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Al-Qaeda's slaughter seeks civil war
The unemployed gather like blown drifts where jobs are to be had. They queue around the block in weary, patient lines at barracks and police stations, clutching their identity papers. They queue to dig ditches or shovel rubbish from the streets, or gather in the early morning in dusty streets and squares where builders tout for labourers.

Last week the bombers came to al-Uruba Square in Kadhimiya, a Shia area of Baghdad. With its vast, important, gold-domed mosque, it has been a favourite for the suicide bombers. On Wednesday the driver of a van, pretending to seek day labourers, called men to his vehicle. As they approached, he detonated 220 kilos of high explosives, killing 114 people and injuring 150 more.

This was the beginning of one of Iraq's bloodiest days, but, despite the carnage, far from its most murderous. In a series of bomb explosions and shootings, 150 people would lose their lives and 500 would be injured.

It was followed by yesterday's toll of 30 people killed and 38 wounded in a car bombing in Nahrwan, around 30 miles from Baghdad. Earlier in the day police in Baghdad found nine bodies shot in the head and chest in three separate incidents, while in Baquba one man died and 17 people, including three Iraqi soldiers, were wounded when a car driven by a suicide bomber exploded near an Iraqi army patrol.

As officials of Iraq's Shia-dominated government, including those at the overworked Institute of Forensic Medicine, study the aftermath of the latest bombings, it is with a new fear: that they will find the bomber was not a Syrian, Yemeni, Saudi or even a Briton, but a brother Iraqi recruited by al-Qaeda.

A year ago analysis of the identities of suicide bombers deployed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq suggested the vast majority of suicide volunteers were foreign fighters smuggled across the Syrian border.

That was then. A year on, the government, and its multinational allies, are confronting a shocking new reality: an emboldened and reinvigorated al-Qaeda that for the first time is attracting increasingly large numbers of young Iraqi Sunnis to its cause - and to die in suicide operations.

Following a week in which Zarqawi 'declared total war' on the country's Shia majority after the co-ordinated series of attacks that began in Kadhimiya, British and American officials have admitted that there is growing evidence that al-Qaeda is strengthening its grip in Iraq.

In the most alarming development, officials concede that for the first time that a significant number of suicide attacks in the country are now being undertaken by Iraqis.

The recruitment of Iraqi suicide bombers by al-Qaeda comes at a time when Iraqi Sunnis also appear to be taking increasingly senior roles in al-Qaeda in their country, and at a time that the leadership and aims of the wider insurgency have become increasingly blurred.

Some American officials have claimed that as much as half of Zarqawi's organisation is now Iraqi, but their British counterparts are more careful, admitting only that they are alarmed by the number of Iraqis volunteering to carry out suicide operations.

'Everything points to the fact that Iraq has become the main point of effort for al- Qaeda now,' said one British official. 'There is evidence that al-Qaeda globally is sending human and financial resources to support the struggle in Iraq.'

What is not clear is the nature of the links between al-Qaeda's current poster boy for international jihad and senior members of Osama bin Laden's operation, and what role they are playing in the organisation in Iraq, although some officials strongly suspect that they are involved.

What has emerged is that al-Qaeda in Iraq has three explicit targets: to hurt the US and Britain on the ground; to attack democracy; and to attack Shias, whom they regard as schismatic apostates.

'There is a feeling in al- Qaeda that Iraq is the springboard for their wider ambitions,' said the official. 'To that end they have upped their game in Iraq significantly in the last 12 months.'

That view is endorsed by a US official who told the Los Angeles Times last week: 'They are the best game in town, the most organised organisation.'

What is doubly worrying for the US and Iraq is evidence that, where once even many Sunnis who actively supported the wider insurgency still regarded al-Qaeda and its tactics as deeply unpalatable, now - despite rejecting al-Qaeda's vision of a return to a medieval caliphate - they are more willing to accept Zarqawi's methods as a valid weapon in their struggle.

The emerging picture of al-Qaeda and its operations is increasingly alarming Washington, London and Baghdad. Although few feel safe estimating the size of Zarqawi's network, one places the hardcore of the organisation as around 10 per cent of the total of Iraq's insurgency, itself thought to command upwards of 20,000 committed fighters. By this account, Zarqawi's organisation would be between 1,000 and 2,000 in total, not including the suicide bombers who pass through its hands.

