Sunday, March 23, 2008

Suicide's Surrender?

No one
there wants to admit that al Qaeda has been beaten in Iraq, but the more
first-hand accounts that show up, the more convincing the stories are. The
truth is this. The al Qaeda volunteers have long been enticed by the prospect
of killing American soldiers. That rarely happens, and survivor accounts always
make that point, and the fact that al Qaeda is mostly killing Iraqis. Last
year, most of the Sunni Arabs turned on al Qaeda, and this has been most
difficult for the al Qaeda recruiters to deal with.



 


Some of
the volunteers get no farther than Syria, where they find that you can't always
get across the border, or that the contacts on the other side are not up to the
task of delivering the foreigners to operational al Qaeda units in the interior.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have been hammering the smugglers for several years,
which leaves a lot of the al Qaeda volunteers stranded.