In the weeks before Iraq's first post-Saddam election in January 2005, the head of the country's national intelligence service gave a strikingly high estimate of the insurgency's size. General Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani told AFP he believed more than 200,000 people were caught up in the armed campaign against the US-led occupation, a figure that folded roughly 40,000 core fighters into a far larger pool of part-timers, volunteers, and supporters who supplied logistics, shelter, and information.
The estimate dwarfed the US military's own, which had climbed over the previous half-year from about 5,000 to some 20,000. A senior American officer, speaking anonymously, would neither confirm nor reject the Iraqi count, conceding that the military lacked a clear read on how large the insurgency really was.
Independent analysts treated Shahwani's number as at least as credible as Washington's. Bruce Hoffman of the RAND Corporation, a former adviser to the US occupation, said the figure, high as it might be, could give a truer picture because it counted active sympathizers and part-timers rather than full-time fighters alone. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies made a similar case, arguing that American tallies understated how much support the insurgency drew in Sunni areas. Shahwani placed that support in provinces such as Baghdad, Salahuddin, Diyala, and Nineveh, home to Sunni Arabs who feared losing influence once Iraqis went to the polls.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in January 2005, in its own words.