Car Bomb Means ISIS In Baghdad Really Hates Cars

“Intense obsession with destroying cars and trucks.”

Baghdad, May 30 – Another vehicle laden with explosives went off this morning in the Iraqi capital, driving home the point to military and political experts that the Islamic State, responsible for the bulk of such incidents, harbors an intense animosity for cars.

The latest attack in downtown Baghdad destroyed yet another motorized passenger vehicle, making it the nine hundredth such explosion of a car by ISIS since its Iraqi insurgency began, and prompting analysts to observe that the Islamist movement must really, really hate those vehicles.

In a telephone interview, Professor Tiyenti Siffor of the University of Helsinki, who studies Islamic State ideology and strategy, described how he and his colleagues independently arrived at their disturbing conclusion. “At first we thought, based on visual and other evidence, that Daesh favored Toyota pickup trucks,” he explained, referring to infamous images of the group’s fighters riding along in a procession of many such vehicles. “But it turns out, after several years’ observation, that they will blow up any kind of car.”

“It’s not just that they destroy cars,” agreed Sue Wisside of the TNT Institute, a Washington think tank, who collaborated with Professor Siffor on the research. “It’s that they insist on such thorough dismemberment of these vehicles that one cannot help concluding these beasts have some intense obsession with destroying cars and trucks. It can’t be healthy to go through life like that.”

Other experts seconded the reasoning. “It’s one thing to hate people – everyone hates people,” noted Mizzan Thrope, an analyst at Jane’s. “But hating cars to the point of individually – one might say compulsively – loading them with military-grade explosives and detonating them is an entirely different order of obsessive malice.”

Thrope added that the apparent anti-car obsession among ISIS fighters offers suggestions for how to defeat the group. “It’s a facile comparison, and probably not a defensible position, ultimately, but there’s a popular perception that had Hitler focused either on the war with the Soviet Union or the Final Solution, he would have succeeded, but because he insisted on prosecuting both, he sealed his defeat. The same might hold true here – if the anti-ISIS coalition can distract the group with an influx of cars they feel compelled to destroy, that might generate enough of a diversion of Islamic State forces to facilitate the meeting of certain military objectives.”

“Also, this realization might alter the coalition’s use of drones or air power to target vehicles,” he continued. “Why waste precious ammo and manpower-hours on hunting down ISIS cars and trucks when the enemy is going to destroy them anyway?”

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