That sense of consternation and uncertainty was mirrored in the reactions of countless Baghdadis in the wake of a wave of suicide bombings–six altogether–that struck the Iraqi capital on the first day of the holy month of Ramadan. A day earlier, the Al Rashid Hotel, home to many officials of the U.S.-led occupation, was hit by a volley of rockets fired from a makeshift launcher parked a few hundred yards away. The rockets struck one floor below the room of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, driving him from the hotel and raising questions about a possible leakage of sensitive intelligence about his whereabouts to Iraqi guerillas. And on Tuesday suicide bombers struck again in Fallujah, killing four. Late Tuesday night, Baghdad rocked yet again to the sound of mysterious explosions–this time, apparently, a pair of mortar attacks.

This upsurge in violence comes just as the Bush administration was making some headway with a public relations offensive meant to convince ordinary Americans that the situation in Iraq is actually far better than depicted in most media reports. Just a few days before the attacks, Commerce Secretary Dan Evans had toured Baghdad, at one point buying a soft drink from a teenaged vendor on the street and declaring the purchase to be proof of an impending economic revival. Evans might have pointed instead to what had been one of the few palpable successes of the reconstruction effort in recent months–the reanimation of the Iraqi police force and their growing effectiveness in coping with day-to-day crime. Random gunfire, car-jackings, and brazen kidnappings–common occurrences in the city in the early summer–had begun to recede. Baghdadis had begun to venture out onto city streets at night again. The U.S. strategy of ceding control over security to local Iraqi forces–one of the most frequent demands to be heard from ordinary folk and Iraqi government officials in the months following the end of the conventional war–seemed to be paying off.

Now, in the wake of this new wave of attacks, there is a palpable sense of modest progress jolted to a halt. By targeting Iraqi police stations (only one American soldier died in Monday’s bombings), the attackers sent a savage new warning to those Iraqis who have thrown in their lot with the occupation authorities. Aside from their sheer destructiveness, Monday’s suicide bombings also contained some ominous messages for the U.S. military. On Sunday, in the wake of the Al Rashid incident, Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the U.S. commander with responsibility for security in Baghdad, told assembled reporters that there was little evidence that foreign fighters were conducting attacks in the city. The very next day his own deputy was forced to contradict him–citing, in an embarrassing turnaround, “indicators” suggesting that the police station bombings were actually the work of foreigners, not “former regime loyalists” devoted to Saddam Hussein. At one of the police stations, guards opened fire on the suicide bomber as he drove toward the building, wounding him and eventually capturing him alive. According to U.S. military officials, the man was carrying a Syrian passport. Police officials at the station told NEWSWEEK that the man had shouted at them, “I am a Syrian. And you Iraqis are traitors for helping the Americans.”

If true, this is a particularly ominous turn of events. American officials had already been forced to acknowledge that the sophistication and frequency of the attacks on their forces has been growing. (Before this weekend the number had risen to around 35 attacks per day.) But now they’ve had to concede that they don’t even know whom they’re fighting. The degree to which they have been caught totally off guard by this new series of attacks implies a glaring failure of everyday operational intelligence–a shortcoming recently assailed in a withering report published by an Army think tank. That report criticized the ineffective use of high-tech surveillance equipment like unmanned drones, a failure to share intelligence among units in timely fashion, and a devastating lack of trained interpreters to provide contact with local people and quick interrogation of suspects. Those shortcomings are becoming ever more important as the attacks intensify. It’s a failure that seems all the odder in light of frequent statements by the military that the sort of guerilla war now under way against U.S. forces can only be won through proper use of intelligence.

Finally, the possibility that foreigners are now staging coordinated attacks within Baghdad itself signals that the enemy may be more diverse, more determined and more dispersed than previously realized by the occupiers. Now U.S. forces and their allies find themselves facing a variety of foes and a variety of threats. While former Baath Party members and disgruntled Sunni Iraqis stage more traditional guerilla attacks on U.S. forces in the Sunni Triangle using remote-controlled mines and rocket-propelled grenades, foreign Islamists resorting to suicide tactics could pose an increasing and very different threat against military and civilian targets alike. The Coalition has already shown itself ill-equipped to deal with the first threat. Now the second one is threatening to open up an entirely new front. And that, needless to say, is the last thing that the occupiers need.