The timing of these attacks is hardly a coincidence. The Iraqi security forces are still reeling from a botched foray into Basra three weeks ago and are currently bogged down with sporadic fighting in Sadr City. The fighting against Moqtada al-Sadr’s militant Shiite Mahdi Army and various splinter factions has also drawn in the U.S. military, who have logged the highest casualty count of the year–approximately 20 soldiers killed in the past 10 days alone, mostly from IEDs. So what better time for the Al Qaeda jihadis to make themselves heard? U.S. military officials, including top commander General David Petraeus, have repeatedly warned that Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI in military shorthand, hasn’t been knocked out and is likely plotting “spectacular attacks.” At a briefing yesterday, a senior U.S. military official said he frequently tells his soldiers, “Don’t get fooled. Don’t think for a second [AQI is] anything more than disrupted.” The bombings today, as well as a handful of bombings in northern Iraq which killed 18 people yesterday, are ample proof of that.
So are these bombings a sign that AQI is back on the scene in their typically brutal fashion? The U.S. military takes great pains to track trends of violence in Iraq and there really haven’t been any similarly large bombings in more than two months. At the briefing yesterday, the senior U.S. military commander even rolled out a series of graphs to show that violence levels in Baghdad had dropped after a spike linked to the fighting against Shia militia elements in late March and early April. These graphics have become such a regular part of the U.S. military’s briefings on Iraq that they were lampooned on the Daily Show last week. One of the faux-reporters doing a standup from Baghdad agreed to replace disturbing footage of wounded Iraqis and burning cars with innocuous graphs to make his report more palatable. Still, the graphs and charts do show low attack levels prior to the recent fighting with the Shia militias. A spokesman quoted in the U.S. military’s release on the Baquba bombing today noted, “Although attacks such as today’s event are tragic, it is not indicative of the overall security situation in Baquba.” And that’s one trend line that few Iraqis or American soldiers want to see change.
