Iraq bomb targets US allies, patience

The method used to carry out the Nasiriyah attack - a well-coordinated suicide truck bombing - raises again the question of who is behind the insurgency, which seems to be gaining in sophistication and breadth. Recent arrests of suspected planners and participants in attacks on coalition forces have netted both former Iraqi military officers and foreigners suspected of entering Iraq to carry out jihad, or holy war against the infidel occupation.

Some analysts say the methods and sophistication points directly to Al Qaeda, while others caution that no links to the organization of Osama bin Laden have yet been made.

On Tuesday Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of Coalition forces, said that the US is holding 20 prisoners suspected of links to Al Qaeda. But he said no clear ties had yet been established.

"We should be extremely cautious about making that [Al Qaeda] link," says Mr. Plesch. "It's a connection the [Bush] administration is desperate to make, but where's the proof?" He notes that the secular Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka used suicide attacks, as have "occupation" fighters in Lebanon and Palestine. And he says there is no reason to assume that the Iraqi military and Republican Guard are not adopting new tactics to continue the war they assume they never lost.

But others emphasize that the method is trademark Al Qaeda - at a time when bin Laden has said Iraq is "now the battleground" of his war.

There have been few groups in history that have used waves of suicide attackers at once, as Al Qaeda has time and again, most recently in the car-bomb attack in Riyadh Saudi Arabia. That attack, on a guarded residential compound for foreign workers, killed 17 people after a group of attackers used gunfire to fight their way in, and then detonated their bomb.

Wednesday's attack also involved two phases, according to the British military, which has overall responsibility for security in the south of the country. "A truck crashed into the entrance of the Italian Military Specialist unit... and at that moment a car followed through and was detonated,'' says Flight Lt. Katherine McIntosh, a spokeswoman for the British military in Basra.

Asia Pacific's Gohel says he can think of no other organization but Al Qaeda with the resources, namely a large cadre of operatives, to carry out so many suicide attacks. At least 10 men have committed suicide in bomb attacks in Iraq since August.

"What we're seeing in Iraq is a ratcheting up of the stakes in a determined push by Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda-linked foreign Islamic terrorists whose aim is to commit atrocities with a [primary] purpose of hampering the reconstruction effort,'' says Gohel.

"There's a possibility that elements linked to Saddam cooperated in this... but this has got all the hallmarks of Sunni Muslim led-foreign Islamic fighters. Al Qaeda's stated aim has been to turn Iraq into a cesspool and another Afghanistan."

"It is by no means a stretch to imagine that links could be developing on the battlefront between international terrorists and the Baathists and former military," Peters says. "Remember, this is the region where the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

• Hassan Fattah contributed to this story from Basra.

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