With our surge blunting al Qaeda's ability to kill Shias, the jihadis have decided that slaughtering innocent Iraqis whose death could not conceivably spark a civil war between Shias and Sunnis will do just fine:
Four suicide bombers hit Kurdish Yazidi communities in northwest Iraq with nearly simultaneous attacks on Tuesday, killing at least 175 people and wounding 200 others, the Iraqi military said. ...
Yazidis are members of an ancient, primarily Kurdish, religious sect that worships an angel figure some that Christians and Muslims believe to be the devil.
Probably just the dehumanizing impact of war on those poor victimized jihadis, right?
UPDATE: To be fair, there is probably a point to the latest jihadi war crime:
The carnage dealt a serious blow to the Bush administrations hopes of presenting a positive picture in a progress report on Iraq to be delivered by the top U.S. commander, Gen. David Petraeus, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker in about four weeks.
It deals a serious blow only if you are pre-defeated. We are hammering the enemy. But killing innocents is fairly easy if you are determined to kill.
But with our surge soon to be judged, the enemy knows that their long-range plan to spark a civil war has to take a back seat to their near term problem of American and Iraqi troops waxing their asses all over the battlefield. Simple body counts are all that matter to derail our surge and so the easiest targets will be sought out.
I've always been uncomfortable about judging the surge based on civilian casualties for this very reason.
UPDATE: Peters addresses al Qaeda's audience as well:
Al Qaeda needs to portray Iraq as a continuing failure of U.S. policy. Those dead and maimed Yazidis were just props: The intended audience was Congress.
Al Qaeda has been badly battered. It's lost top leaders and thousands of cadres. Even more painful for the Islamists, they've lost ground among the people of Iraq, including former allies. Iraqis got a good taste of al Qaeda. Now they're spitting it out.
The foreign terrorists slaughtering the innocent recognize that their only remaining hope of pulling off a come-from-way-behind win is to convince your senator and your congressman or -woman that it's politically expedient to hand a default victory to a defeated al Qaeda.
It all depends on whether members of Congress are looking for a September report or a September excuse.
