Monday, February 18, 2008

Jihadi v. Jihadi

Is al Qaeda in Iraq in its death throes? Well, the fact that they're murdering their former allies because those allies weren't nearly as dedicated to the cause as al Qaeda hoped is a possible hopeful sign.
In the video provided by coalition military officials, armed men wearing masks are shown standing behind nine kneeling men, all of whom are wearing blindfolds or hoods with their hands presumably tied behind their backs. The video shows the men being executed.

"Al Qaeda in Iraq, which is foreign led and foreign dominated here inside Iraq, is killing off other Sunni groups that are certainly not supportive of the government of Iraq, currently, or of the foreign occupation, but are not sharing the same ideology that al Qaeda in Iraq has," Rear Adm. Gregory Smith said.

The video was recovered late last year during a raid on a compound near Samarra that was being used for killing and torture, a coalition official said.

A number of documents -- some found in the same raid -- bolster the coalition notion that al Qaeda in Iraq is waging a violent campaign against its former allies, intelligence analysts said.
The Sunni Awakening began in part because al Qaeda began targeting Sunni civilians with their mass casualty attacks. Now, al Qaeda is going after the jihadi remnants who couldn't come through with attacks of their own. This may only serve to sway Sunni jihadis away from the al Qaeda sphere of influence altogether and could be exploited by the Iraqi government down the road.

Ed Morrissey notes that al Qaeda has the curious tendency to document every last atrocity down to the beheadings and mass carnage, like another group of mass murdering thugs did more than 60 years ago - the Nazis.

UPDATE 2/19/2008:
Rusty at the Jawa Report notes that this video was released back in November and the media didn't exactly rush to report on it. It took the Admiral at CENTCOM to give the video the attention it deserves. If the media simply had reviewed and reported on these videos daily, they'd see just what is going on.

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