Civilian deaths and car bombs have fallen sharply in Baghdad
since a US-backed crackdown began a month ago, but attacks outside
the capital were rising as militants change tactics, Iraqi
officials said Wednesday.
In an upbeat assessment of the first 30 days of the security
plan, Iraqi military spokesman Brigadier Qassim Moussawi said the
number of Iraqis killed by violence in Baghdad since February 14
was 265, down from 1,440 killed in the previous month.
The number of car bombings, a favorite weapon used by suspected
Sunni Arab militants fighting the Shi'ite-led government, was down
to 36 from 56, Moussawi told reporters.
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But as thousands of US and Iraqi troops flow into the capital,
attacks in the area surrounding Baghdad have increased, he said,
without providing specific figures.
US commanders had predicted the plan, regarded as the last
chance to avert an all-out civil war, would bring a temporary dip
in violence in Baghdad. They also had anticipated that insurgents
would be driven out into areas such as Anbar and northeastern
Diyala province.
There are about 100,000 Iraqi and US forces deployed in Baghdad
under a plan to sweep neighborhoods and rid streets of Sunni Arab
militants and Shi'ite militias.
US President George W. Bush is sending an additional 26,000 US
troops, mostly to boost the Baghdad plan.
The US military says the Mehdi Army Shi'ite militia is the
greatest threat to security in Iraq and has conducted sweeps in the
Shi'ite militia stronghold of Sadr City.
So far Shi'ite militias have been lying low and many of their
leading figures are believed to have fled the capital, a
development that has coincided with a decline in execution-style
killings.
But violence has been on the rise elsewhere, including in
western Anbar province, a Sunni militant stronghold where Al-Qaida
and local tribes are engaged in a power struggle, and in Diyala, a
religiously mixed area northeast of the capital.
The US military has sent a battalion of 700 troops with Stryker
armored vehicles to Diyala, which has witnessed some of the worst
violence between majority Shi'ites and Sunnis.
A bomb exploded Wednesday in a market south of the northern city
of Kirkuk, killing two people and wounding 10, police said.
The commander of the Baghdad security plan, Lieutenant General
Abboud Qanbar, warned militants Wednesday they had a choice between
abandoning their fight or being crushed.
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Those "terrorists" who do not want the Baghdad security plan to
succeed should think again before it is too late, he said.
"Otherwise the feet of Mesopotamia's honorable soldiers will
crush them and throw them into the garbage of history," Qanbar
said.
(China Daily via agencies March 15, 2007)
