Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Yesterday large groups of Al Qaeda stormed two villages outside of Baqubah in an attempt to overrun them, and create mass slaughter. In both cases they were beaten back by the villagers in tandem with ISF, mostly Iraqi Police. Now today, 60 Al Qaeda attacked a village’s police station. Once again, the villagers defeated them in a ferocious gunbattle.

All three of these attacks are unusual for Al Qaeda. Their normal MO is to infiltrate a friendly Sunni community, set up shop, and use their newfound home as a base of operations to both solidify control of the area, and launch a slow bleed of attacks against coalition forces. Now that they are almost entirely without host communites, they are resorting to hiding in remote areas, and attacking their former homes in large numbers. This is done in the hopes of achieving the level of headline-grabbing kills brought about by suicide bombs and the ghost attacks of IEDs and small ambushes. Revenge is also a motivation, as they are angry with these villages for routing them out of town in the first place.

Most significantly, these attacks indicate that large numbers of Al Qaeda must now face an enemy in open combat. Such attacks will create a heretofor unseen level of casualties and attrition amongst their forces. What one suicide bomber used to be able to accomplish now requires the lives and capture of dozens of men. Al Qaeda is still fighting, but is quite literally on the run.

And these attacks are suicidal for Al Qaeda in a more significant. As I said after their first revenge bombing of Anbar Awakening sheiks at the hotel in Baghdad, which the MSM misread as a sign of Al Qaeda’s abiltity to tamp down the Sunni insurgency against them, such revenge attacks will actually seal Al Qaeda’s doom in Iraq, because they will simply fully and finally solidify the will of Iraq’s Sunnis against them. This morning, a villager backed up my assessment of two months ago: “”They were shouting ‘Allah Akbar and a curse be upon the renegades,’” said Umm Ahmed, a woman who was wounded in the attack. She refused to give her full name fearing retribution. “This attack will cause the uprising against them to spread to other villages.”

Their last spectacular bombing, while the most deadly one of all, was accomplished only because the small sect of people they attacked were without any security at all, because they were so obscure they were not considered a likely target. Previously, Al Qaeda loved to attack Shiites and Shiite icons like the Golden Mosque, because such attacks could create the impression of a genuine civil war, which the western press would lap up. And, such attacks also contained the promise of igniting a true civil war, although that never actually happened. Not only was the average Iraqi wise to Al Qaeda’s game, but the presence of U.S. forces and their control of all substantial routes of transport make a true civil war literally physically impossible.

Here’s the AP’s version of this morning’s dramatic battle:

BAGHDAD (AP) - Sixty suspected al-Qaida in Iraq fighters hit national police facilities in a coordinated attack in Samarra, sparking two hours of fighting that saw three people killed and more than a dozen insurgents captured, police said Friday.

The masked attackers drove into the city at dusk Thursday in about 20 vehicles, including pickups with machine-guns, then split into small groups and assaulted four police checkpoints and a headquarters building, a Samarra police official said.

One policeman and two civilians—a woman and an 11-year-old girl—were killed in the fighting in the city 60 miles north of Baghdad, and nine others were injured including a police commando and three children. There were no details on insurgent casualties, but police arrested 14 suspects, the spokesman said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

The brazen attack came after early morning assaults by suspected al- Qaida fighters on two villages to the southeast of Samarra near Baqouba, where fighters bombed the house of a local Sunni sheik and kidnapped a group of mostly women.

Residents were finally able to drive off the attackers and end the deadly rampage, but not before 17 villagers, including seven women, were killed. Ten al-Qaida gunmen also died.

Elsewhere, the U.S. command said Friday that Iraqi troops and U.S. Special Forces raided a home in the Hit area and seized an al-Qaida suspect believed to have shot down an American helicopter in 2004.

The forces detained the suspect and a “second person of interest” in the Wednesday raid, and found an assault rifle as well as numerous identification cards and passports. In addition to the helicopter attack, the primary suspect—whose name was not released—is believed to be involved in roadside bombing and sniper attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces in the region, 85 miles west of Baghdad, the military said in a statement.

The twin attacks near the Diyala provincial capital of Baquoba—a city 35 miles northeast of Baghdad that has been the focus of recent major U.S.-Iraqi military operations against alleged al-Qaida fighters and Shiite militiamen—hit a Shiite village and a Sunni village with the same ferocity but apparently different motives.

The attack on the Sunni village, Ibrahim al-Yahya, began when about 25 gunmen exploded a bomb at the house of Sheik Younis al-Shimari, destroying his home and killing him and one member of his family. Ten people were wounded, including four other members of the family and passers-by. Some of the wounded were hit by gunfire.

“They were shouting ‘Allah Akbar and a curse be upon the renegades,’” said Umm Ahmed, a woman who was wounded in the attack. She refused to give her full name fearing retribution. “This attack will cause the uprising against them to spread to other villages.”

Seven people were kidnapped. Two of the abducted men were later found shot in the head on a road leading out of town. The rest of the captives were women, and their fate was unknown.

Al-Shimari and his village apparently came under attack after he called on the men there to rise up against al-Qaida.

While the Sunni village was under attack, another band of alleged al- Qaida fighters stormed Timim, the nearby Shiite village and an obvious sectarian target, according to Baqouba police Brig. Ali Dlaiyan, who reported both assaults and gave the casualty tolls. He said the villagers were able to fight off the attack in a 30-minute gunbattle.

It was unclear how many of the 17 residents who died were in each village.

A police vehicle rushing to the attack scene crashed and two policemen were killed, according to officials in the Diyala provincial police force who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

The Sunni uprising against al-Qaida began spontaneously early this year in Anbar province, once a bastion of the Sunni insurgency in the west of Iraq, and has spread to Diyala province and some Baghdad neighborhoods. The U.S. military has encouraged disaffected Sunnis, many of them former insurgents, and has begun working side by side with the Sunni auxiliary units.