This time, Al Qaeda in Iraq selected a tiny, isolated, unprotected community of some 150,000 Yazidi Kurds, persecuted by Sunni and Shiite Muslims alike, as the victims of its barbarity.
Tuesday, Aug. 14, within minutes, three oil tankers driven by suicide bombers had murdered at least 500 people, injured more than 1,000 and transformed an ancient indigenous Iraqi sect into a humanitarian problem. While rescuers were still digging bodies out of the rubble of their destroyed homes in Qataniya and Adnaniya near Mosul, tens of thousands snatched their remaining belongings and streamed to the Syrian border.
Exchanges among al Qaeda’s adherents in Iraq 4, picked up by DEBKAfile’s special monitors, disclosed method behind the savagery. The jihadists had made an example of the Yazidis of Mt. Sinjar, holding them up as the first complete community they had succeeded in driving out of Iraq. They even urged harassing the refugees to speed the removal of every last Yazidi Kurd from Iraq.
Al Qaeda timed its brutal attack for maximum disruption of the latest American operations in the framework of the US-Iraqi overall Phantom Strike offensive to secure Iraq against insurgents and terrorists.
Lightning Hammer brought 16,000 US and Iraqi troops to the Diyala northeast of Baghdad province Aug. 14 to purge the area between Baquba and Balad and open up the main routes linking Baghdad to Kurdistan in the north for safe travel.
Marne Husky was launched the next day by 4,000 troops as an aviation-based offensive. Infantry drops by helicopter are targeting Sunni insurgents and terrorist sanctuaries in southeastern Baghdad and choking off bombs and weapons smuggling into the capital.
To defeat the US-led security campaign, al Qaeda appears to have opted for meting out death and destruction among large groups of civilians, aimed at forcing them out of their homes and causing hundreds of thousands of displaced people to wander hither and thither in search of safety, strangling communications and generating mayhem across the country. Blocked roads are intended to snarl the US offensives and compel the troops to turn to the immediate task of locating the deadly fuel trucks hurtling down the highways before they explode and inflict carnage.
DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources report that al Qaeda employed two revealing methods of operation this week:
1. Singled out as a soft targeted for the suicide bombers at the wheels of oil trucks was an isolated sect living in a remote community, which was easily accessible and unprotected by American or Iraqi forces or local security resources. The Yazidis live in communities of 5,000 to 20,000 which are clearly defined by religion and ethnic, tribal and clan kinship.
2. It looks as though Qaeda is bent on reusing its method of attack against the Yazidis for additional sections of the population – in particular the highly inflammable oil trucks driven by suicide bombers.
Intelligence source estimate that each the trucks operating against the Yazidi villages was packed with between 250 and 300 tons of explosives. Two reached their targets and blew up, while the third is believed to have exploded prematurely on the way. The force of the third blast was such that dozens of cars and buildings by the wayside were shattered and sent up flames visible to witnesses 2 kilometers away.
The war in Iraq is thus raging on two planes.
On one, coalition and Iraqi forces are launching offensive after offensive to scotch the al Qaeda-Sunni insurgent threat to Iraq’s security; on the second, al Qaeda is seeking to drive masses of terrified civilians out of their homes in chaotic flight.
If they are allowed to persist in this tactic, the report the US commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus and US ambassador Ryan Crocker are preparing to submit to Congress on Sept 10 will have to be limited to American military successes up until Tuesday, Aug. 14. The security crisis in Iraq thereafter turned a fresh deadly page.
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