Thursday, June 14, 2007
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Three Sunni Muslim mosques were torched and mortar bombs hit Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone on Thursday, police said, despite curfews imposed after suspected al Qaeda militants hit a revered Shi'ite shrine.
Thousands of Iraqi and U.S. soldiers were on the streets of Baghdad and other cities trying to enforce the curfews that were imposed after Wednesday's bombing, blamed on al Qaeda, felled the two golden minarets of Samarra's al-Askari mosque.
Police said more than a dozen mortar rounds hit the Green Zone, home to Iraq's parliament and the U.S. embassy, causing some casualties, but they had no further details. Smoke could be seen billowing into the sky from several areas.
The headline grabbed me on this one. This is not a bad episode of the Brady Bunch where Mike lectures Greg about responsibility of getting home on time. A curfew is something you order when you can actually enforce it.
What this does show is that the surge isn't enough. We can not enforce a curfew after we beefed up our presence in Baghdad. I would suspect that we figured Mosques of Sunni sects as being high priority targets for Shia retaliation but we were impotent to prevent another tit for tat cycle.
If anybody sees any light at the end of the tunnel with this strategy, it would be nice to hear.
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