An Analysis of the Iraqi Resistance: The First Year, March 2003-May 2004
Robert Lindsay
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Introduction
I have decided to publish my most recent work, An Analysis of the Iraqi Resistance, on my blog. Previously, this piece was used for the research for An Insiders Look at the Iraqi Resistance a major piece that appeared on the Islamist website Jihadunspun.com (JUS got the copyright but I did the research). That long-running top-billed piece is now down, but it is still archived on Alexa here . Note that this material is copyrighted and all reproduction for profit is forbidden under copyright laws.
For information about reprinting or purchasing one-time rights to this work, email me. This article is an in-depth analysis of the Iraqi resistance and is continuously being revised. It is presently 58 pages long. It lists all known Iraqi resistance groups who have ever fought in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad and includes a brief description and analysis of each group. There are separate sections covering
- Size
- Tendencies
- Motivations
- Structure
- Foreign Assistance
- Foreign Fighters
- Regional Characteristics
- Regions
- Cities or Towns Controlled by the Resistance
- Major Attacks
- List of Groups by Tendency
The article was intended to be a political science-type analysis of the Iraqi Resistance, and I tried not to take sides one way or the other. I used a tremendous amount of source material, mostly publicly available news reports from the Internet. Obviously, in an area like this you are dealing with a ton of disinformation along with the real deal, so I spent a lot of time trying to sort out the disinfo from the relative truth.
The problem is that one cannot simply discount sources of information such as Israeli and US intelligence, US military reports, reporting from the resistance itself, Islamist websites, etc. Of course these sources are loaded with disinfo and just false analysis but they also tend to have a lot of truth mixed in as well. In writing a piece like this, you pull together all the sources and get sort of a “Gestalt” view of the situation. When you examine all the sources at once in toto, you can kind of sort out the disinfo from the more factual material. Admittedly it’s a hit or miss game but that’s about as good as we can do source-wise in the inherently hazy subject area of an underground guerrilla war.
Interviews with resistance cadre by the mainstream Western media were given particular prominence in this piece.
The work starts in March 2003 and goes until May 2004, covering the entire first year of the war in exquisite detail. After May 2004, I lost interest. Nevertheless, much of this work is still relevant today and I feel that this is valuable work.
