Muqtada Al-Sader Quotes

We don't kill Iraqis - our hands do not kill Iraqis. But we target only the occupier with all the means of resistance.

You can't talk about defeating insurgencies in the same way that you can with a conventional army.

The resistance will be exclusively conducted by only one group. This new group will be defined soon by me.

Al-Qa'ida does not follow a traditional command structure, wear uniforms, carry its arms openly, or mass its troops at the borders of the nations it attacks. Nonetheless, it possesses the demonstrated capability to strike with little notice and cause significant civilian or military casualties.

You know as well as I do that counterinsurgency is a very nuanced type of military operation.

Living in this manner also gave them the opportunity to locate targets and develop methods of attack that would make the most impact on the population, infrastructure, and governments of these areas.

An insurgency is the most difficult to fight of all military activities.

If we were fighting an army, the work would be comparatively easy. We are fighting a secret revolutionary organization.

Counter insurgency is something we can’t do, can’t do well, and shouldn’t be doing.

A counter-insurgency is won by intelligence—not by bombardment.

Air power will not defeat ISIS. It has not been able to deny ISIS freedom of maneuver and the ability to attack at will.

The war is in the mountains,” he said. “For as long as I can remember, they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets.

This boa, the American columns, are being besieged between Basra and other towns north, west, south and west of Basra… Now even the American command is under siege. We are hitting it from the north, east, south and west. We chase them here and they chase us there. But at the end we are the people who are laying siege to them. And it is not them who are besieging us.

There are very interesting books about these events, for instance one by a very well-known American historian named William R. Polk called Violent Politics. It's a record of what are basically guerrilla wars from the American Revolution right up through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

History teaches us that nobody can prevent a resistance group from arming when it has the support of the people.

Guerrilla warfare is used by the side which is supported by a majority but which possesses a much smaller number of arms for use in defense against oppression.

Throughout most of our species’ long and bloody slog, warfare has primarily been carried out by bands of loosely organized, ill-disciplined, and lightly armed volunteers who distained open battle in favor of stealthy raids and ambushes: the strategies of both tribal warriors and modern guerrillas and terrorists. In fact, conventional warfare is the relatively recent invention.

Our enemies should take note. Arial attacks, stupendous in their mass effect, surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination from within, the murder of leading men, overwhelming attacks on all weak points in the enemies defense, sudden attacks, all in the same second without regard for reserves or losses.

Maybe it's the spy novelist in me looking for a future plot, but I hope the U.S. and its allies are thinking how to operate 'unconventionally' in Iraq and Syria in ways that undermine the Islamic State.

Offensive operations and hunting down the enemy is an integral part of any counterinsurgency approach.

We want to make the insurgents come to us. Make them be the aggressors. What I want to do is get on the inside looking out - instead of being on the outside looking in.

We cannot kill or capture our way out of an industrial-strength insurgency.

Military leaders, many of whom were students of counterinsurgency, recognized the dangers of an incremental escalation and the historical lesson that 'trailing' an insurgency typically condemned counterinsurgents to failure.

If wars were won by superior technology alone, the United States would not have been vanquished in Vietnam or waylaid in Afghanistan.

Instead of large-scale occupations, we should rely on small units of Special Forces who have proved it's infinitely more effective to work with a country's soldiers and citizens at eye level.