Abu Ghraib, again. The notorious prison, on the outskirts of Baghdad, is back in the news, with Al Qaeda’s spectacular breakout of more than five hundred of its members who had been imprisoned there. This is not the first time that its doors have been opened in a manner that is more of a threat than a reprieve. In October, 2002, after winning a hundred per cent of the vote in a Presidential election in which he was the sole candidate, Saddam Hussein celebrated by freeing tens of thousands of inmates from the prison.

I was reporting in Iraq at the time, as America and its allies geared up for war, and some Iraqis that I spoke to saw an ulterior motive in Saddam’s “gift to the Iraqi people,” as he termed his mass-liberation decree—namely, a plan to terrorize Iraqis with the prospect of thousands of hardened criminals, who could be mustered as shock troops, on the streets. When I asked Saddam’s Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, about it a few days later, he acknowledged that the regime hoped to be able to count on the “gratitude” of released prisoners if they were needed for Baghdad’s defense.

Abu Ghraib was an awful place during Saddam’s day: a horrific internment camp where political prisoners and common criminals were locked up in inhuman conditions, in some cases for many years, and where as many as seventy inmates a week were hanged. I was at Abu Ghraib on the day of Saddam’s mass release. Several dozen men died, trampled to death in the rush for the prison gates. What I recall most vividly is the spectacle of some men carrying out other men, so pale and emaciated that they could no longer walk; the stench that came from a giant mountain of garbage in the prison yard; and the clusters of human shit encrusted on the barbed-wire cell windows.

When Baghdad fell to U.S. troops, in April of 2003, reporters rushed to Abu Ghraib, where they found mass graves and fresh graves, too, dug for men who had been shot by Saddam’s henchmen in the regime’s final hours.

Less than a year later, the prison was back in the news, for the scandal caused by photographs of American abuses of Iraqi prisoners. In the years that followed, Saddam’s atrocities at Abu Ghraib faded from the world’s collective memory. As with the U.S. prison at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib has entered the modern lexicon as an international byword for American injustice.

The latest prison breakout includes, it is said, many senior terrorists, including a number who had been sentenced to death. It took place this past Sunday night, after a complex and bloody attack that included mortars and suicide bombers, as well as an assault by commandos. Several guards and inmates were killed. It comes a year to the day after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Iraq’s Al Qaeda chief, promised to free men from Iraq’s prisons. In the meantime, the Iraqi and Syrian affiliates of Al Qaeda have merged into what is called, with typical grandiloquence, “The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.”

That Baghdadi has been able to fulfill his promise so blatantly and violently, under the noses of the U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces, is extremely alarming. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been surging back, with almost daily suicide attacks or car bombings, in a sectarian campaign against Shiites, as well as with attacks on the Iraqi security forces. Nearly three thousand people have died since April, and over seven hundred have died in July alone. On Thursday, more than forty people were killed in attacks that included the bombing of a café and the execution, by Al Qaeda commandos who, posing as security officers, set up a false checkpoint, of Shiite drivers and passengers. Back in the bad old days of Iraq’s sectarian civil war, in 2006 and 2007, more than three thousand victims per month were killed in such ways. What stopped the violence at that time was the combination of the troop surge, ordered by President Bush, and the so-called Sunni Awakening of tribal insurgents, who turned their guns on Al Qaeda instead of the Americans.

Al Qaeda has come back largely because Iraqi Sunnis feel sidelined and disenfranchised by the Shiite-dominated government, led by Nouri al-Maliki, which came to power following the U.S. occupation of Iraq. And the Americans are gone. Iraq’s sectarian enmity has also been rekindled by the vicious battle between communities in Syria, where the rebels are mostly Sunni (and include Baghdadi’s Al Qaeda affiliates), and where the Assad regime is dominated by Alawites, members of a Shiite minority offshoot.

Five hundred Al Qaeda terrorists back on the streets can do a lot of damage wherever they choose to go—to Iraq, to Syria, to Lebanon, or to the fragile Jordan, where hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees now live in camps along the border. Martin Kobler, the U.N. envoy to Iraq, warned this week that the likelihood of a regional conflagration was growing: “The problems in Iraq cannot be separated from the problems of the region. The battlefields are merging.”

Kobler is right. The Middle East is more of a powder keg, with more fuses, than it has been in years. Political violence is surging, with regional actors like Saudi Arabia and Iran lining up on opposing sides, and the United States and Russia arrayed behind them. On Thursday, the U.N. announced that the death toll in Syria has surpassed a hundred thousand. General Martin Dempsey, in his confirmation hearing last week, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, for his second term as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that Western small arms sent to Syria’s resistance fighters would not make a difference in the course of the war, and that if the U.S. wanted to get more heavily involved—such as by implementing a no-fly zone, or a safe zone from which rebels could operate under U.S. protection—the price tag would be high, costing at least a billion dollars a month for each operation. Meanwhile, he warned, there was a risk that U.S. action in Syria could end up empowering extremists.

At the same time, without some effort to halt its progress, Al Qaeda’s strength in Syria would likely continue to “grow unchecked,” said David Shedd, the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, at gathering at the Aspen Security Forum last weekend.

That’s the Catch-22 that the U.S. finds itself in. In fact, there is nothing close to a way forward, through the murk. But, out of this current impasse, there must come some articulated response that offers an American road map, something stated clearly and decisively, which removes doubt from our minds and suspicion from the minds of our enemies. To be ruminative has the virtue of reflecting civilized precaution, but thus far it has prevented the U.S. from controlling the message in the public eye. And hasn’t that always been an American problem abroad? We approach what looks like a prison, never quite knowing who will come out.

Photograph by Mohammed Ameen/Reuters.