Operation Matador is the largest anti-terrorist operation in Iraq since the Army and Marines cleaned out Fallujah last November. It began today, with the objective of breaking the backs of the insurgencies operating from towns and villages near the Syrian border. Bill Roggio has details, including the report that the bad men are trying to stand their ground and fight (they have nowhere to flee to) which means US and Iraqi forces are cleaning their clocks. See also Belmont Club.

Don’t forget that fighting continues in Afghanistan, too.

One happy outcome of this operation, besides simply reducing the number of terrorists (100 reported killed just now on news) and diminishing their havens, is that it may drive the Baathist insurgents, known as FREs (for “former regime elements“), away from their alliance of convenience with the Islamist terrorists. The Baathists are secular-oriented socialists with little truck for the strict religious fundamentalism of al Qaeda. They have been working together only because they each hate America and democracy, but at bottom they hate each other, too. In fact, were they to succeed in dislodging the United States from Iraq (ain’t gonna happen) at some time thereafter they would turn on one another.

In fact, in February 2003, Osama bin Laden called upon Iraqis to fight the Americans, even by suicide attacks if necessary. Was he trying to save Saddam’s skin or his Baathist government? Not at all. In fact, in his Feb. 11 statement broadcast on al Jazeera TV, bin Laden openly called Baathists “infidels” but admitted he was forced to make a pact with them:

Socialists are infidels wherever they are. . . [but] it does not hurt that in current circumstances, the interests of Muslims coincide with the interests of the socialists in the war against crusaders.

There’s an old toast I learned in the Army whose clean version goes like this:

Here’s to you and here’s to me,
may we never disagree.
But if we do,
to heck with you.
Here’s to me!

One effect of Operation Matador may be to fracture the uneasy alliance between Islamists and Baathists. Why? Most of al Qaeda’s fighters in Iraq are foreign to the country while almost all the FREs are native Iraqis. The FREs have the option, distasteful as it is to them, of asking for quarter and deciding to integrate into a free Iraq; I think that when they realize that victory on their terms is impossible they will take that course. But al Qaeda can’t and won’t. At some point, I hope, the FREs may offer to finger al Qaeda personnel and locations in exchange for clemency of some kind.

The director of operations for the joint staff in the Pentagon just said on a news broadcast that the insurgents being fought in Operation Matador are well armed, better trained than any fought before, and well equipped with uniforms and flak vests. This makes them more difficult to defeat, but it may also make them more confident they can prevail. This will be their undoing, for there is no force anywhere in the world that can hope to prevail against the US Army and US Marine Corps in conventional ground combat.

Update: Belmont Club’s maps show that US Marines have secured the high ground to the west of the terrorist strongholds, cutting off an egress to Syria. This is smart military tactics, but I wonder whether one reason the bad guys are fighting so hard is because they know they can’t flee to Syria in any event. If I were Bashar Assad I would be very reluctant to give America an excuse to conduct combat operations on Syrian soil, which we would have every right to do in hot pursuit of a fleeing enemy - a right concretized in international law and practice for many centuries.

The San Diego Union Tribune has a good rollup of the action, including Syria’s claim that “it is arresting would-be infiltrators and doing what it can to control the border with Iraq.”

Also, Blackfive has some thoughts about just whom the enemy is - it seems US forces went in presuming they would be mostly al Zarqawi- affiliated, hence Islamists if not outright al Qaeda members. Yet, as the Tribune story points out, 10 insurgents surrendered after being pounded by Marine fire - about which Chester, a former Marine officer, blogs,

…Seems to reinforce the idea that the bad guys in this fight are trained military personnel, either from maybe Saddam’s old forces, or from Syria, rather than Jihadists — though its probably safe to assume a mix. Ten surrendering certainly doesn’t sound like anyone eager to get to paradise like we’ve come to expect…

As I said above, if the enemy is a conventionally-trained force, that’s not bad news although it does perhaps forbode more harsh fighting. They have no air support, no imagery systems, no significant indirect-fire weapons except mortars, and probably limited communications capability. They have obviously worked hard at developing effective defenses of urban buidings - see here - but the Marines learned in Fallujah that the M1 Abrams tank is pretty much a cure-all for fighting defenders in buildings.

(The Marines are much under-armored compared to the US Army, though. One Marine officer wrote before the Iraq invasion,

A fully mechanized Army Division is simply mind-boggling. … Marines are tough but we don’t win the big wars. The Army wins the big wars. They do it because they are massive and can bring an incomprehensible amount of firepower to a fight.

The most important fact to remember is that one Army Mechanized Division has more firepower than most countries.

But unlike Fallujah last November, there seems to be precious little Army armor, if any, in Operation Matador.)

The enemy’s lack of support, intelligence and command-and-control systems doesn’t render them helpless or ineffective by any means. It does mean they started the battle with a huge deficit of combat power relative to US forces. Commanders on the ground caution that tough fighting lies ahead, but they, their troops and - crucially - the peoples of both America and Iraq know that our ending point is victory, however long it takes.

Neiother does it bode well for al Qaeda as a whole that, ethnic rifts are tearing at al Qaeda.

American and Pakistani intelligence agents are exploiting a growing rift between Arab members of al-Qaida and their Central Asian allies, a fissure that’s tearing at the network of Islamic extremists as militants compete for scarce hideouts, weapons and financial resources, counterterrorism officials say.

This develppment probably will have no effect on the enemy in Operation Matador, but it doesn’t offer long-term encouragement for al Qaeda’s long-term sustainability in Iraq, either.

(My dog in the hunt is this fact, so the more pacification that takes place now the less apprehensive I am about this fall.)