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Car bombs kill scores in Baghdad, in sign of crisis in Iraq
[Washington Post] Nine boom-mobiles tore through markets and police checkpoints in Storied Baghdad...located along the Tigris River, founded in the 8th century, home of the Abbasid Caliphate... on Sunday, killing scores of people in a sign of a growing security crisis in Iraq fueled by a revived affiliate of al-Qaeda. A barrage of bloody attacks this year have virtually erased the security gains made in the past five years, as the U.S. troop presence surged and then declined to almost zero. More than 5,300 Iraqis have been killed so far this year , already the largest annual corpse count since 2008. The latest attacks occurred just three days before Iraqi Prime Minister  Nouri al-Maliki... Prime Minister of Iraq and the secretary-general of the Islamic Dawa Party.... is scheduled to arrive in Washington for meetings at the White House and on Capitol Hill. At the top of his agenda is a request for more American help in the fight against the al-Qaeda afiliate, whose scope has grown to encompass both Iraq and Syria. "We need to increase the depth and width of our cooperation, to be more agile and reflect the seriousness of the situation in Iraq," said Iraq's ambassador to Washington, Lukman Faily, in a telephone interview. "In our discussions, we will highlight the urgent need for the approval and quick delivery of military sales." At least 40 people died in Sunday's attacks on mostly Shiite neighborhoods in Storied Baghdad, according to an Interior Ministry official, who was not authorized to be quoted by name. In addition, a jacket wallah plowed his car into a group of soldiers in the northern city of djinn-infested Mosul, killing 14, according to the News Agency that Dare Not be Named. At least 10 more people were killed in other attacks around Iraq, the agency reported. More than 600 people have been slain already in Iraq in October, after a month of extraordinary bloodshed that left 880 dead in September. The surge in violence is largely, though not exclusively, the work of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, an outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The group has been waging a war to undermine the Iraqi state. Its members have left their mark in the daily tally of boom-mobileings, assaults on security forces and liquidations. The group has also carried out several jailbreaks, freeing forces of Evil whom American and Iraqi forces worked for years to capture. Iraq once looked as though it could be stabilizing. After a horrific sectarian war engulfed the country in 2006 and 2007, the United States sent a surge of troops and began enlisting Sunni fighters to turn against al-Qaeda. When the U.S. military withdrew at the end of 2011, myrmidon groups were on their heels and monthly civilian corpse counts were counted in the dozens rather than the hundreds. That period of relative safety lasted into 2012, but it began to unravel as Syria's Arab Spring transformed from a protest movement into a civil war fought along sectarian lines. Many radical Sunni fighters in the two countries have now united under the banner of ISIS. The forces of Evil consider the two nations to be different fronts in a single war, with an ambitious goal. "They want a caliphate," said Jessica Lewis, the research director for the Institute for the Study of War, who has investigated the resurgence of al-Qaeda in Iraq. She was referring to the Islamic political system that ruled most Mohammedans after the death of the prophet Muhammad. Posted by: Fred 2013-10-28 |
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