Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

568 • QA’EDA IN THE ISLAMIC MAGHREB, ALbeing attacked and killed by angry Shi’ites. Second, the puritanicalversion of Salafist Islam embraced by the AQI was repugnant tomost of Iraq’s Sunnis, whom al Zarqawi derided as “lacking firmprinciples” and being “mercurial” in their religious faith. Third, theAQI’s attempted alliance with Sunni tribal leaders involved heavyhandedattempts to cement these alliances with marriages betweenAQI leaders and daughters of the tribal leaders, a practice used byal Qa’eda in Afghanistan to cement ties between the local Talibanleaders and the group’s internal constituent national groups, such asEgyptians and Saudis, but which was rejected by Iraqi tribal leadersas alien to their own marriage customs and as presumptuous behaviorby the AQI leaders. Consequently, several Sunni insurgent groups inal Anbar and Diyala provinces that previously fought with the AQIagainst U.S. troops tactically realigned themselves with U.S. andIraqi government forces against the AQI, at least temporarily. Fourth,the targeting of Muslim civilians by the AQI, which was stronglycondemned by Ayman al Zawahiri, the second-in-command of themain al Qa’eda group, turned Muslim public opinion both within andoutside Iraq against the AQI. Finally, the tactic of the surge of U.S.forces has led to the killings and captures of several high-level AQIcommanders, weakening the organization.QA’EDA IN THE ISLAMIC MAGHREB, AL. See SALAFISTGROUP FOR PREACHING AND COMBAT.QAHTANIYA BOMBINGS. On 14 August 2007 four suicide bombingsusing explosives-packed vehicles were coordinated, strikingthe towns of Qahtaniya and Jazeera in Iraq just northwest of Mosul.The bombings killed at least 796 people and injured another 1,562,mainly members of the Yazidi religious minority, who also are membersof the Kurdish minority. This was the largest mass-casualty attackin Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and was believedto have been carried out by al Qa’eda in Iraq (AQI), although nogroup accepted responsibility for the attack. One possible motivationfor the attack involved religious discrimination by Sunni Muslimsagainst the Yazidis as a religious minority that had been denouncedby the AQI as an “un-Islamic group,” while Iraqi President Jalal Talabanibelieved it to be the work of Sunni Muslim insurgents seekingto undermine the efforts of Prime Minister Maliki’s efforts to forge aconsensus among the political factions within the Iraqi government.