Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch:
...There is more.
...in the four days preceding the elections and election day, there was a 57 percent reduction in attacks, January compared to December, and after the elections, an 80 percent reduction in attacks. So there was a significant reduction in the numbers of attacks -- car bombs, suicide bombs, IEDs -- for the December elections compared to last January.
So let's talk about why that happened. There are really four reasons why that happened. One is the detailed collective operations between the coalition forces and the Iraqi security forces over the course of the last several months, focused on defeating the terrorists and foreign fighters and disrupting the insurgency. Those operations were accomplished with great effect.
The second piece is the training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces. They continue to grow with phenomenal capabilities, today 216,000 trained and equipped members of the Iraqi security force, and they made a great contribution to the conduct of a safe and secure environment for these elections.
The next one is the Sunni outreach. There was a detailed, deliberate effort to engage the Sunni leadership -- tribal, religious, local, provincial, regional, national leadership -- to engage that leadership and have them advocate participation in the political process, to choose ballots over bullets. And that all happened very, very well. So you can see the results of that.
...
If you compare specific attack trends -- January, October, December -- and you focus on the polling sites, you'll see this: a large number of attacks in January compared to what we experienced in the elections in December -- significant reductions. Remember how the security was performed. The security was performed by the Iraqi security forces -- Iraqi police at the polling sites, Iraqi army with the inner ring security -- and the coalition forces were indeed over the horizon, if you will, in a quick reaction mode. So we have to applaud the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces, specifically the Iraqi police. There were 64,000 Iraqi police in January, over 90,000 for the conduct of these elections in December.
Three stories on the effectiveness of the Iraqi police. In Mosul, the Iraqi police detained two individuals who had false IECI credentials who were trying to enter a polling site. In north Babil, Iraqi police detained, captured individuals, a militant group, who had a variety of ammunition and weapons, who were preparing to attack a polling site. And my favorite story of them all happened in the town of Kharma the night before the elections. An IED took place, blew a hole in the protective wall around the polling site. Over the course of the evening, the Iraqi police and the Iraqi polling site workers fixed that barrier so that the polling site could open on time at 7:00 the next morning.
...
An amazing statistic: In January, just over 13,500 registered voters in Al Anbar voted. For the elections on the 15th of December, over 365,000 voters in Al Anbar participated -- directly a result of the operations we've conducted over the last five months. Those named operations we've talked about in great detail. We've been able to establish forward operating bases, firm bases throughout Al Anbar. We have left behind with the Iraqi government and the Iraqi security force a persistent presence. The Iraqi government and the Iraqi security forces have reclaimed control of the Syrian border, and operations out there continue.
...
Comments
Post a Comment