Sunday, November 18, 2007
The number of bombings in Iraq since March has dropped by almost half, a senior U.S. general said.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Since the last soldiers of the “surge” deployed last May, Baghdad has undergone a remarkable transformation.
No longer do the streets empty at dusk. Liquor stores and cinemas have reopened for business. Some shops stay open until late into the evening. Children play in parks, young women stay out after dark, restaurants are filled with families and old men sit at sidewalk cafes playing backgammon and smoking sheesha pipes.
To be sure, Baghdad is still a violent and dangerous place. Pockets of territory remain under the control of the al-Qaida in Iraq organization. Bandits and gangsters roam back alleyways. Explosions still rumble through the air, though far less frequently than they did a few months ago. Many issues remain unresolved and much could still go wrong.
But for the first time in years, Baghdad’s residents are starting to remember what an ordinary life is like.
“I used to close my shop at 6 p.m., but now I stay open till 9 or 9:30. Then I walk home and I feel completely safe,” said Jawad al-Sufi, 64, who runs the House of Hijab head scarf shop in the much-bombed district of Karrada. He had to replace his windows five times because of bombings outside his shop, but there has hardly been an attack in Karrada since September.
“It happened very suddenly,” he said. “There was a sharp turnaround, right after Eid,” the Muslim holiday in late October. “Since then, security has improved 85 percent.”
It’s not only that Baghdad is starting to feel normal. Statistics compiled by the U.S. military and the Iraqi government show that the violence has fallen significantly countrywide. Most of the figures are not broken out for Baghdad, but the capital has in the past accounted for a high percentage of the violence.
The number of explosions of all kinds has fallen sharply, from 1,641 nationwide in March to 763 in October. That is still a high number but a level not seen since September 2005, according to the U.S. military. Mortar attacks are also down, from an all-time high of 224 attacks in Baghdad in June to 53 in October. A senior U.S. general said Thursday that the number of bombings in the country since March had dropped by almost half.
Reliable casualty figures are hard to come by since the government stopped publicizing monthly tallies earlier this year, but inevitably the reduction in attacks has also reduced the number of deaths. According to an Associated Press tally, 750 people were killed in Iraq in October, down from 2,172 last December. Iraq’s Interior Ministry gives an even lower figure for the month: 506 civilians killed nationwide.
Though 2007 has been the deadliest year for U.S troops in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, U.S. military casualties also have dropped, from a year’s high of 126 in May to 38 in October, and 23 killed in the first two weeks of November.
U.S. and Iraqi officials attribute the improvement to a variety of factors. The surge of nearly 30,000 extra U.S. troops sent to Iraq has undoubtedly played a part, as have the increased capabilities of the Iraqi security forces. Whereas it was normal in the past to travel across Baghdad without encountering any security forces, now there are checkpoints every few blocks, and smartly dressed Iraqi police stand guard on street corners.
Far more significant than the increased troop presence, officials say, is the revolt that has taken place within Sunni neighborhoods against al-Qaida in Iraq. Echoing the successful tribal rebellion against al-Qaida in Iraq in Anbar province, local Sunni insurgents have turned against their former allies, driving al-Qaida in Iraq operatives out of their strongholds and ending the reign of terror that the extremists had perpetrated.
“There’s obviously our offensive operations to strike against those extremist groups, but the real change has been that the populace rejects al-Qaida,” Lt. Gen Raymond Odierno, the U.S. commander of ground forces in Iraq, told a Pentagon briefing earlier this month.
Iraqi officials already are declaring victory.
“[Al-Qaida] has been defeated completely. And soon they will cease operating completely,” said Interior Ministry spokesman Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, in an interview in his office. “We expect them to have some attacks. They will make huge efforts and maybe they will succeed in one or two instances. But now they’re shifting their operations outside Iraq. They will not have a safe home here anymore.”
The drop in the kind of mass-casualty bombings inflicted by al-Qaida in Iraq on the Shiite community that ignited Shiite rage has also removed one of the chief motives of the Shiite militias engaged in retaliatory death-squad activity against Sunnis. The Mahdi Army militia loyal to cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, blamed for much of the killing, declared a six-month cease-fire in August, and U.S. officials and Iraqis say they mostly appear to be adhering to it.
“The militias were created as a reaction to what al-Qaida was doing, but now there is no need for sectarianism,” said Sheikh Ali Hatim Ali Sulaiman, the head of the Dulaim, the biggest Sunni tribe and a key figure in the Awakening movement that has transformed the Sunni community. “There is still sectarianism, but hopefully it will go away eventually.”