Six weeks into the U.S.-led Baghdad reinforcement, al-Qaida in Iraq is quickly adapting by taking its suicide bombings to towns outside the capital.
Soldiers told The Examiner that Diyala province north of Baghdad is infested with newly arrived al-Qaida terrorists, as well as members of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army.
“I wish I could say the surge is working, but from the perspective of Diyala it isn’t,” says an e-mail from a soldier who has been fighting in the province, and the city of Baquba, for months. “The surge has meant al-Qaida and al Mahdi, the whole gang, are swarming out here to Diyala and obliterating the last shreds of civility in Baquba. I see no reconciliation and nothing that suggest the cycle of violence will be broken.”
Al-Qaida is on the move because commanders have divided Baghdad with barricades and checkpoints to keep vehicle-borne bombs out of highly populated areas. The terrorist group is demonstrating again how it switches targets to try to checkmate whatever move is made by the U.S. command.
In addition to the buildup in Diyala, al-Qaida has executed suicide bombings in Tal Afar, triggering two days of sectarian killings there.
To the west in Anbar province, al-Qaida is targeting police officers, after hundreds of Sunni Muslims answered the call from tribal sheikhs to join up.
“Al-Qaida realizes that this is a threat to the way they like to see things go, and they have chosen the IP, or the Iraqi police, as their targets,” Marine Maj. Gen. Walter Gaskin, the top U.S. officer in Anbar, told Pentagon reporters via a teleconference at the Pentagon.
Using camps and safe havens in northeast Anbar along the Euphrates River, the terrorist network has sprung 400 attacks on police officers since Jan. 1
Gaskin said the trend is moving against al-Qaida in Anbar. He said there were only about 1,300 Iraqi police in the province a year ago. Today there are 13,200.
Anbar has long been one of the most troubled, and deadly, provinces for U.S. Marines, who rotate units in every seven months. Abu Musab Zarqawi, al-Qaida in Iraq’s founding leader who was killed in a June 2006 airstrike, established Anbar as his base.
A year ago, when assembly elections seemed to be leading to sectarian peace talks, al-Qaida struck its most strategically important blow. A suicide bomber blew up a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra, igniting rampant sectarian violence.
