The Quagmire

The Sunni insurgency is larger and more homegrown than the Bush administration acknowledges. American forces, after first insisting that the resistance was composed of no more than 5,000 foreign fighters with ties to Al Qaeda, now hold more than twice that many prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and Camp Cropper -- and admit that as many as 20,000 well-funded fighters remain at large. "We're facing a well-developed, mature insurgency with the support of the local population," Maj. John Reed, stationed outside the city of Husaybah, said recently.

Even Fallujah, a city of 300,000 that was virtually obliterated in a U.S. blitz last fall, is quietly re-emerging as a center of resistance. Fallujah's mayor, in the circumspect language of one U.S. official, is "doing some things not positive in nature." Meanwhile, the city of Mosul has become the newest hotbed of the insurgency. Last fall, during an attack by insurgents there, thousands of Iraqi police melted away at the first sign of violence. "I went from 2,000 police to 50," a U.S. commander on the scene told reporters.

According to Wayne White, who served until March as director of the State Department's Iraq intelligence team, Iraq cannot hold together unless a substantial bloc of Sunnis is brought into the government. But in Baghdad, the newly ascendant Shiite political parties plan to purge Iraq's security forces and fledgling intelligence service of their few remaining Sunnis. Such a move would gut the only forces in Iraq that are actually taking on the insurgency, and would alienate the remaining Sunni moderates, pushing them over into the resistance. Leading the purge, sources say, will be none other than Ahmed Chalabi, the darling of U.S. neoconservatives and Pentagon officials who helped engineer the American invasion.

The Kurds: A non-Arab population that inhabits the three northern provinces, the Kurds have long been America's closest friends in Iraq. But if the country descends into civil war, it will likely be because of the Kurds, whose territory is even further beyond the control of the Green Zone-based government than the Shiite south. Since the U.S. invasion, the Kurds have run a de facto state of their own, controlled by their militia under the command of two warlords, Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Massoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Talabani, who was named president of Iraq in April, makes no bones about his beliefs. "Historically and demographically speaking, Kurdistan was never part of Iraq," he says. In January, about ninety-seven percent of Kurds voted in favor of an independent Kurdistan.

"The central government has no authority whatsoever in Kurdistan," says Peter Galbraith, a former State Department official who is a longtime Kurdish sympathizer. "The government doesn't even have an office there. No Iraqi flag flies there. Signs say, WELCOME TO KURDISTAN OF IRAQ."