Zarqawi's death improved al Qaeda's fortunes in Iraq, says Kohlmann

In today's NYT's Week in Review section, there is an excellent graphic derived from Evan Kohlmann's work tracking the insurgency in Iraq. According to Kohlmann, al Qaeda was losing ground in Iraq until 2006 when two events fortified their position and intensified the insurgency.

The first event was when al Qaeda blew up one of the Shiite's most important shrines, the Askariya Mosque in Samarra. As Kohlmann reportedly told the Times, "that event opened the door to bloodletting between Sunnis and Shiites."

The second event that improved al Qaeda's fortunes in Iraq, according to Kohlmann, was when U.S. forces killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Because Zarqawi was Jordanian and not Iraqi, Kohlmann argues, he was never able to garner the support of those Iraqis who resented the influence of outsiders. But given the fact that al Qaeda in Iraq quickly named another outsider, an Egyptian, Abu Hamza al-Mujahir (a.k.a. Abu Ayyub al-Masri) to replace Zarqawi, how does this square with Kohlmann's assessment that al Qaeda now has a distinctly Iraqi face in Iraq?

Implicit in Kohlmann's complete report which can be accessed here, is the third seminal event of 2006: the formation in January of the Mujahideen Shura Council (MSC), an umbrella that was created to consolidate all of the individual Sunni jihadist groups, including al Qaeda in Iraq, into a single organization while still being able to preserve essential parts of their own identity and independence. The head of this group is an Iraqi, Abdullah Rashid al Baghdadi. Over the course of the year, the group claims to have been joined by almost a dozen jihadist organizations and some 30 Sunni tribes.

One indication that al Qaeda and its related organizations have indeed gained ground in Iraq in 2006 was the announcement on October 15 that the MSC, its superceding organization, was officially declaring an Islamic State of Iraq, comprised of eight Iraqi provinces including Anbar, Baghdad, Dijala, Tamim, Salahuddin, Nineveh, Babil, and Wasit.

Is there any good news to be found here? Perhaps. According to statistics kept by Iraq Body Count and maintained by the Brookings Institute's Iraq Index, 88 percent of the civilians killed in Iraq since the war began were in the areas that are now supposedly encompassed by this new Islamic State. We can hope that providing security at home will be seen as the first order of business of this new Islamic State.