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 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.—Dawn/The Observer News Service
