The US military has increased air strikes in Iraq five-fold this year, according to data obtained by USA Today. The paper's October 22 edition reported that the US military had carried out 1140 air strikes in the first nine months of this year, compared with 229 last year. The figures do not include attacks carried out by helicopters.
The USA Today article went on to note that "increased use of air power raises the chances of killing innocent civilians" and increasing popular support for anti-occupation fighters.
According to the US military's manual on counter-insurgency warfare drawn up by General David Petraeus, the current top US commander in Iraq, and released last December, "an air strike can cause collateral damage that turns people against the host-nation government and provides insurgents with a major propaganda victory. Even when justified under the law of war, bombings that result in civilian casualties can bring media coverage that works to the insurgents' benefits… For these reasons, commanders should consider the use of air strikes carefully."
Despite this warning, the number of US Air Force bombing missions carried out in Iraq so far this year exceeds the total carried out in the previous three years.
The increased use of air strikes may account for the declining rate of US and allied occupation troop casualties over the past five months. From an average daily rate of 4.2 killed in May, coalition fatalities dropped to 3.6 a day in June, 2.8 in July and August, 2.3 in September and 1.3 a day in October.
However, air strikes increase the likelihood of Iraqi civilian deaths. An example of this occurred on October 21 when 17 Iraqi non-combatants, including women and children, were killed when US soldiers called in an Apache attack helicopter after they came under small-arms fire in Baghdad's crowded Sadr City slum district. The October 22 Los Angeles Times reported that "Ismail Mikilf Hassan, 47, said his toddler was killed when a US missile hit his house".
Reuters reported on October 27 that a battle in the city of Samarra, 120 kilometres north of Baghdad, between the Sunni fundamentalist Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) group and "a major Sunni Arab insurgent group" — had killed "at least 16 militants".
Hostility between the mainstream Iraqi resistance organisations and AQI first became public in early 2006. The February 6, 2006 London Telegraph reported that in "a statement released to the pan-Arab Al Hayat newspaper, six Iraqi armed groups, including the 1920 Revolution Brigades and the Islamic Movement for Iraq's Mujahideen, announced that they had united to form a 'people's cell' to confront [Abu Musa al] Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, and provide security in Anbar" province, west of Baghdad.
The March 11, 2006 Telegraph reported: "Insurgent groups in one of Iraq's most violent provinces claim that they have purged the region of three quarters of al Qaeda's supporters after forming an alliance to force out the foreign fighters..."
This March, the Islamic Army and two other major Iraqi resistance groups, the Mujahideen Army and Ansar al Sunnah, announced the formation of a common Reformation and Jihad Front (RJF) in opposition to the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), AQI's political front.
Last month, the three groups in the RJF joined with Hamas-Iraq, the Fatiheen Army and the Islamic Front for the Iraqi Resistance to form a unified Political Council of the Iraqi Resistance in declared opposition to both the ISI and the US-led occupation.
Pentagon counter-terrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann told NBC News on October 23: "There has been increasing divergence in Iraq between Iraqi insurgents and al Qaeda. Some big insurgent groups have attacked al Qaeda in the past few weeks."
Meanwhile, Turkish-Iraqi talks aimed at preventing a cross-border Turkish military operation into northern Iraq collapsed late on October 26 as Ankara rejected proposals from Washington's puppet Iraqi government as insufficient.
Turkey has massed up to 100,000 troops on the border for a possible offensive against about 3500 Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) guerillas based in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Ankara has demanded that all northern Iraq-based PKK members be handed over. But Washington and Baghdad have been unable to get the Iraqi Kurdistan regional government to agree.
Associated Press observed on October 26 that a cross-border Turkish operation against the PKK would "pit two US allies — Turkey, a member of NATO, and Iraq's Kurds — against each other; threaten supply lines for US troops in Iraq and, perhaps, unravel apparent progress in reducing the violence in the rest of the country".
AP added: "According to Iraqi Kurdistan officials and witnesses, Turkey has fired hundreds or thousands of artillery shells into Iraq's border areas, many of them landing near Kurdish towns, and Turkish fighter jets have flown missions several miles into Iraqi territory."