al-Qaeda for the day

Michael Gordon and Duraid Adnan have an article in The New York Times about trouble in Iraq:

The brazen assaults on two prisons in Iraq this week were significant, not only for the hundreds of prisoners who were freed, but also for what they indicate about the growing capabilities of al-Qaeda’s Iraq affiliate, American officials and experts outside government said recently.
The attacks on the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Taji were carefully synchronized operations in which members of the al-Qaeda affiliate used mortars to pin down Iraqi forces, employed suicide bombers to punch holes in their defenses and then sent an assault force to free the inmates, Western experts said.
“We are concerned about the increased tempo and sophistication of al-Qaeda operations in Iraq,” said a senior State Department official, who requested anonymity because he did not want to be seen as commenting on Iraq’s internal affairs.
James F. Jeffrey, who was the United States ambassador in Baghdad when the last American troops left in December of 2011, said that Iraqi forces had performed poorly, and that it was clear their skills had deteriorated now that the American troops training them were gone. “This is the first example I have seen that the absence of American troops that would have provided tactical training has had an impact on the battlefield,” said Jeffrey, who is now a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The assaults’ audacity underscored the worsening conditions in Iraq, where stability has been undermined by almost daily car bombings and other violence tied to a resurgence of sectarian tensions, largely between the majority Shi'ites and minority Sunnis.
al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq is a largely homegrown organization of Sunni militant extremists that includes some foreign fighters and has had some foreign leaders.
“This attack is unlike any other attack when they target a coffee shop or a public market,” said Hamid Fadhil, a political science professor at Baghdad University. “They are targeting the most secured place with big numbers of security forces.”
Other Iraqis said the prison break had intensified their fears of being killed or wounded by just venturing outside at the wrong time. “If al-Qaeda can attack a prison, it means they can do whatever they want whenever they want,” said a lawyer, Meluk Abdil Wahab, 45.
Thousands of inmates have been housed in Taji and Abu Ghraib, the prison made infamous by the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal during the eight-year American occupation, and there were conflicting accounts by al-Qaeda affiliates and Iraqi security officials on the number of escapees and casualties.
But there appeared to be little dispute that hundreds of prisoners, some of whom had been captured by American forces before they withdrew, were now on the loose, an outcome that sent fear through Baghdad and beyond.
al-Qaeda said five hundred inmates had escaped from the two prisons, all of them mujahideen, or holy warriors. Iraqi officials said eight hundred prisoners had fled from Abu Ghraib, of whom four hundred had been recaptured or killed. They said that no prisoners had escaped from Taji, but that an unspecified number had been killed there.
There have been other signs that al-Qaeda s affiliate is becoming a growing threat. About eighty car bombs and suicide bombings were carried out in May, the kinds of attacks generally associated with it. That was the highest number of such attacks since March of 2008.
But Jeffrey said that the prison breakout was especially worrisome, because it would strengthen extremist fighters in the region, and encourage some Iraqis in Sunni areas to take a more militant stance, since the episode would be seen as sign that the al-Qaeda affiliate was getting stronger while the Iraqi government forces were ineffective.
“It will provide seasoned leadership and a morale boost to al-Qaeda and its allies in both Iraq and Syria,” Jeffrey said. “And it is likely to have an electrifying impact on the Sunni population in Iraq, which has been sitting on the fence.”
The escape of al-Qaeda-linked prisoners is also likely to increase the threat to the leaders of Sunni tribes that aligned themselves with American troops during the troop “surge” in 2007 and 2008 and fought the extremist group.
Kirk Sowell, the editor of the newsletter Inside Iraqi Politics, said the episode had also further damaged Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s carefully devised image as the man who brought order to Iraq; all the more so since Maliki has controlled the appointment of senior military officials and maintained a tight hold on the Defense and Interior Ministries. “The glow that Maliki had, of being the strong leader who rebuilt Iraq, that’s gone,” Sowell said.
In another development that has chipped away at Maliki’s reputation, Sowell noted, the commander of Iraq’s 17th Division recently resigned with a blast at Iraq’s political leadership.
In its statement, the al-Qaeda affiliate said that the prison breakout was called Crushing the Tyrants, and that it had taken place precisely one year after its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced a campaign to free prisoners from jails around the country, according to SITE, a research organization that monitors jihadi websites.
There have been other prison breakouts, including a September of 2012 attack in Tikirit that freed more than a hundred prisoners. The Iraqi government later said it had recaptured more than forty of them.
But the latest breakout was on a much greater scale. According to the al-Qaeda-affiliated account, the planners of the assaults, which began Sunday evening, coordinated the detonation of twelve car bombs and a barrage of mortar rounds and rockets to kill sentries outside the prisons, as groups of heavily armed assailants, who had taken an oath not to emerge alive until the prisoners were freed, breached the entrances.
An emergency committee formed by Maliki to investigate the attacks said its initial findings suggested that “some of the guards were involved with the terrorist attackers”.

Rico says if you can't keep your prison guards from being infiltrated by the bad guys, you're screwed...