Quick questions on Iraqi insurgency and sectarian civil war 2003-2008: HSC Modern History Conflict in the Gulf

The Coalition Provisional Authority's two May 2003 orders (de-Baathification on 16 May, dissolution of the army on 23 May) created the human raw material of the insurgency: around 30,000 senior Baath cadres without livelihoods and around 400,000 trained Iraqi soldiers without employment.

Zarqawi's "letter to bin Laden" (intercepted by Kurdish intelligence in January 2004) laid out the strategy: provoke the Shia into open warfare with the Sunni population.

Zarqawi was killed by a US F-16 strike on a safehouse in Hibhib north of Baqubah on 7 June 2006. He was replaced by Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, then Abu Omar al-Baghdadi (Islamic State of Iraq, October 2006), then Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (April 2010).

By spring 2008 monthly civilian deaths had fallen 80 per cent from the late-2006 peak. The combination of factors:

Disbanded military, intelligence, and Baath Party cadres organised initially around the Saddam Fedayeen networks. Saddam's capture (13 December 2003) reduced this stream but did not end it.

The Islamic Army in Iraq, the 1920 Revolution Brigades, Ansar al-Sunna. Drew on tribal networks.

The Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (1966-2006) had run a small group in Afghanistan and Iran. He moved to northern Iraq in 2002. His group pledged allegiance to bin Laden in October 2004 and renamed itself al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQI).

The Mahdi Army (Jaish al-Mahdi) under Moqtada al-Sadr, formed June 2003. The Badr Organization, connected to Iran. Active against Coalition forces from 2004 and against Sunnis from 2005.

Photographs of US military police abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison appeared on 60 Minutes II on 28 April 2004 and in The New Yorker (Seymour Hersh) on 30 April. The images destroyed remaining US moral authority and became major recruiting material.

On 31 March 2004 four Blackwater contractors were ambushed and killed in Falluja; their burnt bodies were hung from a bridge. The First Battle of Falluja (April 2004) was halted under Iraqi political pressure. The Second Battle of Falluja (Operation Phantom Fury, 7 November to 23 December 2004) cleared the city street by street.

The central debate is what reduced the violence by 2008. Linda Robinson and the official US Army history (Joel Rayburn and Frank Sobchak, The US Army in the Iraq War, 2019) credit the Surge's operational shift to population-centric counterinsurgency. Against them, Emma Sky - writing from inside the command as adviser to General Odierno - argues that the Anbar Awakening was the decisive turn and that the Surge reinforced rather than caused it.