Iraq: Success!

It appears that the surge has succeeded - in escalating the internecine warfare currently devastating Iraq. Not that Commander Awol von Bunnypants gives a good goddamn. From the Los Angeles Times via the Boston Globe comes the story of suicide bombers in Diyala, Iraq, who have killed up to 24 people today.

The article states, in part:

...attacks have dropped noticeably since the arrival of about 30,000 additional US forces this year. But violence has flared in regions north of the capital, where many of the militants are believed to have fled.

It notes that women are rarely suicide bombers. However, this is the second known female suicide bomber in Iraq. Authorities identified the woman as Suhailah Hussein Chlayeb. Three of her sons had apparently been killed by the Iraqi Army.

Ibrahim Bajalan, the head of the Diyala provincial council, said the bomber was a former member of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party whose two sons joined Al Qaeda and were killed by Iraqi forces.

"She wanted to avenge the killing of her two sons," he told the Associated Press.

The article fails to point out that just about anyone who had employment in Iraq under Saddam Hussein was required to be a member of the Ba'ath party. As the Oakland Tribune points out:

However, membership or affiliation with the party was required for many government and professional jobs, and American officials have acknowledged that entirely purging one-time Baathists from the ranks of Iraq's civil service may be neither possible nor desirable.

In other, much more important news, the flow of oil was interrupted:

Oil gushed into the Tigris River after an explosion damaged a pipeline supplying crude from the northern city of Kirkuk to the refinery in Baiji, about 125 miles north of Baghdad. Officials suspended the flow of crude from Kirkuk to the refinery until they could repair the damage.

Here's a previous blog post on Baiji.

This is not the first time pipelines carrying oil have been blown up in Iraq. What are the massive oil spills doing to the nation's fragile ecology and its human and animal population?

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