Fourteen improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were detonated Dec. 22 in ten neighborhoods in downtown Baghdad during the morning rush hour. Two more exploded in a neighborhood near Baghdad International Airport later in the evening. Most of the devices appear to have been fairly small; the largest explosion came from a suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) concealed in an ambulance that detonated in the Karrada neighborhood. The attacks appear to have targeted mostly Shiite neighborhoods. In total, 69 people were killed and more than 138 wounded. While security forces successfully disarmed six IEDs placed in or on vehicles, some of the sites had two devices: one bomb whose blast would attract bystanders and first responders, with a second meant to be detonated once they had gathered.
While security checkpoints and concrete blast walls remain throughout much of the city, Baghdad is a large metropolitan area — with all the attendant daily movements of large quantities of individuals and goods that characterize any large city and make the complete prevention of such attacks essentially impossible. The relatively soft targets struck in these attacks do not imply any major breach in hardened security perimeters. Still, the attackers had to have navigated around Iraqi security and intelligence services as well as through checkpoints. Bribery is endemic to these checkpoints, and reports suggest the ambulance driver talked his way through a checkpoint in Karrada, claiming that he was responding to an emergency. Although several VBIEDs were successfully identified and disarmed, the fabrication and emplacement of so many devices across Shiite neighborhoods in the capital is equally noteworthy.
This was the largest and most coordinated attack the Iraqi capital has seen since at least Aug. 15, when a wave of coordinated bombing attacks in Iraq killed some 75 people in 17 cities. However, more than the damage inflicted, what stands out about these attacks is their timing. Tensions between the Iraqi government, led by Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and the country's Sunni factions have been mounting for months. In the aftermath of the withdrawal of U.S. troops, al-Maliki's government has moved aggressively and immediately to target the most senior Sunni government officials. The possibility of future Sunni militant reprisals cannot be ruled out.
No one has claimed responsibility for the bombings, though many have pointed to al Qaeda. However, a group like the al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq, whose capabilities have been significantly degraded by U.S. and Iraqi military operations, would carry out an attack like this regardless of the political situation in the country. Conversely, while official condemnation of the bombings came from both Sunni Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi (currently taking refuge in the Kurdish north to evade an arrest warrant for alleged terrorism) and Iyad Allawi, a Shiite who leads the centrist Iraqiya bloc that garnered most Sunni votes in the 2010 election, the timing of the event bears immense political significance for Iraq's Sunni. The message understood by the many observers who place the attacks in that context will be that Iraq's Sunni will not quietly accept forced subservience to a Shiite-dominated Baghdad.
A Recumbent Insurgency
The post-invasion Sunni insurgency was never fully defeated. There is little indication of any meaningful residual loyalty to Saddam Hussein or to the toppled Baathist regime. Broader Iraqi Sunni nationalism — and more importantly, the Iraqi Sunni imperative for survival and their need to stave off total Shiite domination of the country — was never decisively crushed. Instead, Iraq's Sunni largely made a political decision to break with the foreign jihadists that had been their allies since the invasion and side with the United States. It was this political accommodation that laid the foundation for the success of the 2007 surge that broke the downward spiral of violence — first and foremost in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.
An aggressive campaign to capture or kill foreign jihadist cells and their leadership, led by the Joint Special Operations Command under the command of then-Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal and aided by intelligence provided by Iraqi Sunni, played an enormously important role in degrading the capabilities of those elements. Indeed, this campaign, as well as concurrent and subsequent efforts by the Iraqi Baghdad Operations Command, greatly reduced terrorism and militancy in the country, and its successes should not be understated. However, the Iraqi Sunnis involved in the insurgency retained the skills and experience that they learned not only from their own fighting experience and from foreign-trained jihadists, but also from the considerable experience many had in Hussein's military. It must be assumed that they were able to retain some quantity of weaponry, ammunition, explosives and other materiel.
Al-Maliki's Campaign Against Sunni Leadership
The Shia-dominated government of al-Maliki has set in motion a second campaign to target the Sunnis. This campaign entails a multifaceted approach to break the unity of the Awakening Councils, a coalition of Sunni tribal sheikhs also known as the Sons of Iraq (SOI). Elements of this campaign include bribery and play on intra-sectarian fissures. The campaign also avails itself of state security and intelligence organs to arrest and intimidate the Sunni. Charges of terrorism are weapons of choice for the government; these charges are often grounded in the Sunni dominance of the country under Hussein and the Sunni insurgency that took root after his fall.
The government campaign has an inherent and considerable overlap with the larger counterterrorism campaign. A Sunni militant that once engaged in insurgency may be a legitimate legal target. An illegal arms cache held in reserve by a Sunni that may have temporarily stopped participating in attacks is still an illegal arms cache. In such instances, legal and extra-legal Shiite interests overlap and should have a detrimental impact on the operational capabilities and weapons stockpiles of Sunni groups in Iraq.
Many of Iraq's Sunnis spent years waging an insurgency against the United States while simultaneously facing sectarian attacks from Shiite militias. It would be difficult to overstate the operational experience and expertise they gleaned from this struggle. Even if their capability has eroded considerably, it must still be regarded as significant. Also, in 2010 the SOI counted 93,403 members. Iraq's government had promised to slowly integrate them, with 20 percent to be assigned to security forces and 80 percent to various government ministries (this resulted in their being directed toward low-level, non-military or non-security jobs, including janitorial work).
After the 2010 elections, an integration freeze was placed on the SOI, but the freeze has yet to be lifted. Only 40 percent of the SOI were integrated, with the majority going to low-level jobs in ministries in the Baghdad area. Only around 9,000 were placed in the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) — by most indications, dispersed to peripheral posts. The remaining 50,000 are still on a payroll but over 70 percent are paid late, and there are reports of SOI members' desertion. While SOI members have received little in the way of training, arms and equipment, and operational experience in the service of the SOI, their organization contains many former insurgents, including battle-hardened fighters, and former members of Hussein's military, security and intelligence services.
In addition, the SOI are almost certainly complemented by militant capabilities held in reserve that have survived U.S. and Iraqi government security campaigns. So while the Sunni are a minority demographic and by no means monolithic, they are dominant in large swaths of the country, and some Sunni-dominated formations possess significant strength and capabilities if they are driven to act in a coherent fashion.
The Dec. 22 blasts in Baghdad raise the question of how capable these formations remain and how they intend to act. Prudence would have dictated that some Sunni groups prepare their militant capabilities for the final U.S. withdrawal well before it took place. In fact, planning for a coordinated attack on this scale undoubtedly began before the American withdrawal was completed and before al-Maliki really ramped up his targeting of senior Sunni officials. Still, the scale of the attack and its responsiveness to the spike in Sunni-Shiite tensions is noteworthy. It must be assumed that the Sunnis have the capability to conduct more attacks like those of Dec. 22. Just how far al-Maliki is willing to push, in terms of risking broader Sunni unrest, is unclear. It is likewise unclear just how aggressive the Sunnis will become.
The dynamic extends beyond internal Iraqi politics. Al-Maliki's political maneuvering to consolidate Shiite domination in Iraq is at the very least compatible with Iranian interests, if not actively supported by Tehran. Given the larger regional struggle by Iran to extend its influence, as well as Arab efforts to counter that growing influence, any extended Iraqi unrest could quickly make the country a proxy battleground between Shiite and Sunni interests from around the region.
