DEVELOPMENTS

Insurgents: U.S. forces killed or captured about 15,000 suspected militants in Iraq last year, the top U.S. commander said Wednesday, suggesting that the American military has underestimated the strength of the insurgency. The new figures suggest that previous estimates of an insurgent force of 6,000 to 9,000 fighters were inaccurate, Gen. George W. Casey said in a rare meeting with the U.S. media in Baghdad. But Casey described as inflated a recent estimate by Iraq's intelligence chief that the insurgency numbered as many as 40,000 hard-core fighters and swelled to 200,000 when part-time combatants and sympathizers were included. "It's not a number I would subscribe to," Casey said, a four-star general who is in charge of more than 150,000 U.S. and other coalition troops.
Resignation: The Pentagon's third-ranking policy-maker has decided to leave his post this summer, the Pentagon said Wednesday, announcing the first resignation of a senior civilian architect of the Bush administration's Iraq policy. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith cited personal and family reasons for his decision, said a brief Department of Defense announcement. An official working under Feith has been under investigation on allegations of passing classified information to Israel, and the Senate Intelligence Committee has been looking into Feith's role in developing the faulty intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs and ties to terrorism that the Bush administration used to build its case for invading Iraq.
Source: Combined dispatches