U.S. commander says enemy in Baghdad blunted

The top U.S. commander in Baghdad said yesterday that a two-month counterinsurgency sweep has “mostly eliminated” the enemy’s ability to “conduct sustained high-intensity operations” around the Iraqi capital.

The assessment from Maj. Gen. William Webster Jr., who commands the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, comes after a joint Iraqi-U.S. campaign, “Operation Lightning.” It involved more than 500 raids and 2,500 checkpoints that captured more than 1,700 suspected insurgents.

Gen. Webster said the operation has blunted the insurgents’ ability to launch a wave of car bombings such as the deadly attacks Baghdad suffered after a new Iraqi government was seated April 28. On the next day alone, insurgents unleashed 14 car bombs in Baghdad, killing scores of civilians and coalition troops.

“We’ve significantly disrupted the insurgent cells that were conducting these operations in and around Baghdad,” Gen. Webster told reporters at the Pentagon via a teleconference from Iraq. “We don’t think the enemy is capable of sustained long-term operations against us and the Iraqi security forces.”

Commanders have given such optimistic assessments before, only to see Abu Musab Zarqawi’s terror network regroup and engineer waves of bombings, as it did in May and June.

Gen. Webster did not rule out an insurgency revival.

“I think in an insurgency, it’s not helpful at all to talk about turning the corner or nearing the end,” he said, noting the country’s porous borders. “I don’t think we can say this is a permanent solution, but I would say in the next couple of months we will not see sustained, long, bloody months in Baghdad.”

Gen. Webster said car bombings are down from 14 to 21 a week to seven to eight.

“People are gaining more confidence in their security forces here in Baghdad and they’re providing them lots of information,” he said. “We have also become more experienced in finding [bomb-laden cars] because we know pretty much where they’re concentrated in terms of their production. … These are produced in ones and twos in garages and the back end of some shop that has some other meaning altogether, not in very obvious places.”

The general said the goal is to turn security of Baghdad over to police and to the Iraqi 6th Army Division in time for the planned October voter referendum on a new constitution.

He said it will be nearly a year before Iraqi forces in and around Baghdad can support themselves logistically with supplies and weapons.

He said that when he flies over the city he sees scenes of brisk commerce and construction that were lacking when he was in the city more than a year ago.