Al Qaeda in Iraq, Nearly Crushed, Recruits Women Bombers

Captain Ed reports on "the most spectacular victory" over al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq, where he draws on the Times of London's report, "Iraqis Lead Final Purge of Al-Qaeda."

The Captain makes an interesting observation:

Did you know that the US and Iraq will shortly conclude “one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror”? You wouldn’t if you read American newspapers or watched American television.

No, you wouldn't, as Abe Greenwald points out in his post, "The Times’s Debilitating OCD," where "OCD" stands for "obsessive compulsive disorder," with reference to the newspaper's effort to:

...prove that the American invasion of Iraq ... created violent enemies among the native population of Iraq, and that American aggression, not regional Islamism, is to blame for the majority of the resultant carnage.

Perhaps there's a little OCD in the Times' report this morning, "Despair Drives Suicide Attacks by Iraqi Women."

The article suggests that the increase in female bombings:

...seems to have arisen at least in part because of successes in detaining and killing local members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence officials say is led by foreigners.

The real cause of the trend is not American and Iraqi successes, however, but al Qaeda's own fanatical theocratic nihilism, which is clearly illustrated further down in the report:

Female suicide bombers are not a new phenomenon in Iraq or elsewhere, but they have been relatively rare. Since 2003, 43 women have carried out suicide bombings in Iraq, a tiny percentage of the total, according to the United States military. Though the first two cases came in the first year of the war, suicide attacks by women did not really become a trend until 2007, when there were eight such bombings in Iraq. All but one of the female bombers have been Iraqis and most are young, between the ages of 15 and 35, according to the police and American military analysts. Almost all the attacks have been attributed to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which is also known as Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Diyala has been a stronghold for the group since it was chased from Anbar Province in the west in 2004. The province’s attraction was clear: it offers easy hiding places in its palm groves and orchards, and a Sunni-majority population that includes many people who supported Saddam Hussein and are sympathetic to the insurgency.

But in the past year, American and Iraqi forces have had much greater success in killing and detaining the group’s members in the province, as well as thwarting many of its bigger attack plots. The rise in female suicide bombings has directly coincided with the timing, and the locations, of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia’s biggest loss of manpower in Diyala, Baghdad and Anbar.

“Al Qaeda is always innovating: finding new ways to work,” said Ghanem al-Khoreishi, the police chief of Diyala. “When we destroyed them in fighting, they started to use new methods. And because they knew that women are treated more gently than men, they began to use them.

“The people don’t search them so well even at checkpoints.”

So, al Qaeda's finding "innovative" ways to spread the death and disaster. I'm sure Newshoggers will be cheering at that (Juan Cole certainly is).

See also, Protein Wisdom.