A Progress Report on the "Surge"

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With two-fifths of its current "surge" in troop strength in place, the U.S. military, under the fresh command of Army General David Petraeus, is seeing a few signs that new tactics are contributing to America's goals in Iraq. Granted, amid the smoke and carnage swirling around Baghdad, it's way too soon for conclusions. Any assessment at this time could be overturned with the next huge truck bomb or mosque attack. But certain indicators are encouraging. People are returning to central Baghdad's vast Zawra Park, the Washington Post reported Thursday. Petraeus, in a New York Post interview published Wednesday, said "major improvements" are happening in Baghdad "but we still have a long way to go."

In more good news, the U.S. military said Thursday it had apprehended the leaders of a Shi'ite insurgent network responsible for kidnapping and killing five American troops stationed in Karbala in January. The attackers, speaking English and outfitted with U.S. weapons and uniforms, brazenly abducted four U.S. troops at a U.S. outpost. They were all later found dead; a fifth soldier was killed in the process.

Pentagon officials are watching closely to see how the enemy is reacting to the U.S. troop surge. The insurgents seem to be more desperate in recent weeks. While improvised explosive devices continue to kill U.S. troops, the enemy has begun harnessing chemicals and kids in their quest to kill Americans. In the past week, three suicide bombers blew up their chlorine trucks in western Iraq, killing two people and injuring 350, including six U.S. soldiers. A Pentagon official said the attacks, while scarily labeled "chemical warfare," were "relatively ineffective."

Last Sunday, a car driven by Iraqis was waved through a checkpoint by U.S. troops after they saw a pair of children in the backseat of the vehicle. "Children in the backseat lower suspicion," Army Major General Michael Barbaro, deputy director for regional operations for the Pentagon's Joint Staff, told reporters. "We let it move through. They parked the vehicle. The adults run out and detonate it with the children in back." The blast killed the children and three others and wounded seven, according to Agence France-Presse. "So the brutality and ruthless nature of this enemy hasn't changed," Barbaro said. "They are just interested in slaughtering Iraqi civilians to meet their ends."

Barbaro told reporters Tuesday that two of the five brigades making up the surge are now in Iraq, and that the third is en route from Kuwait. Two more are preparing to deploy, and all five should be in place in greater Baghdad in June. Twenty-three of the 43 planned security outposts have been established across Baghdad. Barbaro said violence in the city has dropped by about a third since the surge began in mid-February. "Murders and executions against civilians, referred to extrajudicial killings, have decreased significantly, somewhere in the area of about a 50 percent decrease," he said. "However, high-profile attacks — car bombs, suicide attacks, more typically conducted by Sunni extremist groups against Shi'a targets — continue. However, the effectiveness of these high-profile attacks has dropped." Hundreds of families are returning to their homes in the capital, Barbaro said.

The tactic of sprinkling U.S. and Iraqi troops like salt across the city — instead of keeping them concentrated in a handful of bases — seems to be paying off so far. "We got down at the people level and are staying," Petraeus told the New York Post. "Once the people know we are going to be around, then all kinds of things start to happen." Operation Safe Markets — where the U.S. military encircles bazaars with concrete barriers — have kept car bombs away from crowds. There hasn't been a major bombing in the capital for a month. "Less than half the al-Qaeda leaders who were in Baghdad when this [surge] campaign began are still in the city," Petraeus said. "They have fled or are being killed or captured. We are attriting them at a fearsome rate."

Things also are changing overhead. U.S. troops, while flying more in Iraq, are being more careful about where they fly, when they fly, and how high they fly, U.S. officials say. While enemy attacks felled seven U.S. helicopters between January 20 and February 21, there have been no reported shoot-downs since then. Although insurgents have been able to threaten U.S. troops traveling in Humvees — as the U.S. had added armor to its vehicles, the insurgents have added more explosive power to their IEDs — the chopper changes seem to have curbed the insurgents' ability to strike the whirlybirds. U.S. helicopters in Iraq flew 230,000 hours in 2005, bumped up to 320,000 hours in 2006, and will reach 400,000 hours this year.

In addition to avoiding wide swaths of greater Baghdad, U.S. military helicopters are flying increasingly under cover of darkness and at 2,000 feet, four times higher than normal, beyond the reach of the crude weapons used by the insurgents to take potshots at airborne targets. That's the good news for soldiers on the helicopters. The bad news is that Army chopper pilots have long been taught to hug the terrain — in so-called nap-of-the-earth flight — to limit their exposure to any individual on the ground seeking to shoot them down. But increasingly, U.S. pilots are trading the protection offered by lack of height for the masking offered by lack of light.