Michael Ware

Journalist

LDT: The al Qaeda announcement


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Length: 2:25

LOU DOBBS: The Iraqi government has more than 300,000 police and troops now trained in its security forces. But the government appears incapable of stopping this violence. The number of Iraqi casualties is rising sharply. Insurgents and terrorists today killed at least 40 people.

Michael Ware reports from Baghdad.

Michael, what in the world is the Iraqi government doing there to show some effectiveness, some capability to at least bring the violence down to what some might call an acceptable level or even better, end it?

MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Lou, it can be said that the Iraqi government is doing everything within its power to stem this bloodletting. But given that the Iraqi security forces, despite American assurances, are still largely ineffective or deeply penetrated by the militias, the death squads and the insurgents that they're supposed to be tracking, that effort really amounts to very, very little.

We saw across the country today 41 Iraqis were killed in violence. Eleven by a fuel tanker suicide bomber targeting police headquarters in the northern city of Mosul. Eleven more were killed in another suicide car bomb attack targeting an army patrol in Kirkuk as they collected their paychecks. In Diyala Province, just north of the capital, we saw seven people killed in a crowded marketplace bombing. Two others were beheaded. Four others in the same province were shot.

In Baghdad, five people died from a roadside bomb explosion and a police officer was assassinated.

It does not bode well for the abilities of this government. And perhaps this is one of the things that saw Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki make a trip to the southern religious city of Najaf to see the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the leader of the Shia religious clerics, and Muqtada al-Sadr, the militiaman who has helped put this prime minister in power.

In the meantime, we've seen al Qaeda announce that Iraq is now the Islamic State of Iraq, fulfilling their promise and their strategy to develop a key toehold here in this country to develop al Qaeda's international caliphate -- Lou.

DOBBS: Michael Ware from Baghdad.