Sunday, January 01, 2006
A swing and a miss
Twelve car bombs exploded around Iraq on Sunday, including eight in Baghdad that detonated within a three-hour window, as insurgents continued their attacks in the new year. The bombs injured at least 20 people but killed no one, police said.
That's a big investment in firepower for the insurgency, all adding up to a big whiff.
Most of these bombs appeared to be aimed at military targets, Iraqi and American, but they ended up injuring civilians instead. Is all of this a matter of luck, or are Iraqi and American military targets getting harder to hit?
In other news, al Qaeda in Iraq released a batch of Sudanese hostages. Why? Because the Sudan agreed to close its embassy in Iraq.
Al-Qaida in Iraq had set a Saturday deadline for Sudan to "announce clearly that it is cutting its relations" with the Iraqi government, or it would kill the hostages. Sudan said Friday it would close its embassy in Baghdad in an effort to win their release.
The terror group has kidnapped and killed a string of Arab diplomats and embassy employees in a campaign to scare Arab governments from setting up full diplomatic missions in Iraq.
In July, al-Qaida abducted the top Egyptian envoy in Baghdad, Ihab al-Sherif, and two Algerian diplomats. It later announced they had been killed. The group also snatched two Moroccan embassy employees in June and said that it had sentenced them to death, though it never stated whether it carried out the sentences.
Again, al Qaeda has no greater fear than that the new government of Iraq will succeed, and bring popular sovereignty into the heart of the Arab Muslim world. Al Qaeda attacks anything and anybody that sustains the viability and legitimacy of democracy in Iraq. Can there be any better reason to fight to uphold it?
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