Good educational material for those ignorant of what's going on in Iraq, and who the players are.

Taheri is right, the key to defeating these bloody bastards is in the rapid training and deployment of new Iraqi security forces. The US has a moral responsibility to stay the course, finish the mission, and provide the Iraqis with the means to develop for themseves a new, promising nation. The real fear of most Iraqis isn't occupation - it's the fear that the US will repeat the tragic error of 1991 and abandon the Iraqis, many of whom were courageous enough to put their lives on the line in a revolt against Saddam, and expose them once again to the Baathists forces of evil, and that many, many more will suffer and die at their brutal hands, with thousands disappearing into mass graves.

QUELLING IRAQI TERROR

By AMIR TAHERI
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July 21, 2003 -- BECAUSE world public opinion is now focused on Iraq, every act of violence, especially against American troops and the new Iraqi authority, makes the news bulletins across the globe.

Nevertheless, for a society that has just emerged from three decades of violence, including two civil wars and four foreign wars, Iraq is a remarkably quiet place. In a country where state authority has ceased to exist while the police presence has been cut to less than 20 percent of its pre-war strength, it is a feat of civic discipline that some measure of law and order is maintained throughout a territory as large as France.

One reason for this relative calm is that most Iraqis, tired of decades of despotism and war, have little stomach for further violence. Another reason is the success of religious and tribal elders and leaders to keep their respective constituencies under some control.

And yet the current calm remains fragile.

Three sources of tension threaten Iraq's peace in the months to come.

THE first represents the remnants of the fallen regime.

Saddam Hussein had set up five parallel security services that employed a total of 20,000 hard-core cadres. Two of those, known as "Jahaz Khas" (Special Apparatus) and "Jahaz Hanin" (Delicate Apparatus), consisted of handpicked special troops, trained in undercover operations. Both services worked under Qussai, Saddam's second son, but were led by two of the ex-dictator's cousins, Hani Abdel-Latif Tilfah al-Takriti and his brother Rafi. Little is known of the actual strength of the two services. But it is almost certain that a few hundred of their members, including the two Tilfah brothers, are still active and at large.

Some of the recent operations conducted against U.S. troops in and around Baghdad bear their imprint. It is unlikely that the so-called Fedayeen Saddam, led by the ex-dictator's eldest son Uday, has survived on any scale. This was never a serious enterprise, consisting mostly of middle-aged, beer-bellied opportunists trained for parades in front of television cameras.

Nevertheless, the Fedayeen organization, which at its peak boasted a membership of 400,000, may well provide part of the cesspool in which killers led by the two Tilfah brothers hide and thrive. Some officers of the disbanded Presidential Guard and their families could also provide logistical support, including safe havens.

Because Saddam recruited most of his officers from the Arab Sunni and Assyro-Chaldean minorities, who together account for 16 percent of the total population, the hard-core remnants of the fallen regime are more active in the so-called Sunni Triangle to the north and west of Baghdad. Clans and tribes, including the Juburis, who made their fortune under Saddam, also back them.

The hard-core Saddamites know that, if captured by their Iraqi enemies, they could face death. They also know that, even if they live, they have no future in a new Iraq. Their message of despair may well find an echo among the estimated 8,000-man officers' corps of the regular army, which was disbanded by the American interim administrator L. Paul Bremer last month.

The disbanding of the army also threatens the pensions of an estimated 60,000 retired officers and NCOs who, with their families, form a community of several hundred thousand. That decision was one of the few mistakes that Bremer has made so far.

THERE are other potential los ers from the change of re gime, including some 30,000 senior Ba'ath Party members, and their families, and a further 20,000 cadres of various front organizations and associations linked with the regime.

The members of a dozen or so terrorist organizations financed and sheltered by Iraq for years could also join the desperadoes. Three Palestinian groups, linked with the late Abu-Nidal (Sabri al-Banna), Mohammad Abbas (now in U.S. custody) and Ahmad Jibril, may still have some operational capacity inside Iraq. Whether or not they have decided to join any campaign against the coalition remains unknown.

Other terrorist groups linked with Saddam include the so-called Baluch Liberation Front, the Front for the Liberation of al-Ahwaz, the Mujahedin Khalq (People's Combatants), the Komaleh (Kurdish Communist Party) and the People's Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf.

There is no evidence that the U.S.-led coalition has succeeded in dismantling these terror organizations, which may or may not be in alliance with the remnants of Saddam's security services.

The elusive al Qaeda, supposed to be led by Osama bin Laden, may also have used the post-war confusion to expand its presence in Iraq.

A statement issued by the self-styled "Operational Command" of al Qaeda, broadcast by the Dubai-based Al-Arabiyah Television, claimed that its members, and not Saddam's henchmen, had been responsible for the murder of several American soldiers. The statement also promised "a great attack that would break the back of America" (sic).

Mafia-style crime syndicates linked to the fallen regime represent the second potential source of violence in Iraq. A syndicate headed by Barzan Abdul-Ghaffar, one of Saddam's cousins, controlled the bulk of Iraq's food imports, worth some $2.5 billion a year, for example.

Izzat al-Duri, Saddam's No. 2 in the Revolutionary Command Council, headed a syndicate that controlled imports from France and Germany, Iraq's two biggest trading partners. Some syndicates, masquerading as trade guilds and commercial associations, had thousands of members including scores of toughs trained to terrorize the souks. Their overall leader was Taha al-Jizrawi, Saddam's vice president.

To deal with the two sources of violence mentioned above, the coalition needs a mixture of classical counter-insurgency and crime-busting skills that cannot be provided by the U.S. and British army units present in Iraq.

TO deal with the third poten tial source of violence, the coalition would need political, social and cultural skills that it has not yet deployed in Iraq.

This third source of potential violence consists of tension within the various ethnic and religious communities. Because each ethnic and/or religious community is in a majority in its neck of the wood, the multi-ethnic capital, Baghdad, being the exception, there is little danger of sectarian wars. But intra-community violence cannot be ruled out. After all, the two main Kurdish groups did fight several mini-wars between themselves in the 1990s.

At least four other smaller Kurdish groups, including the so-called Kurdish Hezballah, financed by Iran, could also trigger violence in the Kurdish areas. In Mosul and Kirkuk, the possibility of violence pitting Kurds against Turcomans, and both of them against Yazidis, and Assyro-Chaldaens cannot be ruled out. Even the Shiite community, accounting for 60 percent of the population, is not immune to internecine feuds. The struggle over the control of the key religious centres of Najaf and Karbala is already pitting three prominent Shiite religious clans against one another.

Is violence in Iraq inevitable? Not at all. Provided the coalition deploys the physical and moral forces necessary and helps Iraqis develop their own government, including an army and a police force as quickly as possible, there is no reason why the bloody chapter opened on 14 July 1958 could not come to a close.