Insurgent strategy
From Brian Todd
CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The numbers going into Falluja clearly favor U.S and Iraqi forces.
The numbers coming out may be a different story.
With the battle playing out street-by-street, experts with close ties to the U.S. military tell CNN the insurgents have a clear, simple strategy -- and it's not to win.
"The insurgent objective with Falluja in particular seems to be to draw the United States into a very bloody, costly fight," says CNN military intelligence analyst Ken Robinson.
With resistance fighters knowing full well they can't win militarily, experts say they're trying to inflict political pain.
"In the assumption that if they kill enough Americans, the Americans will leave Iraq, maybe even stop the assault on Falluja itself, if they kill as many," says Ken Pollack of the Saban Center on Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
The insurgents have had about seven months since the last major U.S. ground attack on Falluja to carve out strongholds; map out passageways and escape routes, and lay traps that U.S. and Iraqi forces have already encountered this time.
"They have bombed bridges. They have booby-trapped buildings. They've established sniper positions. The fear is that they will use mosques," says Robinson.
Then, the information battle can be waged: Images of gunfights around mosques can play on Middle Eastern networks, stirring the Arab population against the U.S.-Iraqi coalition.
At some point, many resistance fighters may just melt away, to emerge in another city and fight again.
Experts say some of the most important, hard-core insurgents, including the notorious Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, may well have already left Falluja.
Who is inside the city now?
"At best U.S. intelligence can tell there is a grab bag of different groups inside of Falluja -- former members of Saddam's regime, foreign Salafi jihadists, Sunni fundamentalists, a home-grown variety, Sunni tribesmen who also oppose the American occupation," says Pollack.
Experts say the key for U.S.-led forces is to drive a wedge between these different groups of insurgents -- to somehow force the native Iraqis among them to get tired of fighting and fade away. The foreign jihadists, they say, will have to be taken out with brute force.
