A net for insurgents fleeing Baghdad

DefenseLink:

American and Iraqi forces posted north of Baghdad are preparing checkpoints to net any insurgents who flee Iraq’s capital city to avoid an expected anti-terrorist dragnet there, a senior U.S. military officer told Pentagon reporters today.

“Because of the pressures in Baghdad, we believe that the threat forces will try to move to Saladin (province) and find safe havens and try to wait out the operations down in Baghdad,” Army Col. Bryan Owens, commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team with headquarters in Tikrit, Iraq, told reporters here during a satellite-enabled news conference.

...

Owens’ troops are establishing fortified traffic checkpoints across his area of operations that will be manned by Iraqi soldiers and police, he said.

The 3rd BCT’s soldiers also are conducting “operations into known and suspected safe havens to try to find these threat forces,” the colonel said.

Salahaddin province encompasses an area about the size of Vermont and is home to 1.2 million Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs with some Shiias and Kurds, Owens said. Major cities in the province include Tikrit, Balad, Samarra and Bayji, he said.

Violence in the province has decreased since the outbreak of sectarian strife that followed the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra last February, Owens noted. Today’s relative peace, he said, can be credited to the province’s governor, who secured an anti-violence agreement from local tribal sheiks last fall.

...

Has the media reported that violence decreased anywhere in Iraq? The check points are a key part of the new strategy. The surge will get the enemy on the move and hopefully he will run ito a check point where he can be caught or killed. It is not clear to me what the Democrats find wrong with this plan.