About 200 people have been killed in Iraq in the past two days. Al Qaeda has shifted its target from police recruits to Shiites. The Sunni Islamist terror group wants to provoke a civil war.
An excerpt from a Guardian story:
... A distinction should be drawn between the national concerns of mainstream Sunni Arabs and al-Qaida's more grandiose, destabilising objectives, said Rime Allaf, a Middle East expert at Chatham House.
"It's not just about Sunnis versus Shias. Al-Qaida often makes no distinction about who is being targeted. Some of these Baghdad neighbourhoods are mixed Sunni, Shia and others. They're all civilians," Ms Allaf said. "There is already a civil war, but it's primarily a war for power, not a war for religion. That's what it's about for al-Qaida. And power is what it's about for the US as well - power over the region."
Considered from this perspective, the Iraqi conflict lies at the heart of two historic struggles that were given a modern dimension by 9/11. All-out sectarian warfare in Iraq, if not avoided, could inflame passions in Shia Iran and among Sunnis and Shias in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, possibly leading to the sort of regime-changing, region-wide upheavals sought by al-Qaida.
An excerpt from an Independent story:
A suicide bomber sparked Baghdad's worst day of slaughter since the fall of Saddam 30 months ago when he lured labourers desperate for work towards his van by offering them jobs and then detonated explosives that killed 114 and injured 156 of them.
On a day when more than a dozen co-ordinated attacks thundered across Baghdad from dawn into the late afternoon - claiming 152 lives and wounding 542 - al-Qa'ida in Iraq said it was retaliating against a US-Iraqi operation directed at the insurgents' northern stronghold of Tal Afar. And as the hours passed with car and roadside bombs shattering the relative calm of the past few days, fears of civil war intensified.
A posting on the internet by al-Qa'ida in Iraq said: "To the nation of Islam, we give you the good news that the battles of revenge for the Sunni people of Tal Afar began yesterday."