Sadly for this excellent plan, al Qaeda had a more direct method of dealing with their death row comrades. This will be a problem for Iraq:
Iraq's parliament speaker warned Thursday that the escape this week of hundreds of inmates during al-Qaida-claimed raids on prisons outside Baghdad will make the country's rapidly deteriorating security even worse.
The warning came just hours after militants carried out a bold ambush on truckers north of the capital, killing 14 people.
The Sunday night attack on the notorious Abu Ghraib prison and another lock-up in Taji, both on the outskirts of Baghdad, underscored the extent of the challenges facing Iraqi authorities as they struggle to keep the country safe. More than 550 people have been killed in violent attacks so far this month.
Obviously, the jihadis will kill anyone working with the government. The escaped jihadis will also make it more difficult for Sunni Arabs to work with the government since these escaped jihadis will seek to intimidate Sunni Arabs in order to establish a safe haven amongst Sunni Arabs.
My understanding is that we've returned intelligence assets to Iraq to combat the resurgent al Qaeda in Iraq. But we have a lot of lost ground to make up after abandoning Iraq at the end of 2011. As Benghazi showed, the State Department army is no replacement for a robust American military presence that provides both concrete assistance to local forces and a sense of security that American power is present and interested in the outcome.
On jihadi prisoners, Iraq clearly needs to speed up the process of executions if this is how al Qaeda reacts to convictions of their people.
