(Updated) Terrorist’s Death a Hollow Victory?

As Ed Morrissey well puts it over at Captain’s Quarters, we’ll have to wait for the official scorer before we can be sure that Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the successor to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, has indeed been killed in a battle with other insurgents.

Iraq’s Interior Ministry claims that Al-Masri is dead, but its track record is piss-poor and it turns out the claim is based on so-called tribal reports and not a body ID. The official scorer, of course, is the U.S., but even if Al-Masri has been offed, it’s not time to open the champagne.

As Marc Lynch explains at Abu Aardvark:

If it is true, it would be great in terms of getting rid of someone responsible for a lot of the worst outrages in Iraq. Politically, however, the most likely effect will be similar to the Zarqawi hit. Like Zarqawi, Masri has been increasingly divisive in the insurgency . . . If he’s gone, it may be exactly what the insurgency factions need to repair their frayed ties and to refocus on fighting the American occupation rather than each other.