Aug 29, 2011 5:07 PM

Report: Next Terrorist Attack Might Come From... Iraq

To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, America might be done with the Iraq war, but the Iraq war might not be done with America. One perhaps inevitable consequence of the relatively successful surge in Iraq is that no one in the U.S. counterterrorism community spends much time worrying about the smattering of terrorist groups that remain in […]

To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, America might be done with the Iraq war, but the Iraq war might not be done with America.

One perhaps inevitable consequence of the relatively successful surge in Iraq is that no one in the U.S. counterterrorism community spends much time worrying about the smattering of terrorist groups that remain in that country. Threats from al-Qaida affiliates in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia appear far more urgent and consume more time from the U.S. military and spy agencies. But that might be a lull that makes the surge look like a catastrophic success.

In a new paper for the nonpartisan New America Foundation, counterterrorism analyst Brian Fishman warns that al-Qaida's main Iraqi ally, the Islamic State of Iraq, might have no choice but to attack western and U.S. targets. (.PDF) That's not a consequence of its strength. The so-called ISI remains dangerous, but it's way weaker than it was at its murderous 2006 peak. Rather, Fishman argues that the ISI might be so marginalized that attacking the west might be its best hope for continued relevance.

Shortly after U.S. special operations forces killed leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006, Zarqawi's organization, al-Qaida in Iraq, rebranded as the Islamic State of Iraq. It was no cosmetic remaking: the new banner was meant to indicate that al-Qaida had created an entire political entity to rule Iraq. As it turned out, very few would salute its flag: the Sunnis turned on the butchery of the ISI in the Awakening, bolstered by the increased strength of the U.S. troop surge. Not only did the ISI fail to hold any of its territory, the U.S. and Iraqi forces drove it back into a Mosul stronghold.

As a result, the ISI may no longer be "wildly ambitious," writes New America's Brian Fishman, but it "has now embraced a much more traditional mode of terrorist operations -- intermittent and very bloody attacks." Those attacks are overwhelmingly oriented at destabilizing the fledgling Iraqi government. For now.

After a lull, the ISI is back in Baghdad, pulling off suicide bombings like the one that killed 28 Iraqis at a mosque on Sunday. Not all terror attacks in Iraq are attributable to the ISI, but the country hosts an average of about 200 such attacks every month, post-surge. While once the ISI cut off the fingers of Iraqis guilty of the crime of smoking cigarettes, now it takes a more transactional approach. Its operatives have shaved their beards off, Fishman quotes an Iraqi military officer: "Their members now wear jeans and T-shirts filled with sentences from hip-hop songs and photos of artists, and they have shaven their heads in a way that gives the impression they can have no connection at all with religion, religiousness, or combat."

Fishman warns that all this might be a prelude to attacking the west. al-Qaida's residual central leadership in Pakistan has been encouraging its franchises to put aside their local focuses and hit the U.S. at home, where it hurts. Now that the group isn't concern with holding territory, its significant volume of fighters imported from outside Iraq -- 20 per month, as of 2009 -- are freed up to "be redirected toward external targets." Iraqi communities inside the United States might be the targets of ISI radicalization and propaganda, Fishman frets. And of course, the ISI's original raison d'etre, going after U.S. troops, is a mite harder once the Americans withdraw in December.

Finally, there's an image factor to consider. ISI was the first al-Qaida franchise to get its ass kicked. Whatever mistakes the U.S. made in Iraq, it was al-Qaida that truly grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory by alienating its Sunni base. Not only are ISI murderers, they're the jeered-at scrubs of global terrorism. Even Ayman Zawahiri disses them. "Attacking Western targets outside Iraq is the most reliable way to reverse the weakness in its brand," Fishman observes.

Not that this is more than tea-leaf reading at this point. Fishman is up front that there isn't much "definitive evidence" that the ISI is targeting the west. It doesn't have a charismatic figure like Anwar Awlaqi to rally people to its cause, especially English-speakers in the States. Then there's the perception that ISI, like the Iraq war itself, is over and done with.

But even if U.S. intelligence chief James Clapper sounds the alarm about al-Qaida's Yemeni and Somali adjuncts, at least a few significant U.S. security officials haven't forgotten about the ISI. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the former CIA chief, conspicuously warned that al-Qaida still has 1000 operatives in Iraq, which is way more than its estimated strength in Pakistan. And Panetta's CIA replacement, David Petraeus, has a certain investment in Iraq of his own, having commanded the surge that changed the U.S.' fortunes in the war. Fishman's warning may not fall on deaf ears.

Photo: U.S. Special Operations Command