More evidence Al Qaeda is being defeated in Iraq

Nibras Kazimi, a former Iraqi dissident and now Visiting Scholar at the Hudson Institute in Washington and widely-read blogger at Talisman Gate on Iraq, reports on a recent posting on an Al Qaeda website:

A prolific jihadist sympathizer has posted an ‘explosive’ study on one of the main jihadist websites in which he laments the dire situation that the mujaheddin find themselves in Iraq by citing the steep drop in the number of insurgent operations conducted by the various jihadist groups, most notably Al-Qaeda’s 94 percent decline in operational ability over the last 12 months when only a year and half ago Al-Qaeda accounted for 60 percent of all jihadist activity!

As Kazimi points out, this study can be found on one of Al Qaeda's chief media outlets: the Al-Ekhlaas website.

In his study the author provides figures and graphs and states that the number of operations that Al Qaeda in Iraq has dramatically declined. As Kazimi writes:

Al-Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq could claim 334 operations in Nov. 06 and 292 in May 07, their violent output dropped to 25 in Nov. 07 and 16 so far in May 08. Keep in mind that these assessments are based on Al-Qaeda's own numbers.

Below are the charts the Al-Ekhlaas writer posted. The figures he describes above are represented in the bars on the left; the smaller bars represent operations figures for other radical groups also operating in Iraq: