March 23,
2008: The sharp drop in suicide bombings in Iraq is partly due to the decline
in foreign al Qaeda volunteers coming into Iraq. The recruiting, mostly in
Saudi Arabia and North Africa, preys on the unique social conditions in those
areas. Namely, high birth rates and high unemployment. This produces a lot of
younger sons who are unemployed, unmarried and face a dim future. So the al
Qaeda recruiter, often working out of a local mosque, makes a free trip to
Iraq, ending in a glorious death for the cause, sound like a solution. But over
the last year, the number of such volunteers has declined from 120 a month, to
about 40. The main reason for this is bad news, and some survivors, coming back
from Iraq. Not many of these losers make it back, but the word gets on to the
Internet, and this has caused quite a commotion on pro-terrorist web sites and
message boards. There's also been a sharp drop in pro-terrorist combat videos coming
out of Iraq. This is largely due to the death or capture of the people
responsible for getting those videos onto the Internet.
No one
there wants to admit that al Qaeda has been beaten in Iraq, but the more
first-hand accounts that show up, the more convincing the stories are. The
truth is this. The al Qaeda volunteers have long been enticed by the prospect
of killing American soldiers. That rarely happens, and survivor accounts always
make that point, and the fact that al Qaeda is mostly killing Iraqis. Last
year, most of the Sunni Arabs turned on al Qaeda, and this has been most
difficult for the al Qaeda recruiters to deal with.
Some of
the volunteers get no farther than Syria, where they find that you can't always
get across the border, or that the contacts on the other side are not up to the
task of delivering the foreigners to operational al Qaeda units in the interior.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have been hammering the smugglers for several years,
which leaves a lot of the al Qaeda volunteers stranded. Some of these guys have
become so lost and despondent that they surrender to the Iraqi police. In any
event, the majority of the foreign al Qaeda volunteers are used as cannon
fodder. These fellows usually don't have any military experience, so they get
minimal training with an AK-47, and often are useless in a firefight. Even
against Iraqi police and soldiers, the foreign volunteers are only effective if
in the company of a lot of experienced locals. For most of the last four years,
the al Qaeda volunteers would go to Iraq and "die a glorious death." Now the
trip tends to end in despair and humiliation. The word is getting around, and
the recruiters don't like it.
