Iraqi insurgency ‘running out of steam'

Britain's senior military officer in Iraq said on Monday that the country's Sunni-led insurgency was flagging, thanks to a series of recent political and military defeats over the past six months.

Since he arrived in October, guerilla attacks had fallen to 300 a week from 500, thanks largely to a series of setbacks that had “helped to take the wind out of the sails of parts of the insurgency”, Lt Gen Sir John Kiszelysaid in a briefing prior tohis departure later this month.

Guerrillas, he said, had failed in four major objectives: to retain their safe haven in the city of Falluja; to deter Iraqis from voting in January's elections; to disrupt the creation of Iraq's own security forces; and to demonstrate that Iraq was ungovernable.

As a result, many Iraqis including guerrilla sympathisers had concluded that the government had the upper hand.

“For those sitting on the fence, in October it was not at all clear who was going to be winning, whether in the long term it was going to be the government and Iraqi security forces ruling this country or the insurgents,” Lt Gen Kiszely said.

Now, “ordinary people who might have supported the insurgency or been ambivalent …increasingly see the purposeless of it”.

He admitted the insurgency was still “deadly”, however, and spoke two days after an estimated 40 to 60 guerrillas massed to launch an assault on the US-controlled Abu Ghraib prison, wounding 44 US soldiers and 13 inmates. US officials said the attackers suffered 50 casualties before withdrawing.

However, reports of such large set-piece battles had become scarcer than in the autumn, when insurgents were able regularly to assemble forces capable of overrunning police stations.

US fatalities had also fallen off, with the US military admitting 33 deaths in March, the lowest number in over a year.

While some of the guerillas, such as militants affiliated to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian Islamist, would probably keep up their fight, others including members of the former regime of Saddam Hussein were exploring a dialogue with the Iraqi government, he said.