Originally Posted by Shek

Daniel,

I know that LTC Kilcullen (retired LTC from the Australian Army and featured in the second post in this thread, Academics in Uniform) states that the deception of insurgent "grunts" by cell leaders posing as pious Muslims is not uncommon at all. As far as being more culturally attuned to Iraqis, my guess is that that has steadily increased over the years as we have gotten more and more soldiers trained on Arabic to various degrees (varying from weeks to months, and while this number still is lacking IMO, it is much further along than we were years ago) and as soldiers have returned for multiple tours, bring along with them the lessons from the previous tour(s).