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BAGHDAD (AFP) - The US military said on Wednesday that more than 500 insurgents who fought US and Iraqi forces had surrendered their arms in the past three weeks and joined the reconciliation process in central Iraq. "A total of 506 insurgents in the region of Balad have reconciled with the Iraqi government, choosing a different path for their lives," a military statement said. It said the 506 insurgents had surrended since May 22 but did not specify exactly how the surrenders worked and the men gave up their arms. US commander in the region, Lieutenant Colonel Bob McCarthy said...

The United States is seeing a sharp drop in the number of foreigners entering Iraq to become al Qaeda suicide bombers, according to intelligence and Bush administration sources. An administration official and a military adviser to Iraqi commanders attribute the decline to a fairly new phenomenon: Al Qaeda's call for mass killings in the name of Islam is losing some of its appeal with young Arabs in North Africa and Saudi Arabia, where most of the bombers originate. The decline also parallels the battlefield losses al Qaeda has suffered in the past 12 months in Iraq's Anbar province and the...

America is very close to succeeding in Iraq. The "near-strategic defeat" of al Qaeda in Iraq described by CIA Director Michael Hayden last month in the Washington Post has been followed by the victory of the Iraqi government's security forces over illegal Shiite militias, including Iranian-backed Special Groups. The enemies of Iraq and America now cling desperately to their last bastions, while the political process builds momentum. These tremendous gains remain fragile and could be lost to skillful enemy action, or errors in Baghdad or Washington. But where the U.S. was unequivocally losing in Iraq at the end of 2006,...

BAGHDAD – Iraqi National Police and Multi-National Division – Baghdad Soldiers seized a number of weapons in Baghdad June 9. Iraqi National Police from the 4th Brigade, 1st National Police Division found 47 AK-47s, three sniper rifles and a Mauser rifle at approximately 6:30 a.m. in the Ur area of Adhamiyah. At approximately 10 a.m. north of Baghdad, NPs from 2nd Brigade, 1st NP Div. seized two 155 mm artillery rounds with improvised-explosive device fuses, two 122 mm artillery rounds attached to two propane tanks, four rocket-propelled grenades, an RPG launcher, 21 AK-47s, three SKS rifles, three enfield rifles, a...

KABUL, Afghanistan, June 10, 2008 – Afghanistan’s Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabit was guest of honor June 5 at the Camp Eggers celebration of Law Day 2008. Army Col. Robert Teetsel, staff judge advocate for Combined Security Transition Command Afghanistan, presents Afghanistan’s Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabit with a plaque commemorating Law Day 2008 at Camp Eggers, Afghanistan, June 5, 2008. As guest of honor, Sabit addressed 30 U.S. and Canadian legal representatives about rule of law in his country. U.S. Navy photo  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Combined Security Transition Command Afghanistan’s staff judge advocate directorate hosted...

COMBAT OUTPOST MURRAY — As Spc. Robert Manchego sees the end of his deployment approaching, he reflects on a year of change. Most of the combat he now encounters is commanding virtual armies on his laptop computer during his downtime. It wasn’t always so quiet for Machengo. When his unit, Company A, 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, first arrived into the area of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad, the place was anything but calm. For four years following the liberation of Baghdad, the area was largely unoccupied by coalition forces; insurgents used the area as a base of operations. “When...

WASHINGTON, June 9, 2008 – Important progress is being made in NATO’s Afghan Regional Security Integration Command South area of operations, the commander there told bloggers and online journalists in a June 6 conference call. “Nothing really too sexy, but actually it's very important stuff in a counterinsurgency that you are able to build up the capacity, and then using the reconstruction money and development monies that we have, we're able to reach out to the Afghan civilians so that we can build better relationships with them,” Marine Corps Col. Thomas J. McGrath said. “I'm talking about roads and helping...

COMBAT OUTPOST MURRAY — The battlefield in Iraq has become a classroom for military analyst Steven Biddle and several associates, who visited 3rd Infantry Division Soldiers on June 4 to get a sense of progress in the area. Biddle, a four-time visitor to Iraq and the author of two military-themed books entitled “Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle” and “Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy,” said his visit was multi-purposed. “Information in the (U.S.) is limited,” said Biddle, a senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Here,...

WASHINGTON, June 8, 2008 – As security in Iraq improves, more doctors are returning to clinical services, but more are needed in the Iraqi security forces, an official involved with this process in Iraq said. “[In Iraq they still] need quite a few doctors just to get to the level where they need to be to provide the primary health care for their force,” Navy Cmdr. Joseph Coleman, deputy director of health affairs for Multinational Security Transition Command Iraq, said in a teleconference with journalists and bloggers June 5. “They’re drastically low on doctors in the military. So they’re going...

FORWARD OPERATING BASE FALCON — The Soldiers of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division Military Transition Team don’t collect weapons. The MiTT team assigned to the 43rd Bde., 11th Iraqi Army Div., did not deploy to the Rashid district in southern Baghdad to capture detainees either. Nor do they have to – thanks to the ongoing efforts of the Iraqi army and Iraqi security forces working with Multi-National Division – Baghdad Soldiers, said Maj. Mark Thompson, operations officer for the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, 1st BCT, 4th Inf. Div., MND-B. “The Iraqi army is a lot better...

