"One enemy--one sacrifice"

The Jihad and Reform Front--Islamic Army Iraq; Army of the Mujahideen; Ansar al-Sunna--along with Islamic Resistance Movement (Jaami), and Hamas Iraq, have issued a statement announcing an "Iraqi Resistance Campaign in support of Gaza". Here are the opening sentences:

The Zionist-Crusader enemies continue [attacks] against the Ummah from the East to the West using the same weapons and the same methods and the same barbaric terrorism, with arbitrary arrests and terror bombings, which include the innocent and the unarmed, women and children and men, destroying houses over their residents, blockading cities and cutting off the necessities of life, in mad campaigns that are devoid of human meaning and that make a mockery of the expressions they proclaim about justice and the protection of human rights. Because at the same time that they bomb Gaza, they are also bombing Arab Jabour and other places again and again, in the ugliest form of tyranny and aggression, and they blockade other cities on made-up pretexts.

The blockades, the statement says, reflect the "policy of slow death by starvation and the cutting off of the necessities of life".

The statement doesn't suggest in what ways the Iraqi resistance is going to be able specifically to "assist Gaza"; merely that the Iraqi mujahideen have not forgotten their brothers in Gaza, and that they will now "escalate [their] military operations against the partners of the Zionists, and against the American enemies of mankind."

It's safe to say these are the first-fruits of the new "tactical" approaches that appear to have been authorized in connection with Bush visit--more bombing in Iraq, and starvation in Gaza--presumably designed to soften up the resistance in both places, but it's hard to see them as anything other than "mad campaigns, devoid of human meaning..." as the above-mentioned statement says, and in the light of history they will bring only shame and no doubt eventual catastrophe to the perpetrators. Certainly in the short term they will not help Condi lure resistance groups to the Cairo conference on Iraqi reconciliation.

The statement is posted on jihadi websites, and there is a summary here.