Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf Quotes

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

This boa, the American columns, are being besieged between Basra and other towns north, west, south and west of Basra. The Americans are the people who are under siege.

We remember the grind of the insurgency -- the roadside bombs, the sniper fire, the suicide attacks. From the 'triangle of death' to the fight for Ramadi; from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south -- your will proved stronger than the terror of those who tried to break it.

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

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

They are still trying to bomb with artillery and rocket-propelled grenades to hit the Republican Guard who are controlling Saddam International Airport.

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.

When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.

With an insurgency, people are the prize. We can win every battle and still lose the war.

They will not fight you all except within fortified cities or from behind walls…

Insurgencies have a way of going on for a long time historically.

When you have to besiege a city for a long time, you must not destroy its trees, wielding an ax against them. You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. Are the trees human, to withdraw before your siege?

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

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerilla wins if he does not lose.

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

It is permitted to surprise the infidels under cover of night, to bombard them with catapults and to attack them without declaring war.

The consequences of U. S. superiority is that its opponents, both state and non-state actors, will have little choice but to resort to guerilla tactics and urban warfare because they simply cannot confront U. S. forces head on..

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.

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

Hamas, we know, embeds missiles, embeds command-and-control units in civilian areas.

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.