Al Qaeda tears through eight Iraqi cities, leaves more than 100 dead
In an unprecedentedly wild rampage, even for al Qaeda, raider-units, speeding drive-by gun squads, car bombs, and homicidal suicides mowed down checkpoints, liquidated Iraqi soldiers, police and security personnel and murdered civilians, in eight Iraqi cities including the capital, Baghdad, Monday, May 10. By the end of the day, more than 100 people were dead and 300 injured.
The gunmen broke new ground in terrorist tactics when they used automatic weapons fitted with silencers to creep up on their victims. debkafile's military sources report that at dawn, the raiders appeared simultaneously at checkpoints in most quarters of Baghdad. They lowered the windows of their cars when asked for documents, then opened fire with the silenced automatic weapons on the officers manning them.
Then came a deadly wave of massive bombing attacks against police stations, policemen's homes and military patrols in Baghdad and Falujjah to the West and Mosul in the North. T
he single deadliest attack struck civilians in the small town of Suwayrah near Hillah in the South. There, a pair of remote-controlled car bombs killed eight passersby, following which a suicide bomber blew himself up among the rescue teams, raising the death toll there to 45.
More al death squads hit Balad, Tamiya and Iskandriya.
Al Qaeda was venting its fury for the deaths of two of its senior commanders in Iraq, Abu Amar al Baghdad and Abu Ayub Al-Masri, at the hands of joint US-Iraqi intelligence teams, on April 18.
The two terrorist chiefs were killed by missiles at a hideout in the town of Tharthar northeast of Baghdad. Al Masri's aide and Al-Baghadi's son also died in the attack.
debkafile's counter-terror sources note that it took al Qaeda only 22 days to avenge the loss of its commanders and unleash a coordinated reign of terror countrywide that proved its strength was unimpaired.