Fears from reorganizing Baathists as U.S. troops withdraw – paper

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: The New York Times said on Friday that the string of recent attacks has raised worries that Baathist and jihadi militants are regrouping into a smaller but still lethal insurgency seeking to reassert itself as the American troop presence on the ground is reduced before a full withdrawal in 2011. “At least 80 people died and 120 others were injured Thursday in three bombings, one by a female suicide bomber in Baghdad who, Iraqi officials said, held a young child’s hand as she set off her explosives among a group of women and children receiving emergency food aid,” the newspaper said. “The number of people killed in the attacks is the largest single-day total since February 2008,” the paper added. “The government was treating the situation like they’d won a victory,” said Sheik Jalal al-Din Saghir, a member of Parliament from the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, a Shiite political party. “They relaxed. We can’t ignore that there were security successes, but that doesn’t mean the story is finished.” “The government may have scored at least one important security victory on Thursday, announcing the capture of a major leader of the Sunni insurgency, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. But reports of his arrest, and even his supposed death, have been announced before, and some American military officials even question whether such a man exists,” the newspaper said. Iraqi leaders say Mr. Baghdadi is the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group of Sunni militant forces that includes al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown group that American intelligence officials say is led by foreigners. The Iraqi military provided no further details about the arrest, and the United States military has not confirmed it. “On Thursday, Hussein al-Shami, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, defended the government’s security gains,” the paper said. “The security situation is still good, but there are some sleeper cells that are targeting the softer areas,” he said. “They just want to send a message to the government and the world that they are still here.” The woman who blew herself up in Baghdad’s central Karada district on Thursday resembled most of the other women crowded outside a food distribution site that was catering mainly to those displaced by the war. She wore a black abaya and, like many of the other women, was walking with a child, in her case a young girl, according to Iraqi Army and police officials who interviewed survivors at the scene. The woman stood out, the witnesses said, only because she began nudging her way through the crowd, which had been waiting patiently for the bags of flour, bottles of cooking oil and other staples that the police were handing out. The witnesses said she tugged the child, who looked about 5 years old, along with her. SH (S) 1