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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Sahar Issa | McClatchy Newspapers
BAGHDAD — The departure of al Qaida-affiliated fighters from Iraq to join
the rebellion against Syrian President Bashar Assad in Syria has had one
benefit, Iraqi officials say: Violence has dropped in this country, in some
areas by as much as 50 percent in just a few months.
Iraqi officials declined to provide precise figures for the drop-off or to
estimate how many al Qaida-affiliated fighters have left the country for
Syria. But the impact of the departure, they said, has been especially
apparent in Ninewah province, which borders Syria and has long been the
scene of some of al Qaida in Iraq's most violent bombings and assassinations.
The province's capital, Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, was once home to
as many as 800 al Qaida-affiliated fighters, U.S. officials estimated last
summer. But one provincial security officer said al Qaida in Iraq attacks in
Mosul have become infrequent this year, and the attacks that do occur
generally are small or are detected before they can be carried out. The
officer spoke only on the condition of anonymity because regulations
prohibit him from talking to reporters.
"Violence is down in Mosul, maybe one or two operations per day, sometimes
none," the officer said Monday. "Today, members of (al Qaida in Iraq)
attempted to booby-trap a house, but they were discovered and the operation
failed. Yesterday, two IEDs" — improvised explosive devices — "were
planted and both were discovered, and they failed again. The day before that
there were no operations at all."
As for the rest of the province, "I can say that violence is down more than
50 percent since autumn of 2011, and much more than that if compared with an
earlier date, like autumn of 2010," the officer said.
Last Thursday, James R. Clapper, the Obama administration's director of
national intelligence, told Congress that the United States thought al Qaida
-affiliated fighters were responsible for the most spectacular rebel attacks
on Syrian military forces in recent months, including suicide bombings in
Damascus in December and January and two attacks earlier this month in
Aleppo. The four attacks, which targeted Syrian military or intelligence
facilities, killed at least 70 people.
Clapper called the presence of al Qaida-affiliated fighters in Syria a "
disturbing phenomenon" and warned that the anti-Assad rebels "in many cases
may not be aware they are there."
Iraqi officials said they'd suspected for months that al Qaida-affiliated
fighters, who flocked to Iraq after the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003,
were leaving for Syria.
"For some time now al Qaida members have been heading toward Syria to fight
there, and as a result violence has gone down and we witness a much smaller
number of operations carried out, overall, in Iraq," Col. Yahya al Ubaidi,
an Iraqi intelligence officer, told McClatchy. He said violence had dropped
throughout Iraq since late last year.
Iskander Witwit, the deputy chairman of Parliament's security committee,
said the nature of some of the attacks in Syria had alerted Iraqi officials
months ago to the likelihood that al Qaida-affiliated fighters had
transferred their efforts to the anti-Assad cause.
"Their activities in Syria are clear to the eyes of all who know their
hallmark: the bombings, the random killing, but the suicide bombings
especially," Witwit said.
The result, he said, was that "operations carried out by al Qaida have
dropped off in all of Iraq, but especially in Ninewah, where they had a
large and clear presence."
He described the al Qaida-affiliated fighters as "preoccupied with their new
jihad in Syria."
Local officials in Ninewah pointed out, however, that violence still takes
place in the province, driven by local political rivalries.
"The events in Syria have direct bearing on security in Iraq, no one can
deny that," said Abdulraheem al Shammary, the chairman of the security
committee in Mosul. "However, we cannot say that violence has stopped
because al Qaida fighters have left Iraq and gone to Syria. Violence has not
stopped; it has dropped off."
The anti-Assad revolt began nearly a year ago as peaceful demonstrations
demanding political change that were met with fierce government repression.
The United Nations estimated that government security forces had killed at
least 5,400 Syrians before it stopped keeping count because it said it had
no reliable way to gather the numbers.
The anti-Assad movement has become increasingly violent in recent months,
however, as frustrated opposition forces, bolstered by defections from Assad
's military, have taken up arms, fighting pitched battles with security
troops in Homs and other cities. On Feb. 11, gunmen assassinated the head of
the military hospital in Damascus, the first killing of a military officer
in the capital.
The Syrian government claims that 2,000 security officers and soldiers have
been killed since the uprising began last March.
Iraqi officials said they thought that many of the al Qaida-affiliated
fighters who'd left Iraq were foreigners.
"Formerly, Syrians used to come to fight in Iraq, but now they are fighting
in Syria," Adnan al Asadi, Iraq's acting minister of interior, said Feb. 2
in comments distributed to McClatchy last week.
Asadi also said that weapons were being smuggled from Iraq into Syria across
the countries' nearly 400-mile-long common border, and that demand for
assault rifles was so high that the price had risen nearly 10-fold.
Mudhir al Janabi, a member of Parliament's security committee, bristled at
any suggestion that Iraqis are among those traveling to Syria.
"Iraq has no history of extremism. It never tolerated camps for training
religious extremists before 2003. It does not export extremist-related
violence," he said. "Let those who came from other countries and brought the
violence with them go back. All we want is to be left alone, to lick our
wounds and put our efforts into rebuilding our country."
(Issa is a McClatchy special correspondent.) |
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