Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy The Americans by Robert Fisk

Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy:
Copy the Americans
By ROBERT FISK

Understanding the brain. That's what you have to do in a guerrilla war. Find out how it works, what it's trying to do. An attack on US headquarters in Baghdad and six suicide bombings, all at the start of Ramadan. Thirty-four dead and 200 wounded. Where have I heard those statistics before? And how could they be so well co-ordinated--well-timed, down to the last second? And why the Red Cross? I knew that building, and admired the way in which the International Red Cross refused to associate themselves with the American occupation--even at the cost of their lives, as the guards outside their Baghdad headquarters carried no guns.

So here's the answer to question one. Algeria. After the Algerian government banned elections in 1991 that would have brought the Islamic Salvation Front to power, a Muslim revolt turned into a blood-curdling battle between the so-called Islamic Armed Group--many of its adherents having cut their battle teeth in Afghanistan--and a brutal government army and police force. Within three years, the "Islamists"--aided, it seems, by army intelligence officers--were perpetrating massacres against the villagers of what was called the Blida triangle, a three-cornered territory around the very Islamist city of Blida outside Algiers. And the very worst atrocities--the beheading of children, the raping and throat-cutting of women, the slaughter of policemen--were committed at the beginning of Ramadan.

http://www.counterpunch.com/fisk10292003.html