CNN’s Michael Ware has a must-read piece on Al Qaeda in Iraq and its organization. Ware obtained captured documents from the Anbar Awakening that outline Al Qaeda in Iraq’s organization, planning, operations, recruiting, shadow legal system, and targeted propaganda campaign, as well as the outright brutality that the terror group inflicted on the Iraqi people in Anbar. Al Qaeda’s senior leadership is largely foreign but filled out the middle ranks with Iraqis. The group is highly bureaucratic, and kept records on everything from operational planning to administration. Ware’s piece refutes last summer’s meme that al Qaeda was but a mere fraction of the insurgency in Iraq. Folks like counterterrorism consultant Malcolm Nance and the New York Times‘s public editor Clark Hoyt said that the United States was pumping up al Qaeda’s stature and claimed that al Qaeda consisted of the entire insurgency. The piece also highlights another important point about Al Qaeda in Iraq. While the terror group has suffered major setbacks in Anbar and Baghdad and is on the ropes in Ninewa, Salahadin, and Diyala province, the organizational capacity to regenerate still exists. “The picture the documents paint of a well-oiled, bureaucratic organization is relevant today,” Ware states. Al Qaeda in Iraq may be down, but they are not out. A hasty withdrawal from Iraq could give al Qaeda the space it needs to reignite the violence the U.S. and Iraqi forces fought so hard to quell these past 18 months.
