I’m sure most people following the news probably heard the breathless media announcement about the car bomb that went off in Iraq that killed 50 people in a Shia neighborhood in Baghdad this week. It was the first mass casualty car bomb in weeks and this is about all the information you get from the news that leaves viewers with the impression it was just some random Al Qaeda terrorist attack to kill Shia civilians.

As usual the media never tells you what the real story behind the bombing is. First of all, as reported in the Long War Journal the bombing only killed 27 people (as usual the media always get the body count wrong) and the bombing was actually executed by a Shia Mahdi Army Special Groups cell not Al Qaeda. The Special Group cell was trying to mimic an Al Qaeda attack in order to get Shia civilians to retaliate against Sunnis. So now many of you are probably thinking this is because of Shia religious extremism against Sunnis which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Like many things in Iraq this bombing was about simple organized crime and not the religious extremism that people usually try and blame killings in Iraq on.

The Special Groups cell led by the Mahdi Army leader, Haydar Mahdi Khadum Al Fawadi executed the bombing because local Sunnis were moving back into the neighborhood and reclaiming their houses. The Mahdi Army during the ethnic cleansing of 2006 forced the Sunnis out of their homes and then started renting them out to fellow Shia’s to make money. The government reconciliation efforts to have dislocated families reclaim their homes is effecting the pocketbooks of mafioso leaders like this Al Fawadi character who were making a fortune off the rental scheme. You can read the rest here.

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