US military searches for foreign fighters on Syrian border. Can't fine one

[NNN0LHI]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002634946_insurgents20.html

Face of the Iraq insurgency: What role do foreigners play?

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Before 8,500 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers methodically swept through Tal Afar two months ago in the year's largest counterinsurgency offensive, commanders described the northern city as a logistics hub for fighters, including foreigners entering the country from Syria, 40 miles to the west.

"They come across the border and use Tal Afar as a base to launch attacks across northern Iraq," Col. H.R. McMaster, commander of the Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which led the assault, said in a briefing the day before it began.

When the air and ground operation wound down in mid-September, nearly 200 insurgents had been killed and close to 1,000 detained, the military said at the time. But interrogations and other analyses carried out in recent weeks showed that none of those captured was from outside Iraq. According to McMaster's staff, the 3rd Armored Cavalry last detained a foreign fighter in June.

In a recent interview, McMaster maintained that foreigners were at least partly responsible for the "climate of fear" that pervaded Tal Afar before insurgents were driven out in September; he cited beheadings, suicide attacks and the abduction of young men to conscript them as fighters.

[leveymg]

1. If we find you parked here again, Mr. Zarkawi, you'll face a stiff fine.

[Old and In the Way]

2. How will this administration interpret this?

The flypaper strategy isn't working, looks like we'll have to invade Syria, Iran, and SA afterall. Amazingly, we have radicalized a population who never had inclinations to blow themselves up and unified them in a common desire to rid themselves of the democracy bringers.

[ngGale]

3. Ah, ha! You mean all the insurgents are Iraqis...

but that would mean our leader is, all wrong. Drat the cat, more bad intel.:sarcasm:

[oblivious]

4. Reporter to Col McMaster: "Is your intel shit or are you a liar?

I wish...

I wonder about the effect of this Washington Post article if the title had focused on paragraphs 7 to 9, instead of focusing on foreigners' role in the defense of Iraq.

But analysts say the focus on foreign elements is also an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the insurgency in the eyes of Iraqis, by portraying it as terrorism foisted on the country by outsiders.

"Both Iraqis and coalition people often exaggerate the role of foreign infiltrators and downplay the role of Iraqi resentment in the insurgency," said Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who is writing a book about the Iraqi insurgency.

"It makes the government's counterinsurgency efforts seem more legitimate, and it links what's going on in Iraq to the war on terrorism," he continued.

Something like:

1. Foreigners' role in insurgency part of US propaganda

2. Role of foreign terrorists in Iraq fiction

3. US invented foreign terror threat to justify counterinsurgency efforts

4. No evidence of foreign fighters in Iraq besided coalition troops