“The assault on the UN offices [in Baghdad] on August 19 [2003] was carried out by a twenty-six-year-old Moroccan volunteer, Abu Osama al-Maghribi, who came from a relatively well-off family that owned a restaurant in Tangiers. …The UN bombing had particularly serious consequences. Among the dead was the UN secretary general’s special envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. The devastation also drove out of Iraq most of the international community of aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations just when the United States and nascent Iraqi state most needed their counsel.”
– Bruce Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda, Page 99