What the Pen Reveals About the Sword: Rhetoric-Based Mapping of Insurgency Factional Structure in Iraq Michael Gabbay Information Systems Laboratories, Inc. 200 W. Mercer St., Ste 410 Seattle, WA 98119
[email protected] Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association March 28, 2008 Note: A condensed version of this paper appeared as \Mapping the Structure of the Sunni Insurgency in Iraq," CTC Sentinel, 1(4):10{12, March 2008 ISL What the Pen Reveals About the Sword M. Gabbay 1 Introduction The Iraq conflict is a complex fusion of a rebellion against foreign occu- pation and an internal civil war | a conflict that seems intent on explor- ing almost all axes of violence between its participants. Divisions within the Sunni insurgency in Iraq have critically influenced the evolution of the conflict and will no doubt bear critically upon its subsequent course and resolution. Major points of contention between nationalist-leaning insur- gents and caliphate-minded, pan-Islamic jihadists have been, among others, Sunni participation in elections, the indiscriminate targeting of Shiite civil- ians, and the nature of the threat posed by United States-backed Sunni militias, known as \awakening councils." Understanding the divisions be- tween insurgents at the level of speci¯c insurgent groups is key to devising e®ective counterinsurgency and conflict resolution strategies. In Iraq, this task is complicated by the proliferation of insurgent groups, most of whom claim an Islamist mantle, and the murky nature of their origins, composi- tion, and leadership. In this paper, we describe a quantitative methodology for constructing diagrams that characterize and clarify insurgency factional structure using insurgent rhetoric as data.