Last year during Ramadan, the upmarket Karrada district in Baghdad was full of families shopping and socialising when ISIL detonated a suicide truck bomb, killing 324 civilians. It was the single biggest loss of life in an attack since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
This week, ISIL struck again, in the same, majority-Shia, district, killing more than a dozen people, including children in the ice-cream parlour the group targeted. A second bomb during rush hour killed at least 14 people.
Both attacks were made during Ramadan and explicitly targeted civilians. Both were also making a similar point: that ISIL, as much as it is being driven out of Mosul and other places in Iraq, remains a force to be reckoned with. Last year’s attack on Karrada came a week after Iraqi forces seized the city of Falluja from ISIL. The attack was a way of showing that the group was far from finished, and could still target the heart of the capital.
The same message was being relayed this time, as Iraqi troops surround the group in their last major Iraqi stronghold of Mosul. But the attack also raises serious questions for Iraq’s security services, who stepped up their presence in Karrada after last year’s attack.
The fact is this is unlikely to be ISIL’s last attack. The entire focus has been on ridding Iraq’s second city of the ISIL scourge, but rebuilding Mosul, returning refugees to their homes, and making sure the remnants of ISIL have no chance to rebuild the group will be difficult.
What has been destroyed in Iraq is any lingering belief that ISIL are the saviours of Iraq’s Sunnis. Some, seeing the open sectarianism of previous Iraqi governments, thought that ISIL, which set itself up as defenders of the Sunni community against Shia domination, could help them. That turned out to be a catastrophic error.
As the brutality of life in Mosul has shown, ISIL’s vision of the world is warped, but the reality of life under its dysfunctional rule has been ugly and painful. The same applies to its other claim of representing Islam – any group that targets civilians must lose its claim to be acting according to Islamic principles; the same applies to any group targeting other Muslims or staging attacks during Ramadan. ISIL did all three, in one day.
The ISIL scourge has not been defeated in Iraq, but it will be. For the sake of Iraqis, that day cannot come soon enough.
