Analysis: Sunni and Shiite Insurgents Remain Mystery to U.S.

The Iraq Study Group

WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 — Nearly four years after the invasion of Iraq, the United States still does not understand the enemy that American troops are fighting, according to last week’s report by the Iraq Study Group.

The commission’s final report harshly criticized United States intelligence officials for failing to answer basic questions about the nature of the Sunni insurgency or the increasingly powerful Shiite militias, both of which pose grave threats to American forces.

The intelligence community has had some success hunting Al Qaeda in Iraq, the report found, but that terrorist organization is small and is not the main enemy confronting American troops. The far bigger Sunni insurgency and Shiite militias are still largely mysteries to American intelligence, according to the report.

“While the United States has been able to acquire good and sometimes superb tactical intelligence on Al Qaeda in Iraq, our government still does not understand very well either the insurgency in Iraq or the role of the militias,” the report said. It said that American intelligence agencies were “not doing enough to map the insurgency, dissect it, and understand it on a national and provincial level” and that intelligence analysts’ “knowledge of the organization, leadership, financing, and operations of militias, as well as their relationship to government security forces, also falls far short of what policy makers need to know.”

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