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The Surge Appears to be Working... For Now Submitted by Robert on Tue, 2007-07-31 20:26.
Michael Yon reports on the after effects of Operation Arrowhead Ripper "As of 30 July, we lost one soldier, while the enemy losses number about a hundred. This battle is best measured not in the losses, but the gains. The people of Baqubah have been demonstrably ecstatic. Other than in the Kurdish areas, I have never seen such overt gratitude from so many Iraqis. Iraqis continue pointing out al Qaeda operatives and their hidden bombs. Despite that many al Qaeda escaped, the success so far is overwhelmingly obvious. The challenge remains to make it stick, but the gains are undeniable and the sense of momentum is palpable." "The sectarian divide here was not manufactured by al Qaeda. Most countries have societal fissures that can be exploited, and the Sunni-Shia divide is like a tectonic plate. It’s actually somewhat stable, except for al Qaeda stuffing bombs in the cracks..." "Because the one thing that definitely can run us out of here is the civil war, it follows that disrupting al Qaeda is like taking the blowtorch off the curtains..."
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Good news, Robert...
And this from today's issue of The Independent... According to David Kilcullen, senior counter-insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, heightened security has forced suicide bombers to detonate their devices at checkpoints well away from targets such as markets and other public gatherings, "killing far fewer people than intended, and far fewer than in similar attacks last year".
Colonel Kilcullen, an Australian former special forces officer, added that several bombs failed to explode, "showing a loss of skill as key bomb-makers are taken off the streets". Other reports show a steep decline in the number of bodies found dumped overnight, indicating that the "surge" is curbing the activities of death squads.
Civilian deaths in Baghdad were at record levels in the final months of last year, and remained high in January. Then, the start of the "surge" around 20 February saw the number of deaths fall in that month by more than two thirds, to 446.
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The success of the surge is making the enemy desperate - they're making children bombs:
Al-Qa'ida in Iraq is accused of involvement in a spate of bombings around Ramadi and Fallujah which have released chlorine gas, while a Pentagon spokesman, Major General Michael Barbero, pointed to two recent suicide attacks using children. In one, a car was allowed through a checkpoint because there were two small children on the back seat. The attackers later abandoned the car, allowing it to blow up with the children still inside.
More recently, an Iraqi police convoy was pursuing a suspicious vehicle in Anbar province. As they passed a 12-to-14 year old boy riding a bicycle, a bomb in his backpack exploded. "These acts - the use of poison gas and the use of children as weapons - are unacceptable in any civilised society and demonstrate the truly dishonourable nature of this enemy," Gen Barbero said.