Word: baathist
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...insurgents have no intention of laying down their arms. Indeed, the nature of the insurgency in Iraq is fundamentally changing. TIME reported last fall that the insurgency was being led by members of the former Baathist regime, who were using guerrilla tactics in an effort to drive out foreign occupiers and reclaim power. But a TIME investigation of the insurgency today--based on meetings with insurgents, tribal leaders, religious clerics and U.S. intelligence officials--reveals that the militants are turning the resistance into an international jihadist movement. Foreign fighters, once estranged from homegrown guerrilla groups, are now integrated as cells...
...troops during the invasion and has served as a resistance commander ever since, organizing rocket attacks on the green zone, the headquarters of the U.S. administration in Baghdad. When interviewed by TIME last fall, he spoke of a vain hope that Saddam would return and re-establish a Baathist regime. But at a recent meeting near a rural mosque, he said he is fighting to rid all Muslim lands of infidels and to set up an Islamic state in Iraq. "The jihad in Iraq is more potent than it was in Afghanistan in the 1980s because the insurgents today have...
...Despite the considerable risks attached to the transition process he's leading - including direct threats on his life - Allawi remains unruffled. That may be because he is widely viewed both in Iraq and abroad as a pragmatic "strongman" type ruler, rather than a Jeffersonian democrat. Himself a former Baathist intelligence operative, he insisted for much of his three decades in exile that the only way to change Iraq was by lopping off the head of the regime but maintaining much of its administrative bureaucracy and security personnel. To that end, he worked - for some time as a CIA asset...
...Sunni Insurgents The Players: Initially dismissed as the work of Baathist "bitter-enders" and a handful of foreign jihadists, the insurgency centered in the Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad has raged on for more than a year, and last week's death toll throughout the region suggests it is far from over. U.S. officials have come to recognize that the insurgency is in fact a diverse movement - some of its elements being foreign fighters such as the Jordanian Qaeda-linked militant Musab al-Zarqawi, others being former officers of the old army or ordinary Sunni Iraqis guided by nationalist...
...Challenge: Establish independence from the U.S. in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis and the region; isolate the Sunni insurgents by giving as many former Baathist types as possible a stake in the new Iraq, and send them after the foreign jihadists; draw the skeptical Shi'ites closer by going all-out to organize elections and make sure that Moqtada Sadr's group is participating; keep the Kurds on board; develop a common understanding between Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. over the terms of a new Iraqi political arrangement. A tall order, to be sure, but the alternatives...