11-20-2007, 03:27 PM
|
 |
Banned
Guru
|
|
Join Date: Dec 2005
Posts: 11,152
|
|
Zarqawi Map Aided Successes Against Iraqi Insurgency+
Quote:
Zarqawi Map Aided Successes Against Iraqi Insurgency
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
WASHINGTON — A key turning point in the U.S.-led war against the Iraqi insurgency came even before last winter's troop surge, FOX News has learned.
A map drawn by Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — who was killed last year by U.S. forces — turned up last December in an Al Qaeda safe house and essentially gave U.S. war planners insight into the terrorist group's methods for moving explosives, fighters and money into Baghdad.
"map"--> http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/Baghdad_Belt.pdf
"The map essentially laid out how Al Qaeda controlled Baghdad. And they did it through four belts that surrounded the city, and these belts controlled access to the city for reinforcements and weapons and money," said Maj. Gen. Bob Scales, a FOX News contributor who recently visited Iraq.
"And [U.S.-led forces] simply made the decision to reduce these belts one at a time, and essentially what that did was it choked off Al Qaeda's access to the city. And once that was done, Al Qaeda had no alternative but to leave the city, to leave the belts and to retreat into the city of Baquba," Scales said.
RelatedStories
2 Key House Democrats Threaten Future War Funds, Call on President to Accept Withdrawal Deadline The map showed four rings around Baghdad, nearly identical to rings former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein once created to protect the city.
U.S. military planners used those maps to choke off Al Qaeda, moving ring by ring, hunting and destroying Al Qaeda in Baghdad, flushing them out of their urban strongholds and picking them off as easy targets in the desert.
The troop surge was announced Jan. 10 and began soon after that. Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno took a risky but calculated move to send U.S. troops out of main base camps and set up small patrol stations that were jointly manned with Iraqi forces, essentially living among Iraqis in Baghdad. It made it easier for intelligence to surface but made U.S. troops easier targets.
U.S. forces seized on an opportunity as Al Qaeda gathered in the northern city of Baquba. The surge allowed troops to encircle Baghdad, and the insurgents fled into the desert, making them even more vulnerable to U.S. forces.
"What this offensive did is it essentially cut the head off the snake," Scales said.
The explanation for the turning point came as new reports of a more peaceful Baghdad surfaced.
|
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,312343,00.html
Quote:
November 20, 2007
Baghdad’s Weary Start to Exhale as Security Improves
By DAMIEN CAVE and ALISSA J. RUBIN
BAGHDAD, Nov. 19 — Five months ago, Suhaila al-Aasan lived in an oxygen tank factory with her husband and two sons, convinced that they would never go back to their apartment in Dora, a middle-class neighborhood in southern Baghdad.
Today she is home again, cooking by a sunlit window, sleeping beneath her favorite wedding picture. And yet, she and her family are remarkably alone. The half-dozen other apartments in her building echo with emptiness and, on most days, Iraqi soldiers are the only neighbors she sees.
“I feel happy,” she said, standing in her bedroom, between a flowered bedspread and a bullet hole in the wall. “But my happiness is not complete. We need more people to come back. We need more people to feel safe.”
Mrs. Aasan, 45, a Shiite librarian with an easy laugh, is living at the far end of Baghdad’s tentative recovery. She is one of many Iraqis who in recent weeks have begun to test where they can go and what they can do when fear no longer controls their every move.
The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.
As a result, for the first time in nearly two years, people are moving with freedom around much of this city. In more than 50 interviews across Baghdad, it became clear that while there were still no-go zones, more Iraqis now drive between Sunni and Shiite areas for work, shopping or school, a few even after dark. In the most stable neighborhoods of Baghdad, some secular women are also dressing as they wish. Wedding bands are playing in public again, and at a handful of once shuttered liquor stores customers now line up outside in a collective rebuke to religious vigilantes from the Shiite Mahdi Army.
|
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/wo...nt&oref=slogin
Some people flippantly dismissed and actually mocked the killing of Zaraqawi as "insignficiant"..and that his al Qaeda was virtually irrelivant and much too small of a % to matter. SO much for that.
+
One of the loudest bleaters of defeatism is being forced to report success.
Oh yeah and I guess the Iraqis forgot they where supposed to be in a !Civil War!....but then they told you all that over a year ago.
|