Baghdad, April 26: Al-Qaeda in Iraq is struggling to recruit volunteers for suicide bombings and other attacks, the US army said on Sunday, hours after the network confirmed the deaths of its top commanders.
Brigadier General Ralph Baker, a senior officer in Baghdad, said no-one could deny that the killing of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayub al-Masri, who had direct links with Osama bin Laden, was a “decapitation” for its leadership.
The SITE Intelligence Group late on Saturday said the Qaeda front in the country, had in a statement posted on Internet forums announced for the first time the deaths of the two men.
But they also vowed in the message that other militants would take their place
Baker cautioned that the killing of AQI’s previous military leader, the much better known Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who died in a US airstrike in 2006, had shown the Qaeda members were capable of rebuilding.
But he said AQI was weaker now than then, and it would be harder for it to regenerate after hundreds of arrests in recent months.
“When Zarqawi was killed, someone stepped up and took his place,” Baker told reporters in Baghdad.
“This time we believe there are less charismatic and combat-proven leaders remaining in Al-Qaeda that can step up and resume that leadership role as effectively as has been accomplished in the past.”
Since January, Iraqi intelligence and security services, with US support, have captured or arrested 404 Al-Qaeda members, according to Baker.
“Dozens of those AQI members have been mid- to upper-level leadership,” he said.
Although Iraq’s government, US forces and Washington trumpeted the success of the joint operation that killed Baghdadi and Masri, a series of car bomb attacks in Baghdad on Friday killed 54 people and wounded 201.
Baker argued that violence was falling overall, with security breaches down 40 percent since American combat troops left Iraq’s cities, towns and villages last June.
“It is very difficult to stop every attack in this city of seven million citizens.”
A close aide of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Sunday told state television the discovery of Baghdadi and Masri’s hideout was a greater military achievement than the capture of Saddam by American forces in December 2003.
—Agencies