Maliki: Security Forces Involved in Massive Baghdad Attack

With officials at a loss to explain the security forces’ inability to stop the repeated massive bombings in Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced today that the security forces themselves were in no small measure complicit in the attacks.

“The network was a large one, 24 from one arm of the Iraqi security forces, 12 from another, and eight or nine from another,” Maliki announced. Last week’s bombing killed at least 127 Iraqis, and wounded over 500 others.

Maliki’s statement insisted that some Iraqi forces took bribes, while others were directly involved with militant groups themselves, and had infiltrated the police and military.

Several major coordinated attacks have hit the capital in the last several months, and each time the government has struggled to explain the security lapses which allowed truckloads of explosives to be delivered unquestioned to the sites of attacks. Top officials have been arrested after each attack, and promises of additional security measures made.

Yet for all these measures, added checkpoints and bans of vehicles near government buildings, the attacks keep happening. Even if the Iraqi government has rooted out 45 infiltrators, it seems hard to believe that this is the full extent of the problem.