Rusted Sky

Well, there might be a limited amount of fools after all. It could well be that after seeing a lot of their friends go off to cover themselves in glory... and never seeing them return, or even really know what happened... the glories of jihad are starting to pale.

WorldTribune.com: The new insurgency: Foreign, untrained teenagers

"The very interesting thing is that the younger foreign fighter that we're seeing now — very poorly trained," said Col. Robert Brown, commander of the U.S. Army 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division. "We would call them more like RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] for hire."

Brown, whose Stryker brigade operates in the Mosul area, told a Pentagon briefing on Sept. 14 that the teenaged foreign fighters began to arrive in northern Iraq last February.

He said the military captured Algerians, Libyans, Saudis and Yemenis, many of them as young as 15. About 70 percent of the insurgents who fought in Tal Afar near the Syrian border earlier this month were said to be foreigners.

...

In an address to a Washington conference, investigative journalist Peter Bergen said foreign fighters launched 91 percent of suicide bomb attacks in Iraq.

"We did face well-trained foreign fighters prior to January elections," Brown said. "We have not faced well-trained foreign fighters since. Since February of this year until now, we have not seen any well-trained, in fact, very poorly trained foreign fighters. So whoever was training them before, I don't know, but apparently they've lost their support and they're not able to train them."

In August, the military captured a Libyan who they said had been brainwashed. Brown said the Libyan told U.S. interrogators that he thought he had been recruited to fight U.S. forces in Iraq. Instead, he was pressed to become a suicide bomber.

15 years old.

Damn.

The result of all this is a sharp decrease in the number of Sunni insurgency attacks in northern Iraq. Commanders said the drop began in June 2005 along with the disruption of the Al Qaida leadership.

"Nobody's taken over [Al Qaida] now," Brown said. "It's not a very popular position because if they step up, they get captured or killed. And so they're really disrupted, totally different."

At the same time, Sunnis in the north has turned against the insurgents. Commanders said that unlike 2004, Iraqi residents have begun to relay tips on insurgency plots and attacks in the Mosul area.

Brown said the number of mortar attacks in the Mosul province has dropped from 300 to six per month. U.S. and Iraqi forces have captured more than 142 mortar systems in 2005, he said.

Bergen said the Iraq war marked a training ground for Islamic insurgencies throughout the world. Widespread use of improvised explosive devices would serve as a model for future conflicts. "We have to prepare ourselves for blowback from the Iraq war," Bergen said.

It's a damn poor training ground when all your trainees end up dead or captured. Unless it's training to become a corpse - which is really a rather limiting career option.

15.

Damn.

J.