Checkpoint Baghdad : Parsing the Bombing Upsurge

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Checkpoint Baghdad

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Babak Dehghanpisheh

Larry Kaplow

Rod Nordland

Lennox Samuels

Silvia Spring

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Parsing the Bombing Upsurge

Babak Dehghanpisheh

It's starting to look like the bad old days again. A series of bombings in Baghdad, Baquba, Mosul and Ramadi today killed nearly 60 people and wounded more than 100. Multiple bombings are often the work of Al Qaeda in Iraq and have been rare in recent months, largely because many former insurgents in Sunni-dominated areas are now on the U.S. payroll. The worst attack today was a car bomb near a courthouse in Baquba which, according to the U.S. military, killed 36 and wounded 67. The large bomb wiped out three buses and damaged 10 shops in the area.

The timing of these attacks is hardly a coincidence. The Iraqi security forces are still reeling from a botched foray into Basra three weeks ago and are currently bogged down with sporadic fighting in Sadr City. The fighting against Moqtada al-Sadr's militant Shiite Mahdi Army and various splinter factions has also drawn in the U.S. military, who have logged the highest casualty count of the year--approximately 20 soldiers killed in the past 10 days alone, mostly from IEDs. So what better time for the Al Qaeda jihadis to make themselves heard? U.S. military officials, including top commander General David Petraeus, have repeatedly warned that Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI in military shorthand, hasn't been knocked out and is likely plotting "spectacular attacks." At a briefing yesterday, a senior U.S. military official said he frequently tells his soldiers, "Don't get fooled. Don't think for a second [AQI is] anything more than disrupted." The bombings today, as well as a handful of bombings in northern Iraq which killed 18 people yesterday, are ample proof of that.

So are these bombings a sign that AQI is back on the scene in their typically brutal fashion? The U.S. military takes great pains to track trends of violence in Iraq and there really haven't been any similarly large bombings in more than two months. At the briefing yesterday, the senior U.S. military commander even rolled out a series of graphs to show that violence levels in Baghdad had dropped after a spike linked to the fighting against Shia militia elements in late March and early April. These graphics have become such a regular part of the U.S. military's briefings on Iraq that they were lampooned on the Daily Show last week. One of the faux-reporters doing a standup from Baghdad agreed to replace disturbing footage of wounded Iraqis and burning cars with innocuous graphs to make his report more palatable. Still, the graphs and charts do show low attack levels prior to the recent fighting with the Shia militias. A spokesman quoted in the U.S. military's release on the Baquba bombing today noted, "Although attacks such as today's event are tragic, it is not indicative of the overall security situation in Baquba." And that's one trend line that few Iraqis or American soldiers want to see change.

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Member Comments

Posted By: ClementW (April 16, 2008 at 12:56 PM)

The bombing upsurge as mentioned in the article is AQI letting everyone know that they are still around. Unlike the gentleman Chaotician below, I am of the opinion that AQI and Iran have a vested interest in making it as difficult as they can for the US. If the US was not in Iraq, I am sure that some other location of importance to us would have been.

Look at what has happened in the past 5 years. The constant Al-Qaeda activity in Indonesia and the Philippines has disappeared. The folks of Al-Qaeda, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Hezbollah and every other disaffected moslem country as well as the disaffected moslems in the countries of Europe are having a great time fighting the "Christian Crusaders". They are not going to give up until the Islamic people themselves see the carnage that they are allowing themselves to be subjected to. When the Mullahs and the Ayatollahs keep inciting their flocks, how can the flock ignore them? The Popes during the crusades,a thousand years ago were doing the same thing. Those were called the "Dark Ages" and western civilisation evolved into the middle ages and further into today. Fortunately, Christianity has evolved and is now unfortunately in a decline. See the parallel and what it shows is that the vast majority of the poorly educated canon fodder in these countries are being manipulated by the educated elite into these self-destructive behaviours.

Most people are not aware that Sunnis consider the Shias to be HERETICS. Hence killing each other is to most of the under- or uneducated is in their own minds, a guarantee of a place in heaven. Can you imagine what the average Christian today would be feeling like doing if he were told by his preachers that he would go to heaven if he got rid of heretics to his religion and was guaranteed a place in heaven and to be serviced by a bunch of beautiful virgins?

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Posted By: Chaotician (April 16, 2008 at 8:53 AM)

It s telling that the Iraqis are reluctant to fight and kill their own! The Americans Generals are dismayed that they can't get the Iraqis to do the killing for them! It seems pretty obvious that the primary destablizing force in Iraq is us!

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