WASHINGTON, June 4, 2008 – Positive trends in Iraq can be attributed to the increasingly successful Iraqi army and the cooperation of the country’s citizens, a senior military official in Iraq said today. “For the third week in a row, security incidents in Iraq are at the lowest levels in some four years,” Army Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a Multinational Force Iraq spokesman, said in a Baghdad news conference. “These numbers reflect fewer attacks on Iraqi civilians, fewer attacks on Iraqi and coalition forces, and fewer attacks on the government’s infrastructure,” Bergner said. Operations from May 15 until yesterday show...

KIRKUK, Iraq – Kirkuk Provincial Rule of Law judges and lawyers met with their key provincial and city police leadership during the inaugural Criminal Justice Conference at Forward Operating Base Warrior in Kirkuk May 29.“The security gains of the region are evident -- over a 70 percent decrease in violent attacks against ISF, Kirkuk citizens and the Coalition forces. As a result, we can now begin our transition from a form of martial law to rule of law,” said Lt. Col. Kevin Brown, 1st Brigade, 10th Mountain Division deputy commander.The agenda of the meeting included recent case studies that focused...

This remarkable series of before and after pictures documents the rebuilding efforts of Task Force Marne, aka Multi-National Division Center, aka "the surge" Division in Iraq, 2007-2008. The Division's area of responsibility included some of the most violent areas on the southern edge of Baghdad (the "Baghdad belts") and in addition to peacemaking efforts in the region the Division's mission included halting the flow of "accelerants" into the city. Areas such as Salman Pak, Yousifiyah, Arab Jabour, Jisr Diyala, Mahmudiyah, and Iskandariyah may not be familiar to Americans (they were generally - and erroneously - referred to as "Baghdad" in...

The "surge" of American troops in Iraq last year winds to a close next month when the last two surge brigades redeploy home. Security conditions in the Iraq they are leaving are much improved over those the extra troops encountered when they arrived, say analysts and defense officials, many of whom are confident that trend will continue even without the extra US troops. The departure of the two brigades comes as the number of American casualties is at a new low. Of the heavy fighting that continues in Iraq, in places like Basra and the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City,...

6/3/2008 - PANJSHIR PROVINCE, Afghanistan (AFPN) -- More than 1,000 people attended the groundbreaking ceremony for a new $6 million road May 28 in Barak of the Bazarak District in the Panjshir province. During the ceremony, Afghan officials from the highest levels of government discussed the critical importance of the road, which will extend from Barak to Khenj, to Panjshir and to all of Afghanistan. Ahmad Zia Massoud, Afghanistan's first vice president and the brother of famed Panjshir martyr and Afghan national hero Ahmad Shah Massoud, was the main speaker during the hour-long ceremony. The ceremony was held adjacent to...

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan, June 3, 2008 – Parliament leaders, village elders and other government officials attended a meeting May 29 at the governor’s compound in the Mahmood Raqi district of Afghanistan’s Kapisa province to discuss issues that have arisen with construction contractors. Abubaker, governor of Afghanistan’s Kapisa province, points to an engineer during his conclusion speech made during a meeting at the governor's compound in the province’s Mahmood Raqi district, May 29, 2008. The engineer was brought up and told by Abubaker, in a symbolic gesture, that he now has the authority to inspect and monitor all construction...

Something very strange is happening in the hallowed halls of the old media. From the Washington Post to the New York Times, articles are starting to appear actually acknowledging that the Iraq war may be, gasp, winnable. Even the United Nations went on record, with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon saying Iraq has made "notable progress" in the security, political and economic fields. This recent acknowledgment of the obvious has yet to extend to the Democrat Party. Despite

KABUL (Reuters) - Taliban insurgents are fleeing south towards the Afghan border with Pakistan in the face of a U.S. Marines offensive in volatile Helmand province, the NATO commander in Afghanistan said on Monday. U.S. Marines have been pushing south from the former Taliban stronghold of Garmsir in Helmand for a month in an operation meant to cut off insurgent infiltration routes from Pakistan. "They have shown under some amount of pressure they flee to their sanctuaries," General Dan McNeill told a news conference. "In the last two days we have had many reports ... that the insurgents after experiencing...

How odd (or to be expected) that suddenly intelligence agencies, analysts, journalists, and terrorists themselves are attesting that al-Qaeda is in near ruins, that ideologically radical Islam is losing its appeal, and that terrorist incidents against Americans at home and abroad outside the war zones are at an all-time low—and yet few associate the radical change in fortune in Iraq as a contributory cause to our success. But surely the US military contributed a great deal to the humiliation of al-Qaedists and the bankruptcy of their cause, since it has (1) killed thousands of generic jihadists, and to such a...

Missions by special forces and air strikes by unmanned drones have "decapitated" the Taliban and brought the war in Afghanistan to a "tipping point", the commander of British forces has said. The new "precise, surgical" tactics have killed scores of insurgent leaders and made it extremely difficult for Pakistan-based Taliban leaders to prosecute the campaign, according to Brig Mark Carleton-Smith. In the past two years an estimated 7,000 Taliban have been killed, the majority in southern and eastern Afghanistan. But it is the "very effective targeted decapitation operations" that have removed "several echelons of commanders". A member of 2 Scots...