|
By David I. McKeeby
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- Recently, an Iraqi citizen placed a call to alert officials to a bomb planted by insurgents on a bridge along the highway between Baghdad and Yusufiya. Within 25 minutes, Iraqi and coalition forces converged on the scene and safely removed the device before it detonated.
The call was an example of what U.S. Army Major General Rick Lynch, spokesman for the coalition’s Multinational Force Iraq, said is a significant increase in tips from Iraqi citizens concerning insurgent activity, helping to reduce violence and representing yet another indicator of the country’s progress towards stability.
In a May 11 Baghdad press briefing, Lynch said that the increase in citizen information could be attributed largely to rising confidence in the Iraqi security forces they see patrolling their communities.
The Iraqi army and police forces are 254,000-strong and working across the country to keep the peace, in partnership with approximately 130,000 U.S.-led coalition forces, Lynch said. They have figured prominently in Operation Scales of Justice -- a series of more than 32,000 patrols made since April aimed at keeping the peace in Baghdad. The operation has netted approximately 800 terrorists and insurgents and more than 140 caches of weapons and explosives. (See related article.)
Lynch also reported that since April, Iraqi citizens have phoned in a record 1,500 anonymous reports about terrorist activities to a nationwide hotline, 98 percent of which he said resulted in usable intelligence that helped take terrorists off the streets.
Improved intelligence and increasingly capable Iraqi security forces also led to the capture or killing of more than 161 senior leaders of al-Qaida in Iraq, as well as a marked decrease in effective improvised bombs. More than 50 percent of the bombs now are found and defused before they can kill, he said. (See related article.)
Similarly, throughout the country, in the past six months more than 2,000 caches of weapons and explosives have been seized and taken out of circulation before they could be used to harm Iraqis.
Unfortunately, the fact that Iraqis are turning away from the insurgency is not lost on al-Qaida in Iraq, which, Lynch said, is “pulling out all the stops” to continue mounting deadly attacks in efforts to arouse sectarian tensions, discredit the elected government and derail democracy. (See related article.)
Lynch reported that 85 such attacks had occurred across Iraq during the previous 24 hours, noting that civilians account for an average of 60 percent of all casualties of this violence.
But, he said, Iraqis are, “tired of the insurgency, so as Iraqi forces conduct operations on their streets, Iraqi people come up to those patrols and provide actionable intelligence, and it's happening all the time.”
A transcript and video link of the Lynch briefing will be available on the Multinational Force Iraq Web site.
For more information, see Iraq Update
Created: 11 May 2006 Updated: 11 May 2006
|
