Ash-Sharq al-Awsatreports that the U.S. Army has seized numerous Al-Qa’ida in Iraq documents from the office of the leader of AQI in Anbar Province, Abu Fares Azzam. Azzam was killed in the raid.
The Army has recovered numerous documents and folders on a wide range of topics: AQI’s infantry and mortar/rocket battalions, volunteer questionaires that new AQI recruits have to fill out (the forms apparently were required for those who wanted to join the battalions, information on foreign fighters in jail (obtained from people inside the government), and the telephone numbers of pro-US informants. Other documents show that AQI has conducted after action reviews with members who have been arrested and released, in order to study American interrogation methods.
Last, according to the article, the internal AQI documents suggest that the group is trying to reduce the role of foreign fighters within the organizational structure, relegating them to roles in suicide operations. At the same time, Saddam-era army officers have taken up the managerial positions in the organization.
Overall, this seems to be a good break for the U.S. Army. This last bit of information, about the reduced role of foreign fighters, may pop up in debates on U.S. policy in Iraq. If AQI is being run by old Iraqi army vets, then the group is less of a threat to foreign nations than some analysts and pundits have suggested. Don’t get me wrong, foreign fighters are still gaining experience on the Iraqi battlegrounds and that is dangerous, but, in the short and mid-term, an organization generally run by Iraqis is less likely to shift its strategy outward, ala Al Qa’ida in the early 1990s.
AcewiththeFace…Splash…any thoughts?
Filed under: Understanding Al-Qaeda | Tagged: Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Iraq, Iraqi Insurgency
Good stuff. Im kind of skeptical that its gonna mean a whole lot though strategically. Havent these kind of caches been discovered before?
Abu Muqawama has a good piece on this topic but you can only read the first 50 words of the article.
Yeah we have got caches of stuff like this before. I would think that this would be a big domestic news story, Al Qaeda in Iraq on the run, etc., but I haven’t seen anything on it.