StormWarning’s Counterterrorism

A Return to Baghdad

Has al Qaeda been “lured” back into Baghdad because of the recent bombings in Sunni areas? With the attention drawn to al Sadr’s Mahdi Army, it appears possible that AQI has returned. This happens as the Iraqi forces remain focused on the Mahdi.

Pointing to the bombings last weekend, the fear is that AQI has returned.

Now, some observers fear Sunni insurgents allied with al-Qaeda may seek to capitalize on the situation by wreaking havoc in other neighborhoods where U.S. and Iraqi forces are paying less attention. Last month, American troops found a letter in a farmhouse northwest of Baghdad, purportedly signed by an al-Qaeda operative, which called on insurgents to sow disunity among the nation’s Sunni fighters who have begun working with the Americans.

Apparently using a new tactic of tandem events, if this is AQI, they are drawing crowds of people to the first incident, like the recent assassination style killing of a shopkeeper and his son, and then exploding the bomb.

“These attacks are evidence that al-Qaeda is still a very large threat,” Rear Admiral Patrick Driscoll, a spokesman for the multi-national forces in Iraq, said Sunday, “We are continuously very closely focused on al-Qaeda.”

I may well be swimming against the stream of the happy talk right on this one. The question could well be whether AQI ever really left. The question may still remain if even American presence in Baghdad and the region, whether the Sunni/Shi’a conflict will be quelled, or if it remains the festering boil that it has always been.