A Blast Hits Close to Home

On Sunday, a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest attacked a group of mostly Iraqi civilians outside the provincial Governance Center complex in downtown Baqubah, the volatile capital of Iraq's Diyala province. I know the site well -- I lived there, or 500 meters down the street at the police headquarters, for the duration of my tour in Iraq from 2005 to 2006. Plus ca change. . . such attacks were much more common back then; they are increasingly rare now. It is dangerous to generalize too much from one attack and impossible to discern any trends. At most, singular incidents can demonstrate a particular capability, like the use of a truck bomb to take down a bridge or the use of a female suicide bomber. In this instance, the Baquabah attack demonstrated that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia retains a few key capabilities: a pool... [read full story]