MichaelMoore.com

Rebels Said to Have Pool of Bomb-Rigged Cars

By Eric Schmitt / New York Times

WASHINGTON, May 8 - Insurgents in Iraq are drawing on dozens of stockpiled, bomb-rigged cars and groups of foreign fighters smuggled into the country in recent weeks to carry out most of the suicide attacks that have killed about 300 people in the last 10 days, senior American officers and intelligence officials say.

Insurgents exploded 135 car bombs in April, up from 69 in March and more than in any other month in the two-year American occupation.

For the first time last month, more than 50 percent of the car-bombings were suicide attacks, some remotely detonated. The officers and officials have not drawn a single conclusion from this, but one top American general said it suggested that Iraqis were being coerced or duped into driving those missions.

Senior American officers predict that the insurgents, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant whose network has claimed responsibility for the deadliest suicide bombings, will not be able to sustain the level of attacks much longer. And the attacks have not yet dented recruiting for the American-trained Iraqi security forces.

But these officers acknowledged that the increase in suicide bombings over the last two weeks, while possibly a last-ditch effort, had won the militants important propaganda victories by gaining worldwide news media coverage. The benefits, they said, would include bolstering insurgent morale that flagged after the Jan. 30 elections, and depicting the newly formed Iraqi government as incapable of protecting its citizenry.

"When he cranks up the propaganda campaign, it means we've probably hurt him," Brig. Gen. John DeFreitas III, the senior military intelligence officer in Iraq, said of Mr. Zarqawi in a telephone interview. "It's a tool in his arsenal, and he has used it effectively."

Less than two weeks after the government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari won a parliamentary vote of approval, a snapshot of the insurgency reveals an adaptive enemy with the ability to regroup, recalibrate tactics after the setback of the elections and bide its time to strike at a politically opportune moment.

In interviews with a dozen senior military officers now in Iraq or with experience there, as well as other American officials, varying assessments emerged, underscoring the military's opaque understanding of exactly how the disparate strands of the insurgency operate and coordinate with one another.

One senior officer said the recent violence was a predictable "attempt by the enemy to show that they are still a factor, still relevant and still capable." The bombings, the officer said, "grabbed the headlines, drowned out the good news of a newly formed government, attacked the credibility and legitimacy of the new government."

Another officer, a general with extensive command experience in Iraq, acknowledged that he was not sure yet what the rash of suicide car-bombings meant: "More foreign fighters? More religious extremists? An indicator of insurgent desperation? Iraqis as suicide attackers?"

Attacks against allied forces, which dropped to about 40 a day in March and early April, now stand at 55 a day, well below the 130 a day in the prelude to the January elections, but roughly the same as last fall. Attacks against power stations, pipelines and other infrastructure have declined sharply in the last three weeks as insurgents shifted their attacks to Iraqi security forces, American officers said.

The assault last month against the Abu Ghraib prison that wounded 44 Americans and 13 Iraqi prisoners, as well as smaller strikes almost daily since then against the prison that became the epicenter of the detainee-abuse scandal, have been ineffective militarily, but successful as a means of propaganda, General DeFreitas said. "Abu Ghraib is a huge symbol for the insurgents," he said.

To help counter that, American and Iraqi officials have taken pains to announce progress in capturing insurgents. On Sunday, American military officials said soldiers had captured the planner of the Abu Ghraib attack and another wave of bombings on April 29 that killed 40 Iraqis. The man was identified as Amar Adnan Muhammad Hamzah al-Zubaydi, or Abu al-Abbas, a top aide to Mr. Zarqawi.

American officials say the insurgency is still a mix of former Baath Party loyalists, Iraqi military and security service officers, Sunni Arab militants and terrorists like Mr. Zarqawi. They claim progress against the insurgents, killing or capturing at least 20 of Mr. Zarqawi's top lieutenants, driving militants into rural areas less patrolled by the Americans and getting more tips from Iraqis on the location of guerrillas.

Foreign fighters, only a small part of the insurgency, still commit most of the suicide bombings, military officials say. Young jihadists from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Iran continue to infiltrate Iraq's porous borders despite newly formed Iraqi border patrol units, and teams of specialists sent from the United States Department of Homeland Security to assist them.

"Fighters, arms and other supplies continue to enter Iraq from virtually all of its neighbors despite increased border security," Earl E. Sheck, the Defense Intelligence Agency's director of analysis and production, said at a hearing in Congress last week.

But some intelligence analysts say they believe that Iraqi Sunni extremists are now joining the ranks of suicide bombers in what would be a troubling new trend.

Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the operations director for the military's Joint Staff, questioned last week whether the remote detonation of suicide bombs could mean that the drivers might be "being forced into that condition by virtue of the fact that someone has got their family, you know, 20 miles away?" A senior military officer in Iraq said it was more likely that bombing plotters were remotely detonating the explosives when their chosen driver balked at the last minute.

Senior military officials said they had been concerned for weeks about intelligence reports that insurgents were stockpiling bomb-rigged cars to be used when the new government formed. Iraqi police commandos seized about 10 vehicles rigged with explosives in the last 10 days.

There is no shortage of explosives in Iraq. Just last week, soldiers and marines destroyed a huge underground cache near Al Amiriyah in western Iraq that contained more than 800 rocket-propelled grenade rounds, 100,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition, and several thousand pounds of explosives.

Top commanders said they expected spikes and lulls in the violence through at least early next year. "It takes everything they've got to muster attacks," Maj. Gen. Stephen T. Johnson, the top Marine commander in Iraq, said in a telephone interview. "Unless the insurgents get involved in the political process, I think we'll continue to see this."

Thom Shanker contributed reporting for this article.