WASHINGTON: If the United States has focused on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Al Qaeda bombers to justify its troops in Iraq, analysts say terrorism is just a small part of the mayhem plaguing the country.

President George Bush on Thursday hailed Zarqawi’s death as a potential turning point in the battle against Iraqi guerillas. But the experts were sceptical.

Anthony Cordesman, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said US forces had scored ‘a major political and propaganda victory’ in their drive to tame Iraq three years after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

“But the past tendency to demonise both Zarqawi and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has been dangerously misleading,” Mr Cordesman said. “The insurgency is far more complex and robust.”

Iraq watchers have said the bulk of the Iraqis opposing US troops has been nationalists and Saddam loyalists, with foreign fighters representing only five to seven per cent of the anti-US forces.

They said Zarqawi and his followers, for all their spectacular suicide bombings, did not account for a majority of either attacks or fatalities in a country beset by sectarian militias as well as guerillas.

Jeffrey White, who spent 34 years at the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), said the Al Qaeda militants were only part of a multi-headed system of violence in Iraq.

“It not even the main driver,” Mr White said. “The main driver of the violence in Iraq is the insurgency which is dominated by former regime elements, rejectionists and nationalists.”

The Bush administration has not been shy about stressing the terrorist threat in defending the continued deployment of 130,000 US troops in an increasingly unpopular conflict.

The White House calls Iraq ‘the central front’ in the ‘war on terror’. Its ‘national strategy for victory in Iraq’ cites the anti-terrorist drive exclusively as the vital US interest in the conflict.

“A sudden withdrawal of our forces from Iraq would abandon our Iraqi allies to death and prison, would put men like (Osama) bin Laden and Zarqawi in charge of a strategic country,” Mr Bush said in his State of the Union speech in January.

The Pentagon has been presenting a quarterly report to Congress on progress in the war, but critics say its provides what Mr Cordesman called ‘a fundamentally false picture’ of the situation in Iraq.

“Some estimates, like ... claiming that AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) is responsible for 90 per cent of suicide attacks seem to be dangerous estimates in political correctness,” he said.

The US administration has since 2004 given growing importance to the activities of Zarqawi, anointed by Osama bin Laden as Al Qaeda’s representative in Iraq. Both men have a 25 million dollar bounty on their heads.

But analysts such as Melvin Goodman, of the Centre for International Policy, stressed right away that the Al Qaeda mastermind and his lieutenant for Iraq were not on the same page.

“Zarqawi’s tactics are something that (Osama) bin Laden has repudiated because Zarqawi will use extreme violence against anyone and I think even bin Laden is more discriminate than that,” Mr Goodman said.

Behind the public rhetoric focused on a monolithic terrorist menace, US officials acknowledged they were facing a more complicated opposition broken up into factions with ‘separate and to some extent incompatible goals’.

Some analysts suggested the demise of Zarqawi might ease tensions significantly since he was a major factor in stoking hostilities with the Shias.

Yet not even Mr Bush, who optimistically said Zarqawi’s death could help ‘turn the tide’ in the conflict, was ready to predict any immediate drop-off in bloodshed.

“We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him,” the president said. “We can expect the sectarian violence to continue.”—AFP