Two thousand and counting

Death comes quickly in Iraq. But some die quicker than others, writes Paul McGeough.

Rory Carroll lived to explain why 2000 US soldiers have died in Iraq's bitter war.

The British journalist's account of his brief abduction in Baghdad last week is a disturbing window into the ordinariness of this trillion-dollar insurgency that frustrates Washington's democracy plans for the Middle East with such seeming ease.

The grim statistical milestone of being the 2000th American soldier victim of the insurgents was allotted to a 34-year-old Texan, Sergeant George Alexander, who died on Saturday in the American hospital where he was being treated for wounds he suffered in a roadside bombing. And hasn't taken long for the toll to rise. The 2001st US soldier was killed in a vehicle accident on Tuesday in southern Iraq.

But it's not just Americans who die in this war. Statistics on Iraqi civilian deaths are kept with less precision, but the most respected tally, from the Iraq Body Count, estimates Iraqi deaths at between 26,690 and 30,051.

This insurgency survives only because Iraqis let it operate around them in their homes and villages, in their tribes and mosques. In their communities there are few secrets, but very few are willing to spill the beans to the authorities - Iraqi or American.

It was the domestic ordinariness of Carroll's imprisonment that jarred - under the stairs in an ordinary Iraqi home where women went about their chores and children squealed with delight when he was brought out to eat and to exercise.

Whole families and wider circles of friends are in on the movement of thousands of rank-and-file insurgents, offering shelter, sympathy and signals on what the Americans are up to. Washington offers multi-million dollar rewards for information on the insurgency's high-profile leaders, but even this appeal to baser instincts has failed.

Despite all Washington's promises of reconstruction and all that democracy has to offer, the extent of the American failure to win the trust of Iraqis, to win in the vital battle for hearts and minds, is borne out in reports in the British press in the past week.

They reveal that an opinion poll commissioned secretly by the British military found 45 per cent of Iraqis believe attacks on foreign troops are justified. Given that Sunnis who back the insurgency account for about 20 per cent of the population, that is a staggering figure.

More than 80 per cent of respondents across the country indicated strong opposition to the presence of foreign troops. And while 70-plus per cent said they had no confidence in them, 67 per cent said the presence of the foreigners made them feel less secure; and 43 per cent reckoned that conditions for peace and stability had deteriorated.

Death in Iraq now comes quicker - for while it took the insurgents 18 months to kill the first 1000 US troops, it took only 14 months to despatch the second 1000.

Iraqi civilians are dying at a faster rate, too, the estimate for this year is 60 a day compared with 40 a day last year. More than 90 per cent of the US deaths have occurred since George Bush stood in May 2003 before a banner that read "mission accomplished" and said major combat operations had ended in Iraq.

The insurgency is now firmly dug in. Defying repeated claims by the authorities in Washington and Baghdad that victory is imminent, it has established its sources of weapons and funds and is so comfortable in its operations that it even buses in Afghan fighters to train them to fight the Americans.

In the early days of the insurgency, when the Americans still hoped to be welcomed with flowers and candy, the attacks were almost schoolboyish - a shot from a rooftop, a grenade dropped from a traffic overpass. But as the Americans armoured up, the insurgents went after their check-point teams.

Their information was good because they were infiltrating the new Iraqi police and army services and their weapons and tactics were upgraded as they perfected crude roadside explosives and suicide bombers. And when the Americans started pulling back, the insurgents made the agencies of the new Iraqi government and Shiite mosques their prime targets.

The only plan that the US has is to train Iraqi troops in sufficient numbers to take on the fight themselves. But that is a fractured process in which the timeline is continually stretched into the future.

The numbers trained are often rubbery and well short of the fighting force needed. And now the US brass has identified another problem - it will probably take two or more years for the Iraqis to learn how to deploy and supply their forces in the field.

Coupled with a prediction by the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, that the insurgency could last for another 12 years, these teething problems add weight to the prediction by Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary in the US Department of Commerce, that the cost of fighting the war and caring for thousands of injured veterans, could stretch to $US1.3 trillion.

That's the landscape as it has evolved. What some observers see in the future is even more disturbing.

An observation by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, that the bombs used against British forces in the south of the country were similar to those used by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia in Lebanon, prompted some analysts to predict that neighbouring Iran would likely encourage the Iraqi Shiites to turn their guns on the Americans.

There is much pretence in Iraq. Neighbouring countries, particularly Iran, are accused of stirring the Iraqi pot from behind diplomatic veils, and the Shiite leadership in Baghdad might insist that it is not responding to attempts to incite civil war.

But the Shiites are fighting back. Their private armies have taken control of entire sections of the military, police and intelligence services. They run their own illegal prisons - I have seen them - and now they round up Sunnis for summary execution. The week before last, I spoke by phone to an associate of Iraq's top breed of Shiite henchmen. He reported that his acquaintance had executed 37 Sunnis in the previous 24 hours. That night, he added, they would be guests at one of the highest Shiite tables in the land for Iftar, the twilight breaking of the Ramadan fast.

Coming to terms with that lot remains a mighty challenge.

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