http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36526-2003Sep6.htmlBAGHDAD, Sept. 6 -- After four months of military occupation, and in the midst of what most military officials still describe as a war, U.S. commanders and defense officials say they do not have a clear understanding of who they are now fighting.
Some elements of the Iraqi army were rapidly defeated while others faded away on their own during the heavy-combat phase of the war this spring. Their absence gave way to more classic, but short-lived, guerrilla resistance from former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's irregular, paramilitary forces, Saddam's Fedayeen.
Now, as remotely detonated car bombs, booby traps and armed militias challenge the occupation, defense officials say they are facing a low-intensity conflict like none they have fought before.
The enemy includes "disparate elements," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today. He and commanders in three separate military headquarters identified the enemies as foreign terrorists, former Hussein loyalists and criminals. Each group by itself probably could not launch anything amounting to a war, officials said. But together, the threat has U.S. military commanders and CIA officers on overdrive, trying to figure out how much coordination exists between the hostile groups.
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