The murderous attack in Najaf has led to the arrest of four suspects who are alleged to be part of the Al-Qaeda network. This arrest, if correct, will transform the analysis of the terrorist violence that has disfigured Iraq since the ouster of Saddam’s Baathist regime. Until now, the violence in Iraq has been blamed on Saddam loyalists. The assumption has always been that with Saddam neutralized, the campaign of violence and terror would probably end. Now we have had the slaughter of over 100 in Najaf and for the first time, there seems strong evidence that Al-Qaeda is behind the crime and not Saddam’s Baathist thugs. If the fingerprint of Al-Qaeda becomes clearer on the Najaf horror, then it is likely that investigators will begin to consider the organization as prime suspects in the UN bombing. Both attacks were apparently suicide bombings and used far greater amounts of explosives than are normally used by Baathists.

The irony is that when Washington claimed, before the invasion of Iraq, that Saddam had been actively supporting terrorism and might be making weapons of mass destruction available to Bin Laden, there was little genuine evidence that this was so. Saddam’s ruthless secular state had little room for religious fundamentalism and would have viewed Bin Laden with the deepest suspicion.

But it clearly is now. On the basis that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, it now seems very likely that an alliance has been formed between Al-Qaeda and the dangerous remnants of Saddam’s regime. Whether this will in the long run make it easier or harder to defeat the forces opposing the coalition occupation remains to be seen.

It is a fact, however, that with every new attack from whatever source, the Iraqis protest ever more loudly at the US-led coalition’s inability to restore law and order. Thus after the Najaf horror the curses were for George W. Bush as well as Saddam. This may be another occasion like the UN bombing in which the US was not entirely at fault. As at the UN headquarters, the authorities in Najaf were not keen to have a large US security presence around them. When US troops first entered Najaf during the invasion, there was an extremely tense standoff when the soldiers went into the city and it was only defused because the senior US officer kept his head and ordered his troops to back away slowly.

The link between the UN and Najaf bombings, which seems to implicate Al-Qaeda for both, is the manner in which the laxity of US military cover has been exploited by the attackers. The Iraqi conflict has taken on a dangerous new dimension. For Washington the only consolation about the threatening appearance of Al-Qaeda is that it finally justifies a piece of anti-Iraqi propaganda that almost certainly started off as absolute nonsense.