Blown Away
A long hunt. A killer's quick death. But it may not change much in Iraq
More broadly, U.S. officials agree that the biggest threat facing Iraq remains the indigenous Sunni insurgency. "Even if every single solitary jihadist was eliminated in Iraq, we'd still have a full-blown war in Iraq," says Biden. "You still have a major sectarian war and full-blown insurgency that he had no control over." Zarqawi's death will have little effect on the Sunni insurgents, who are behind most of the roadside bombs that have been so deadly for U.S. soldiers. Those insurgents are also blamed for many of the attacks on Iraqi security forces and infrastructure targets like the electricity grid and the oil industry.
Zarqawi had also become the most visible symbol of the specter of a sectarian civil war in Iraq. U.S. officials believe that his network was behind the bombing of the Shiite mosque in Samarra in February, which sparked a violent round of sectarian-related killings that continues today. U.S. officials are privately debating what, if any, effect Zarqawi's death will have on the Sunni-Shiite tensions. "It is unlikely that anyone will immediately take his prominence in terms of verbal provocation," says a senior U.S. official. "But it doesn't necessarily make it easier to get the Shiites to back down on some of their more egregious behavior." (One such incident was the apparent kidnapping last week of some 50 people from transport companies, which turned out several days later apparently to have been a raid by a unit in the Shiite-run Interior Ministry.)
All along, outside experts and even some officials inside the U.S. government have been concerned that Zarqawi's role had been exaggerated. "The best thing about Zarqawi's death is that maybe we'll stop fixating on him and start focusing on things that matter more," says Kenneth Pollack, a former Iraq analyst at the CIA who is the research director for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "Maybe we can start focusing on the broad societal problems we have allowed to develop in this security vacuum."
With David E. Kaplan and Anna Mulrine in Baghdad
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