Some news from Iraq that was missed by the presidential race-horse obsessed media. As we have seen many times in the past al-Qaeda is running out of holy warriors willing to be suicide bombers or even be fighters. They have recently been trying to recruit and train young children – as if these poor waifs would have a chance where adult Jihadis failed? Now it turns out al Qaeda are scavenging mental hospitals for patients they can trick into being bombers:

“They [the security forces] arrested the acting director, accusing him of working with al-Qaeda and recruiting mentally ill women and using them in suicide bombing operations,” a hospital official said.

Ibrahim Muhammad Agel, director of the hospital, was killed in the Mansour district of Baghdad on December 11 by gunmen on motorbikes. Colleagues suspect that he was shot for refusing to cooperate with al-Qaeda. Even before Sunday’s arrest, US officials believed that al-Qaeda was scouring Iraq’s hospitals for mentally impaired patients whom it could dupe into acting as suicide bombers. They said that al-Qaeda had used the mentally impaired as unwitting bombers before. “We have fairly good reason to believe this is not the first time they have recruited mentally handicapped individuals,” said one senior officer, though he did not think there had been more than half a dozen cases.

Few people are crazy enough to buy into Bin Laden’s butchery, so these animals go out and find sick people they can trick. The true face of Jihad al-Qaeda style is now very clear. It is not movement of the future, it is the sick and deranged blood lust of malcontents and criminals who would stoop to any low.

I wrote recently about the al Qaeda documents found by Iraqi and US forces, now the transcripts are available ofr all to read. Here is one fascinating snippet:

Its group Emir called [redacted] (Detained), and the number of fighters in the Battalion were 200. … The battalion was one of the first battalions whose numbers of fighters was tarnished after Abu-Haydar al-Ansari Battalion, and the number of fighters is now only ten.

The al-Ansari Battalion mentioned here went from 300 fighters to 17. The passages are very interesting to read, as the anger at those who turned their backs against jihad just comes rushing out, demanding more brutality for the snub. Thus is the vicious cycle of hate and defeat al-Qaeda finds itself in across the Muslim world.

I found an interesting editorial from the ME which blames Bush for being stubborn, and yet notes the fact that it is al-Qaeda’s fault for losing Iraq through their continued bloodlust. Some people will never understand that determination in the face of murderous evil (and you don’t get much more murderous or evil than al-Qaeda) is not the reason murderous evil fails. It is the reason freedom wins out in the end.

There is a new Iraq and US action in the Mosul region to defeat al-Qaeda’s last remnants. Given what we have seen in the way of local intel tips and leads, and the fact AQ is now fleeing the area, this should be successful, and could be the final stage of major fighting. We shall see. al-Qaeda is tenacious, but they are not invincible.

Rich Lowry highlights the sea-change in a small village in Iraq as the march of freedom continues to spread across even the rural areas of Iraq:

This small, rural village in the Diyala Province north of Baghdad experienced a revolution a month ago. It had been controlled by al-Qaeda and its band of teenage killers who terrorized the place. The mayor of the nearby city of Muqdadiya lived here — until al-Qaeda blew up his house and he fled. The village became a ghost town.

Then, for the first time in five years of war, U.S. troops showed up. They captured key al-Qaeda leaders, and the rest ran away. Local citizens formed a makeshift security force, and people returned to the streets. Suddenly, it was a new day.

…

At this village level, the war on terror is less a grand ideological struggle than an elemental fight to replace men with guns who want to prey on the local population (al-Qaeda) with men with guns who want to help it (us). It doesn’t take a romanticism about human nature to realize most people will prefer the latter.

Gen. Mark Hertling, who commands American forces in the north, recalls being introduced in the village of Himbus to a 12-year-old girl who had pointed out where the al-Qaeda thugs were hiding. “I asked her why she had done that,” Gen. Hertling says, “and she said, ‘They killed my two brothers, my father couldn’t farm, and I couldn’t go to school.’ ”

In Iraq it is clear al-Qaeda is not the future of Islam, it is seen as the enemy. It will take a long time for the nay-saying SurrenderMedia to realize how big a change has swept that country. Even now these professional doubters of America look for marginal imperfections in a massive force of popular will – as if the ever present imperfection of human kind could stop the demise of al-Qaeda’s fortunes in Iraq. But this obsession with trying to salvage defeat from success in Iraq is a personal emotional issue for those on the liberal left to deal with. It is a denial of reality – it is not changing reality. To those who lost loved ones to the Bin Laden’s butchers, and now fight to bring them to judgement, the inability of some journalist or politician in the West to grasp the anger and hate that now enshrouds al-Qaeda is of no consequence. The focus is on routing and destroying al-Qaeda for their heinous crimes. Nothing else matters.