockpile weapons and prepare for a showdown.

"You certainly want to explore every opportunity possible to achieve a political-diplomatic solution before applying military force," Lessel said. "You don't like to use force, but many times it is necessary, and we're ready."

Globe correspondent Sa'ad al-Izzi contributed to this report. Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.