IRAQI RESISTANCE

Los Angeles Times: Resistance in Iraq Is Home Grown

Nationalists and Islamists are among diverse groups joining the
attacks, Foreign fighters are present in moderate numbers

BAGHDAD — The men attempting to recruit a former soldier in the
Fedayeen Saddam militia for today's war against the Americans took him to a
bearded sheik seated in a pickup truck. They appealed to the mortar expert's
sense of nationalism and then to his religious conviction. The Americans have
done nothing for Iraqis. They defile the homeland. Attacking the
American occupiers is the only way to make them leave, the recruiters argued.
In their shadowy guerrilla war to drive American forces out of Iraq,
hundreds of insurgents have organized into cells, especially in Al Anbar
province west of Baghdad and Diyala province to the northeast, both strongholds
for Saddam Hussein, the Sunni tribes that supported him and Wahhabi and
other Islamic fundamentalists.