Al-Qaeda's slaughter has one aim: civil war

150 died in one day in Baghdad -
and Iraqis, not foreign fighters,
are now the insurgency's keenest
recruits. Peter Beaumont i
nvestigates how this crucial
shift has changed the fight

Sunday September 18, 2005
The Observer

The unemployed gather like blown drifts where jobs are to be had. They queue around the block in weary, patient lines at barracks and police stations, clutching their identity papers. They queue to dig ditches or shovel rubbish from the streets, or gather in the early morning in dusty streets and squares where builders tout for labourers.

Last week the bombers came to al-Uruba Square in Kadhimiya, a Shia area of Baghdad. With its vast, important, gold-domed mosque, it has been a favourite for the suicide bombers. On Wednesday the driver of a van, pretending to seek day labourers, called men to his vehicle. As they approached, he detonated 220 kilos of high explosives, killing 114 people and injuring 150 more.

This was the beginning of one of Iraq's bloodiest days, but, despite the carnage, far from its most murderous. In a series of bomb explosions and shootings, 150 people would lose their lives and 500 would be injured.

It was followed by yesterday's toll of 30 people killed and 38 wounded in a car bombing in Nahrwan, around 30 miles from Baghdad. Earlier in the day police in Baghdad found nine bodies shot in the head and chest in three separate incidents, while in Baquba one man died and 17 people, including three Iraqi soldiers, were wounded when a car driven by a suicide bomber exploded near an Iraqi army patrol.

As officials of Iraq's Shia-dominated government, including those at the overworked Institute of Forensic Medicine, study the aftermath of the latest bombings, it is with a new fear: that they will find the bomber was not a Syrian, Yemeni, Saudi or even a Briton, but a brother Iraqi recruited by al-Qaeda.>>>>continued

Link Here