Blog from Iraq: U.S. ties rash of beheadings to al Qaeda-linked forces
Senior Editor Anna Mulrine is reporting from Iraq this week.
BAGHDAD — U.S. military officials are attributing the nine severed heads found in fruit boxes left along a roadside near the town of Baquba, the second such horrific discovery in a period of days, to a renewed campaign of terror by al Qaeda-linked forces seeking to fuel sectarian warfare.
"There has been a definite spike in beheadings," says one U.S. military official.
On Saturday, also in the Diyala province, eight heads were found with a note explaining that the Sunni victims were killed in retaliation for earlier Shiite deaths. The U.S. military says the recent upsurge in executions, including beheadings, represents efforts to sow sectarian division, particularly in places like Diyala province, a mixed Sunni-Shiite area beset by violence.
"Beheadings are grisly—that's how they capture media attention," another official adds. "They know how to get the most bang for their buck."
The discovery of the heads, some of which were blindfolded, comes on the heels of the arrest late last month of terror suspect Ahmed Hussein Dabash Samir al-Batawi. Iraqi authorities say he has confessed to hundreds of beheadings in Baghdad and throughout Iraq.
Throughout the conflict in post-Saddam Iraq, beheadings have been a hallmark of Sunni terrorists, both against civilians and against foreign hostages, whose brutal executions sometimes were videotaped and posted on the Internet for maximum effect. For instance, wanted Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, is believed to be the masked executioner who beheaded American hostage Nicholas Berg in a 2004 video. In October 2005, al Qaeda in Iraq distributed a video showing the beheading of two hostages being sentenced to death by beheading for being part of a Shiite militia.