At the head of the Iraq organisation is Zarqawi and a series of key aides who co-ordinate strategy and logistics. Beyond this small, central group are locally com- manded al-Qaeda groups in major cities and areas of activity which are under the command of individual 'emirs'.

According to officials, each of these emirs, who are in charge of operations, logistics, finance and planning, is paired with a propaganda chief in charge of communicating al-Qaeda's recruitment message to the local organisations. 'Zarqawi's organisation is the most secretive operating in Iraq, and probably the best,' said one British official. 'For that reason, it has probably always looked bigger than it is.'

Yet the existence of such an effective terrorist organisation, even if it is just a small part of the insurgency, has created another paradox that Western military and intelligence officials are grappling with: the willingness of Iraqis to fight where al-Qaeda is under assault.

In Falluja, 40 miles west of Baghdad, and the northern city of Tal Afar 'what has been extraordinary on both occasions is the number of people who picked up weapons', said one official. 'The orthodoxy had been to expect more resistance from the foreign fighters.'

One explanation for al-Qaeda's new appeal to Iraqi fighters is supplied by Mowaffak Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser and a former Shia activist, who said last week that 'there's no doubt' that once-nationalistic elements of the insurgency were now drifting toward Zarqawi. 'There's a tendency to religionise the insurgency,' he said. 'Religion is a strong motive. You're not going to find someone who's going to die for Baathists.'

It is not only the apparent resilience of al-Qaeda in Iraq as an organisation and its ability to replenish itself after setbacks that is worrying military and intelligence officials: the organisation's ability to refresh the ranks of its volunteers for suicide operations is also causing alarm.

'What is striking,' said one Whitehall analyst, 'is that a year ago al-Qaeda would have extravaganzas and then run out of suicide bombers, so there would be a lull. We had 11 on a single day last week.'

Iraqi and Western officials are not the only ones who are waking up to the new potential of al-Qaeda in Iraq. After two years and more of ignoring the problem, Iraq's neighbours are now taking an urgent interest in the group's ability to flourish, conscious that, after Iraq, their own regimes are in the crosshairs.

If last week's bombings were designed to deliver one message - the provocation of the Shias into a broadening civil conflict - Zarqawi's declaration of total war, broadcast by al-Qaeda's 'Jihad Media Battalion' on the internet, had a different audience in mind. That audience was potential recruits, urging them to abandon moderate Sunni clerics in favour of al-Qaeda's apocalyptic agenda.

Describing the joint US-Iraqi assault on Tal Afar, Zarqawi sought to cast the Sunnis as victims of a vicious sectarian war. 'Sunnis who managed to escape from the hell of the crusader bombing,' claimed Zarqawi, 'were seized by the treacherous hands of the treacherous [Badr] corps and others, who abused and murdered the men and who desecrated the women's honour and stole their jewellery and ornaments.

'This is an organised sectarian war, whose details were carefully planned, against the will of those whose vision has been blinded and whose hearts have been hardened by Allah.

'Beware, oh Sunni scholars - has your sons' blood become so cheap in your eyes that you have sold it for a low price? Has the honour of your women become so trivial in your eyes? Beware.' It is a declaration of war on Iraq's Shias last week, Western officials fear, that has exploded in the middle of the rapidly souring relations between even those Sunnis and Shias who had previously sought to ignore the country's sectarian differences. In the directness of its call to arms, it suggests an al-Qaeda in Iraq that is emboldened and far from worn down by the long months of war.

It is this that is alarming US and UK intelligence officials most. The most frightening development of all is the way in which Sunni nationalist insurgent leaderships and al-Qaeda's leaderships are growing closer in a number of areas. 'There used to be a clear division in our minds between what we used to call "terrorists" and "insurgents" in Iraq,' said the Whitehall official. 'Now there is a blurring as these groups come closer together.'

From a political point of view, any closing of the gap between the wider insurgency and al-Qaeda is deeply problematic for the policy of trying to engage those insurgents who could be incorporated into Iraq's political process, and thus isolating al- Qaeda and the hardliners.

None of which is any consolation to the families of the dead labourers of Kadhimiya.
Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-09-18
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=129873