AQI Tactics Revealed

From Centcom:

Use silenced guns to kill Coalition forces at Iraqi security checkpoints, smuggle weapons in gradual shipments to reduce the risk of detection, and poison Iraq’s water supply with nitric acid to spread disease and death. Such tactics were fleshed out in a terrorist letter intended for Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the foreign-born leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. But the document never reached Masri. Instead, Coalition forces lifted it from the body of a terrorist they killed last month during an operation 30 miles northwest of Baghdad. The slain terrorist and author of the 11-page missive was Abu Safyan, from Diyala, Iraq, according to military officials who made available all but two pages deemed “not releasable” on the Multi-National Force – Iraq Web site.

Now while that sounds like a nasty recipe for death and destruction, there’s plenty of good news in between the lines there (besides the fact that the note was plucked from the body of a dead tango). First, al Qaeda is acknowledging that the tactics which sustained them since 2003 have been rendered obsolete by General Petraeus. Second, they are reacting to us, instead of us reacting to them. Last, while al Qaeda’s tactics appear to be changing, they continue to cling to the same failed strategy of death and destruction. That battleplan succeeded in landing an additional 28,000 American troops on Iraqi soil and turning almost the entire population of Iraq against al Qaeda’s foreign jihadists–it’s an objectively bad strategy.

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