Evidence of surge success

Sunday Independent:

US military commanders in Iraq have accused insurgents of using children in suicide bombings and staging poison gas attacks in a campaign to undermine the month-old security "surge" in Baghdad and Anbar province.

The clampdown in the capital is credited with bringing a sharp reduction in civilian deaths in recent weeks, even though the number of attacks has remained fairly constant. "There are tanks and Humvees on every street corner," said an independent observer who returned from Baghdad last week. "There is a real change of atmosphere from earlier this year, before the operation began." 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. But the difficulty of maintaining the improvement was shown by events in March. Another reduction in deaths seemed on the cards until last Thursday, when two suicide attackers wearing explosives vests blew themselves up in a market in the mainly Shia Shaab district, killing nearly 80 people.

Though counter-insurgency officials point out that suicide bombers are increasingly being forced by the security measures to attack their targets on foot rather than in vehicles, and that it will never be possible to prevent all bombings until the populace has been won over by follow-up measures, the dramatic loss of life is still a setback. Yesterday a car bomb killed another five people outside the Sadrayn hospital in the sensitive area of Sadr City, the Shia stronghold in Baghdad.

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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.

Col Kilcullen argued that attacks by Sunnis against members of their own community, including the first use of poison gas in Iraq since Saddam Hussein killed thousands of Kurds in Halabja in 1988, showed "an incredible level of desperation". They were "own goals" which had contributed to a major shift in Anbar province, where he said only one out of 18 major tribes supported the Iraqi government a year ago. "Today 14 out of the 18 tribes are actively securing their people, providing recruits to the Iraqi police and hunting down al-Qa'ida."

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The US command in Iraq is doing several things right at this point the surge is putting the forces on the street that hare disrupting the enemy's ability to operate. They are also now talking about the enemy's war crimes in more detail with the media. This is something that I have been suggesting for months. They need to keep up the drumbeat in order to change the attitudes about the enemy in Iraq. It will also have a political effect in this country eventually, because the liberal media cannot continue to side with war criminals and as they abandon them it will be harder for the Democrats to ignore this enemy's war crimes.