More than 200 people are dead after twin truck bombs detonated in Baghdad this weekend, one in the Karada district and the other in largely-Shia eastern Baghdad.  Karada is also a mostly Shia neighborhood.  Crowds were heavy on the streets due to the upcoming end of Ramadan, the month of fasting that Islam refers to as holy.  Families were out together, meaning that dozens of the dead were children.

The Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for both attacks.  Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi condemned the attacks, but anger is growing as he seems powerless to stop ISIS from striking his capital.  NPR reports:

“At a demonstration at the bombing site Sunday evening, Iraqis blamed the government for being corrupt. In an outpouring of anger and frustration on social media, some called the head of security in Baghdad to be replaced, and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was pelted with rocks when he visited the site.

“The attack was one of Iraq’s worst, and the head of civil defense in the Karrada area of Baghdad said on state TV that he had never seen a bomb like this — the flames spread further and were more powerful than the car bombs that hit Baghdad several times a month.”

Al Jazeera also sees anger from Iraqi citizens on the rise.  One citizen complained that the Iraqi government was still using fraudulent “bomb detectors” that were actually made to help find lost golf balls.  They are nearly useless, and the British businessman who sold them to the Iraqi government is doing ten years in prison for the fraud.  But soldiers still use the things because, one said, they need something to do at the checkpoints.

ISIS backers struck in Malaysia and Bangladesh as well, with a grenade attack on a nightclub in Malaysia and a murderous stabbing rampage in Bangladesh that killed dozens.  The Baghdad bombings, though, are the work of the core ISIS organization, and show that it has not in any way been disrupted by the territorial losses in Anbar province.

American air strikes, though encouraging and credited with killing hundreds of ISIS fighters, have also not reduced the threat posed by the Islamic State.

ISIS’s attacks can only be answered by a more intense military strategy aimed at destroying the Islamic State and replacing it with a stable political order.  In the monograph Cut Down the Black Flag:  A Plan to Defeat the Islamic State, a number of security professionals led by former US Special Forces Master Sergeant Jim Hanson set out a range of military options for resolving the conflict.  It is past time that such a strategy be employed by the American administration.