The Islamic State of Iraq: The Newest Incarnation of Al-Qaeda in Iraq

The war has been going pretty dismally for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The comfortable rise in sectarian violence that threatened to drive the Americans out of the country in 2006 has been cut dramatically, and most of their leadership has been utterly decimated, to say nothing of the break down in communication caused by the more direct control taken by the terrorist leaders still in hiding in Afghanistan. The chaos of inter-faction fighting was a breeding ground for radicalism, decentralization, and most importantly, the morale-devastating attacks on civilians and military personnel that went almost without response - Iraq became a proverbial playground for al-Qaeda.

The ultimate objective, of course, was to kill American willpower to stay in the fighting, thus forcing the troops to come home, and in turn leave the nation bare and vulnerable to radical pressure - thus capitulating the Maliki government and allowing the formation of a kind of Neo-Taliban under Emir Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The plan, as is seen now, came to a grinding halt. The death of Zarqawi clearly, and severely, hindered the terrorist faction's ability to remain cohesive, and as time went on, and Abu Ayyub al-Masri's incompetence was laid bare for all to see, those organizations that made up the crux of the Iraqi insurgency slowly turned on them, until the current states of affairs came to be.

Ever since the insurgency began in 2003, among the most feared were those surrounding al-Qaeda's foreign fighters, who did not see this as a nationalist battle against American invaders of the Iraqi homeland, but a key chance to rebuild Iraq in the image of the Afghani Sharia. The concept was nothing new to Osama bin-Laden - following the wake of the Afghan-Soviet War, he easily helped topple the Afghani Nationals in the ensuing power gap, and with the Pakistani ISI nowhere in sight, primarily contenting itself with the driving out of the Communist Russians, the Taliban dominated the nation.