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Actions against al Qaeda in Iraq tied to better human intelligence

Christian Science Monitor:

In a succession of intelligence breaks, the US says it has killed two key members of Al Qaeda in Iraq in recent days, including the organization's No. 2 man who is suspected of orchestrating a series of suicide bombings in Baghdad since April.

According to American military officials, the US has either made key arrests or developed informants who have led to a cascade of actionable intelligence over the past month. Since the middle of August, the US has reported killing or capturing at least 16 members of Al Qaeda in Iraq, led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

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The US says it killed the insurgent leader of the town of Karabilah at 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, and Abdullah Abu Azzam, said to be the Al Qaeda leader (or emir) of Anbar Province, in a raid in Baghdad on Sunday. Meanwhile Gen. Kevin Bergner told reporters that in northern Iraq, where the US recently fought a major engagement in Tal Afar and where major operations have also been carried out in Mosul, the US has made inroads against the organization.

"We are probably at the point of impacting about 80 percent of that network in terms of detaining, capturing, killing the leadership, and disrupting their resources, and disrupting their support bases and neutralizing their capability,'' he said.

An Iraqi government spokesman said Abu Azzam, who's real name is Abdullah Najim Abdullah Mohamed al-Jawari, was an Iraqi. He was on a list of Iraq's 29 most-wanted insurgents issued by the US military in February and had a bounty of $50,000 on his head.

Like many stories discussing the enemy in Iraq, this one also relies on analysis from Anthony Cordesman who has been routinely pessimistic about events in Iraq. He fails to see the wearing effect on al Qaeda of the continued loss of its leadership figures. Not only are they losing cohesion because of the significant turnover, the people they are putting in place have less knowledge of the war and are more likely to make a mistake. This and the attacks on Iraqis may be leading to the cascading effect against leadership targets. The victory in Tal Afar was significant and it clearly spooked al Qaeda into attacks in Baghdad that were counter productive. Those attacks may have led to the intelligence on Azzam.

Update: The UK Times says that Azzam was betrayed by an al Qaeda insider.