[URL="http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/01/07/260434999/how-al-qaida-returned-to-a-troubled-part-of-iraq"]NPR Story[/URL]
[quote=NPR]Yet again, Iraqi civilians are fleeing violence in Iraq's sprawling western province of Anbar. Years of under-the-radar daily tension and bloodshed has erupted into another al-Qaida surge and retaliatory Iraqi government airstrikes.
But the violence that brought Iraq back to the headlines, while tragic, was not surprising.
For months, observers had been warning about the combustible combination of the Syrian civil war next door and the alienation of Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority.
Back in July, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, said that the U.S. needed to contain the Syrian civil war, which threatened to spread like a "forest fire" into Iraq.
The Syrian uprising has been fueled by Sunni extremists from Iraq who joined the rebellion against Syria's President Bashar Assad and helped conquer towns and desert safe havens along the Iraq-Syria border. That gave operating space and motivation for the extremists to ratchet up the ongoing wave of terror attacks in Iraq.[/quote]
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