Daily Times Monitor
LAHORE: Secretary of State Colin Powell has privately confided to friends in recent weeks that the Iraqi insurgents are winning the war, Salon.com quoted Newsweek as having reported.
The insurgents have succeeded in infiltrating Iraqi forces “from top to bottom,” a senior Iraqi official told Newsweek in its Monday’s issue, “from decision making to the lower levels”.
This is a particularly troubling development for the US military, as it prepares to launch an allout assault on the insurgent strongholds of Fallujah and Ramadi, since US Marines were counting on the newly trained Iraqi forces to assist in the assault.
Newsweek reported that “American military trainers have been frantically trying to assemble sufficient Iraqi troops” to fight alongside them and that they are “praying that the soldiers perform better than last April, when two battalions of poorly trained Iraqi Army soldiers refused to fight.” “If the Fallujah offensive fails, the American president will find himself in a deepening quagmire on Inauguration Day,” Salon.com quoted Newsweek as saying.