"The intimidation campaign is extraordinarily hard," a senior U.S. Embassy official said. "It's very hard to combat."
The counter-strategy being applied by U.S. and Iraqi forces, according to another Western diplomat, has been grounded in weeks of relentless raids aimed at underground insurgent networks.
Iraqi Interior Ministry police commandos monitor a traffic circle in downtown Baghdad. Iraq's security forces, a favorite target of insurgents, now routinely don masks as part of their uniforms to avoid being identified.
(Karl Vick -- The Washington Post)
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"We're doing an awful lot of things to strip away the secondary supporters the intimidators have to have around," the diplomat said.
At the same time, insurgents have worked to infiltrate the Iraqi security services. U.S. and Iraqi commanders openly acknowledge that the ranks of the new army and police are routinely compromised by insurgents.
The same subterfuge threatens Iraq's civilian government: In October, a senior official in the office of the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, was arrested on suspicion of providing insurgents with home addresses and other personal details of government employees being targeted for assassination.
But the security forces, uniformed and out on the street, remain the most vulnerable.
"Some of it is just because they're easier to kill," said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But some of it is because the insurgents worry about these forces establishing themselves."
"They're becoming a very capable force," said Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, "which is exactly what the enemy is afraid of."
That's also how the police commandos see it, through the eyeholes of their ski masks.
"We are the first step on the long road to security," said Abu Jaffar. "If people see us working, they'll have the courage to go in the army themselves."
And if they cover their faces, it's only to level the playing field against an invisible enemy that attacks through drive-by shootings and suicide car bombs.
"The terrorists are the cowards," Abu Jaffar said, "because they don't face us."
Special correspondents Salih Saif Aldin in Baiji and Bassam Sebti in Baghdad contributed to this report.
