Tragedy Puts Nineveh on the Map

Aug. 15, 2007 — -- Before Tuesday's devastating attacks few people had heard of Sinjar, a remote town in northwestern Iraq. Now insurgents have put it on the map as the scene of Iraq's most deadly attack this year.

Four coordinated suicide bombings targeted the minority Yazidi community, killing more than 200. The local mayor tells ABC News this number is likely to rise as rescue workers pull more bodies from the rubble.

This region of Iraq, Nineveh province, has, until now, been comparatively untouched by the sectarian violence which is a daily occurence in the capital Baghdad and other areas.

A few weeks ago, Col. Stephen Twitty, a U.S. commander on the ground in Nineveh, told reporters, "We're not seeing a lot of sectarian violence up here at all."

In the same briefing, he mentioned an incident, describing it as a "pretty much isolated" event that involved the Yazidis, a minority pre-Islamic religious sect that is predominately Kurdish.

Last April a group of Yazidi workers was pulled from a bus and executed. Local officials believe this was in retaliation for the stoning of a Yazidi girl. The Yazidi girl was stoned to death by her family and tribal leaders. Her crime? Falling in love with a Sunni Muslim.

Attacks by Sunni extremists on the Kurds and other ethnic minorities in the province is rising, most notably the Tal Afar bombings this March and the growng animosity between Sunnis and Kurds in Mosul, but on the whole Col Twitty saw "Nineveh province as a success story."

Just hours before the bombs exploded on Tuesday, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey echoed this sentiment. Speaking at the National Press Club, Casey said that commanders on the ground thought they were "about ready" to hand over security in Nineveh to the Iraqis.

And Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq was, according to a report in the L.A. Times, expected to propose in his September status report to Congress a pull back of U.S. forces from certain areas in Iraq -- among them, Nineveh.

U.S. military commanders on the ground are keen to play down the significance of Tuesday's suicide attacks.

U.S. Army spokesman Maj. General Benjamin Mixon acknowledged the reality of policing Iraq, telling reporters in Baghdad, "It's virtually impossible to secure all small villages and farmland. This is a remote area with little coalition presence in this area. These Yazidis are peaceful farmers. This is a desperate act to gain international attention from the media."

But some believe that current U.S. military operations -- the so-called "surge" in Baghdad and operation "Lightning Hammer" in Diyala -- may have driven the insurgents to this relatively quiet province.

Dr Robert Lowe, of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, told ABC News that "By increasing troop levels in Baghdad the U.S. is squeezing insurgents up north as yesterday's bombings show."

Information from the Iraq Body Count, a database that collects media reports on the civilian death toll in Iraq, shows that the death toll in Baghdad has dropped since the surge began, but has risen in the provinces.

U.S. military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver, recognized the whack-a-mole aspect of the counter insurgency.

"We know that the al-Qaeda senior leaders picked up and fled in Diyala…so we expect them not just to give up (but) move away and go somewhere else and try to establish a new base of operations and a new network," Garver told the Financial Times. "If that's where they go that's where we will go."

However, al Qaeda in Iraq will continue to be a formidable adversary if they can pull off this kind of attack on the hoof.

Sean Smith, a photographer from the Guardian Newspaper who has spent a significant amount of time embedded with U.S. troops says that the soldiers on the ground are growing increasingly tired and frustrated with this process, especially as once they do secure an area "the soldiers are skeptical of who they are handing power over to and whether these people will hold onto it."

Smith says the soldiers recognize the fragility of the Iraqi forces and the lack of national allegiance within the army. "People in the Iraqi army have different allegiances to different militias, or at least allegiances to friends or family for paychecks. There is no allegiance…just different factions in the same uniform."

This lack of cohesion and centrality in the Iraqi army is mirrored in the Iraqi parliament.

The government is again paralyzed by inter-factional fighting.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had planned a crisis summit to try and break the deadlock but the Nineveh bombings stalled this attempt to get the government back on track.

This summit was postponed due to the bombings but when the politcal leaders did meet Thursday little was resolved.

The U.S. military warns of more attacks in the run up to Gen. Petraeus's report to Congress this September.

As Lt. Col. Garver told the Financial Times, "The enemy knows the political timeline."