Islamic State Terrorizes Baghdad

Shift in Islamic State strategy has Iraq government looking paralyzed.

Another wave of explosions in the Iraqi capital killed at least 70 people on Tuesday, the latest in a surge of urban violence that has the government, beset by political crises, looking increasingly paralyzed.

Bombings almost every day over the past week in or around Baghdad have killed at least 194 people, and the political strain from the bloodshed has begun to show on U.S.-backed Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government.

Islamic State’s success in breaching cordons around the city have politicians and security forces openly trading blame for the gaps.

The attacks represent a shift in strategy amid recent losses by the group in Anbar province, which borders Baghdad. Dislodged from the cities of Ramadi and Hit and under pressure on the front lines, militants have stepped up suicide bombings in populated areas they don’t control.

Despite the growing threat to the capital, the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State is urging Iraq not to divert any forces from the front lines, according to coalition spokesman Col. Steve Warren.

“There is a deficit in the government strategy, a deficit in planning and a deficit in the management of the security battle,” said Ahmed al-Shireifi, a Baghdad-based security analyst.

With much of Anbar province still under Islamic State control, the extremists could sneak through rural areas to reach the capital without much trouble, said Yahya Rasool, a spokesman for Iraq’s joint operations command, which oversees military operations nationwide.

Some analysts, including Mr. Shireifi and Nate Rabkin, the managing editor of the newsletter Inside Iraqi Politics, blamed sectarianism and the proliferation of security agencies. The Ministry of Interior, which controls police, and the Ministry of Defense, which also has forces on the street, are controlled by political appointees who don’t always get along, Mr. Shireifi said.

“The security agencies were established based on political party loyalty, not on skills and capability,” he said, referring to a quota system that guarantees places in the political structure to the main religious and ethnic blocs—Kurds, Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims.

Mr. Rabkin noted the different forces often have overlapping missions. “The chain of command is nominally unified. But in practice different units report to different ministries or offices, which are in turn controlled by rival politicians,” he said.

Brig. Gen. Saad Maan, the spokesman for Iraq’s Ministry of Interior and Baghdad Operational Command, dismissed the notion that security bodies failed to coordinate.

He said that security forces had an especially hard time detecting suicide bombers who come to the capital from Islamic State-held areas.

“Most of them are Iraqi and their dialect is the same,” he said. “You don’t have any indications about them that would allow you to capture them, because most of them are ordinary people coming from places controlled by” Islamic State.

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