Baghdad and its environs have been shaken by a series of deadly Islamic State suicide bombings in recent days. More than 200 people, primarily Shiites, have been killed since last week.

This has prompted the familiar spin from the U.S. military and the Obama administration, who claim that these attacks are a sign that ISIS is actually getting weaker — that because ISIS has lost 45 percent of its territory in Iraq it is turning to terrorist attacks to remain relevant. I remember similar spin from the Bush administration and the U.S. military from 2003 to 2007 when they claimed that al-Qaeda in Iraq bombings were a sign of desperation on the part of a few “dead-enders.”

In point of fact, the bombings carried out by AQI (the ISIS predecessor) were a sign of strength, not weakness. The group had a strategy of attacking Shiites so as to prompt retaliatory attacks on the Sunni population that would unite Sunnis around AQI as their defenders. After the Samarra mosque bombing in February 2006, that strategy was well on its way to success. Iraq was plunged into a sectarian civil war from which it was only rescued by the American troop “surge,” which coincided with, and helped to galvanize, the Anbar Awakening when Sunni tribes turned against AQI.

There is cause to fear that this same strategy could also be successful today. At the very least, the attacks in Baghdad will drive more Shiites into the arms of hardline Shiite militias, because it is increasingly obvious to them that the corrupt and ineffective security forces can’t protect them. The New York Times quoted a fruit-seller in Sadr City, a Shiite district in Baghdad, as saying: “If the government is not able to protect us, then let the Peace Brigades protect the areas of east Baghdad.” (The “Peace Brigades” is what Muqtada al-Sadr now calls his militia, formerly known as the Mahdi Army, which has been responsible for ethnic cleansing and all sorts of grisly atrocities.)

Beyond the support these attacks will undoubtedly generate for extremists on both the Shiite and Sunni sides of the sectarian divide, there is also the message they send about the incompetence of the government. The Iraqi government already has roughly half of its armed forces deployed around Baghdad and still they can’t stop this onslaught of suicide bombings. It doesn’t help that the Iraqi government fell for an obvious scam and bought lots of supposed “explosive-detection” wands that work about as well as an Ouija board. This is the same government that the Obama administration is counting upon to defeat ISIS for us.

Of course, even when U.S. forces were deployed en masse in Baghdad, they had difficulty stopping every suicide bombing — until, that is, the 2006-2007 Anbar Awakening occurred. Then, with Sunnis turning against AQI, the U.S. military finally got the intelligence it needed to break up terrorist cells before they could strike. Today, the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government has so alienated Sunnis that it is not getting the intelligence it needs — and until it embraces Sunnis, it will not be able to break up the terror networks that seem to strike at will.