Update: Iraq

In my article, “The Beginning of the End?,” I noted that many foreign fighters have chosen to leave Iraq and engage in jihadist activities in their home countries. I also stated that this was nothing new and the world witnessed the same situation at the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. When the Soviets left, the international jihad movement was at a crossroads and was forced to make a choice between going back to their normal lives and wait for the call if they were needed again or take the jihad to apostate regimes in Muslim countries. While a homogenous decision did not take place, many found they could not return home because they were marked by their country of origin and forced to flee to countries that were more open to fundamentalist Islam. This is the situation of many terrorists forced to leave Iraq.

In the late 1980’s, many of those who fought in Afghanistan followed Usama bin Laden to the Sudan. Today, both Sudan and Somalia are playing host to the jihadists that nobody wants. On the one hand it is nice to see the remnants of al-Qaeda run out of Iraq, while on the other the people of Africa are now forced to suffer. Since the jihadist exodus out of Iraq, attacks in Sudan against the enemies of the Omar Al-Bashir regime have increased substantially (it appears as if a prosecutor for the International Criminal Court is seeking to indict Al-Bashir for genocide and war crimes). It is still too soon to tell if the two phenomenons are correlated, but it does appear to be too much of a coincidence.

Troop Drawdown

Many news outlets across the U.S. are reporting that the Bush administration is debating on whether to accelerate the removal of U.S. troops from Iraq. This is another subject I have commented on. For the Iraqi government to succeed the U.S. must get out of the way as much as possible and let the new government spread its influence. The U.S. has repeatedly contended that the reduction of coalition forces depends on the security situation. The following photos show the progress the U.S. and Iraqis have made in expelling foreign fighters and increasing security. This may be the situation needed for the U.S. to go ahead and begin the drawdown of coalition forces.


Note: Recent operations in the Mosul area have removed this as a haven for al-Qaeda. The presence of insurgents is now far less than represented on this map.