Al Qaeda’s Black Flag Flies Over Iraq

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The death toll for 2013 has already topped 7,000, with the United Nations saying that 979 died in October alone, the latest month for which figures are available.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: The Daily Beast
By The Telegraph | December 13th 2013

Friday's anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s arrest sees the country struggling with a resurgent al Qaeda and a death rate double that of a decade ago.

Ten years after the capture of Saddam Hussein, Iraq is at risk of becoming a failed state again as al-Qaeda reclaims vast swathes of the country.

Friday’s anniversary of the Iraqi dictator’s arrest sees the country still struggling with his legacy, with al Qaeda launching a fresh campaign of terrorist atrocities from new territory carved out in western and northern Iraq.

Backed by jihadists fighting the civil war in neighboring Syria, the group is trying to create an “emirate” straddling the two countries, taking advantage of the collapse in security across the border.

Bridges linking four key border towns on the Iraqi side have been dynamited, making it difficult for security forces to operate in the area.

Road signs have even been put up proclaiming it to be the turf of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the name for the joint Syrian-Iraqi al Qaeda franchise.

Further north in the city of Mosul, another al Qaeda stronghold, the group is boosting its war chest by raking in up to £5 million a month in “tithes” from local businesses.

Using their new safe haven as an operating base, al Qaeda has mounted repeated strikes across the country, with an average of 68 car bombs a month this year.

After a period between 2009 and 2011 in which violence was on the wane, al Qaeda’s resurgence in the past year has led to a fresh sense of despair on the streets of Baghdad, where many young Iraqis think now only of leaving the country.

“It is not as bad as during the civil war, but whenever you leave your house, you can’t be sure that you will be coming back,” said Shadi Karaqzi, 23, an accountancy student smoking a shisha pipe in a central Baghdad cafe, itself the target of a devastating car bomb attack in 2007. “We are living in terror.”

“The wish of most young men now is just to live abroad so that they can have a normal life,” added his friend Ghaith Hamed, 22.

In recent months, al Qaeda’s so-called “reload rate” – the time between one series of mass attacks and another – has dropped to as little as a week, down from four to six weeks.

The death toll for 2013 has already topped 7,000, with the United Nations saying that 979 died in October alone, the latest month for which figures are available.

That is roughly twice the Iraqi death rate when US forces plucked Saddam from his “spider hole” in Tikrit in December 2003, an arrest hailed at the time as spelling the end of Iraq’s insurgency problems.

The brunt of al Qaeda’s new onslaught is borne by Iraq’s majority Shia Muslim community, who are classed as apostates in the terror group’s extremist Sunni Muslim vision.

So far, senior Shia clerics have forbidden retaliation. But in interviews with The Telegraph, both Iraqi politicians and foreign diplomats have expressed fears that the sheer scale of the current onslaught is putting a strain on Shias’ willingness to turn to the other cheek.

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