A "Victory" for al Qaeda in Iraq

The "heroic warriors of jihad" scored a major "victory" today in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, as a suicide terrorist blew himself up among a group of elderly pensioners waiting to cash their checks:

A man wearing a belt packed with explosives blew himself up outside the Rafidiyan Bank just after it opened Tuesday morning, said Gen. Sherko Shakir, Kirkuk's police chief.

A crowd of street vendors and elderly men and women waiting outside the bank bore the brunt of the blast, and a pregnant woman and several children were among the victims.

Body parts were strewn for 20 yards in every direction from the blast. The bodies of several victims were found in the rubble of a nearby pedestrian overpass. Two cars were set on fire.

"It was the biggest awful crime in Kirkuk since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime," Shakir said.

Al-Qaida's northern affiliate, the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, claimed responsibility for both suicide bombings in northern Iraq and threatened more violence in retaliation for the arrests and killings of Sunni Arabs.


Ansar al-Sunnah has been responsible for numerous terrorist atrocities during the last two years, among them the December 2004 suicide bombing of a US Army mess hall in Mosul. The Iraqi government has even put a $50,000 bounty on the head of the group's leader, Abu Abdullah Al Shafi’i. Ansar's objective is to turn Iraq into a Taliban-style totalitarian Islamist state. As noted above, Ansar al-Sunnah is an al Qaeda affiliate organization, part of the broader jihadist network.

With this "heroic" massacre of elderly "apostates", Ansar al-Sunnah has outdone itself. As horrific as this atrocity is, it shows why the terrorists are destined to lose. They have nothing to offer but death, destruction, and the promise of eventual slavery. The vast majority of Iraqis want no part of the jihadist agenda, and today's display of barbarism will only further alienate them. As long as the United States retains the will to stay the course in Iraq, the terrorist insurgency will ultimately be defeated.