The Economist - January 29th, 2005

By a Brookings estimate based mainly on Pentagon briefings, some 32,000 insurgents have been
killed or captured since the conventional phase of the war ended in April 2003. Yet the number of
active insurgents, though hard to count, is plainly swelling. The head of Iraq's intelligence service
suggested last month that there were 40,000 hard-core rebels, with another 160,000-odd Iraqis
helping them out. That is several times the standard, albeit rough, estimate of a year ago.
It is plain that many units of American troops, who now number 150,000 out of an allied total of
175,300, adopt a “shoot first, ask questions later” approach. Some 8,000 Iraqis are currently
detained on suspicion of insurgency. Photographs of the mistreatment and humiliation of Iraqi
prisoners by American and British soldiers have seared themselves into the Iraqi national
consciousness. Virtually every opinion poll (however rough and ready) and a heap of anecdotal
evidence suggest that most Iraqis, bar the Kurds, place the overwhelming burden of blame for
their misfortunes on the Americans.
As the Americans have sought to build up the pro-government Iraqi army, national guard (a civildefence
force) and police, the insurgents have begun to single out perceived collaborators as
targets. In the last four months of last year, around 1,300 Iraqi policemen were killed, compared
with 750 in the first nine months of the year; some 1,500 recruits have been killed, nearly 800 of
them in a four-week period towards the end of last year. Though the new Iraqi forces are
ethnically mixed, the targeting of some units by the insurgents hints at a deliberate stirring of
sectarian hatreds.