Word: guerrillaism
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Saddam has aimed all along to draw coalition forces deep into Baghdad's back streets and cinder-block neighborhoods, where his forces could neutralize American technological superiority with guerrilla tactics that put civilians in the middle. He saw how faithful defenders hidden in Iraq's southern cities scored surprising success holding out. The U.S. desperately wants to sidestep that kind of bloody door-to-door fighting, which could drag out the war and rack up unacceptable body counts among American troops and innocent Iraqis...
...options coalition war planners are offering them: surrender or obliteration. Instead, those Iraqis still fighting have, according to an American officer, "turned matador," changing into civilian clothes, sidestepping the full might of advancing forces only to reappear later to inflict cut after cut in the Americans' flanks with guerrilla strikes on convoys or suicide bomb attacks. In this atmosphere every civilian is suspect, and the longer the conflict lasts and the more innocents that are sacrificed, the less welcome the Americans may be. The recent suicide bombing, in which four 3rd Infantrymen were killed, swiftly followed by the 3rd Infantry...
Before the conflict started, combat trainers stressed the priority of avoiding civilian casualties. But that changed with the first guerrilla-style attacks. On Day 2, the order came to assume all Iraqis were hostile unless proved otherwise--an assumption that many of these young soldiers had made anyway. Since receiving their new instructions, the soldiers have dropped their message of liberation for one of mistrust and irresistible force. Checkpoint squads have arrested hundreds of Iraqis who are unable to communicate their reasons for traveling, while detaining others carrying AK-47s as "terrorists," even though Iraqis carry AKs the way Texans...
...battle for Baghdad may be mostly over; the battle for Kirkuk may be just beginning - and it may put the United States on a collision course not with Saddam Hussein holdouts, but two of its key allies. Iraqi Kurds are cheering the arrival of their guerrilla fighters in Kirkuk Thursday, and the same news has Turkey's leaders confronting their worst nightmare about the war next door. The U.S. had promised Turkey that the Kurdish fighters would be kept out of the northern oil town, and that, indeed, had been Washington's orders to the guerrillas working with U.S. Special...
...most influential body among Iraq's Shiites. Washington had, in fact, drawn SCIRI into a tentative coalition of six exile groups ahead of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." But the Pentagon had, at the same time, warned al-Hakim to refrain from sending his 10,000 exiled guerrilla fighters back into the country. SCIRI's al-Badr brigade has been armed and trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guard, and the Pentagon was suspicious of an armed group that might serve as a proxy force for hard-liners in Tehran...