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BAGHDAD - CD shops sell love songs again. Some women emerge from their homes without veils, and alcohol sellers are coming out of hiding in the southern city of Basra — where religious vigilantes have long enforced strict Islamic codes. The changes in recent weeks mark a surprising show of government sway — at least for now — after an Iraqi-led military crackdown that was plagued by desertions, ragged planning and ended in a virtual stalemate with Shiite militias in Iraq's second-largest city. But it's unclear whether the new tone in parts of Basra represents a permanent tilt toward the...

The commander of forces in far western Iraq said April 15 the enemy his Marines and their Iraqi counterparts now confront is in disarray -- a smattering of foreign malcontents ruled by local thugs with little community support. Disillusioned foreigners from Yemen, Algeria, Syria and Saudi Arabia are coming to Iraq with dreams of "jihad" in fewer numbers than they were a year ago, arrive under-equipped and are poorly led once they infiltrate the province. "These are very often young to middle aged males who are kind of malcontents and misfits from their society," said Col. Patrick Malay, commander of...

Iraq's major Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties have closed ranks to force anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to disband his Mahdi Army militia or leave politics, lawmakers and officials involved in the effort said Sunday. Such a bold move risks a violent backlash by al-Sadr's Shiite militia. But if it succeeds it could cause a major realignment of Iraq's political landscape. The first step will be adding language to a draft election bill banning parties that operate militias from fielding candidates in provincial balloting this fall, the officials and lawmakers said. The government intends to send the draft to parliament within...

Sen. Biden: Troop buildup is failure 16 minutes ago A leading Democrat on Saturday declared last year's troop buildup in Iraq a failure. Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the military push didn't succeed because U.S. troops remain committed there in large numbers and political reconciliation has not been achieved. "The purpose of the surge was to bring violence in Iraq down so that its leaders could come together politically," said Biden, D-Del., in this week's Democratic radio address. "Violence has come down, but the Iraqis have not come together." He later added, "There is...

Congressional Democrats are warning U.S. Iraq commander General David Petraeus, and the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, not to attempt to minimize the seriousness of the situation in Iraq when they testify to Congress next week. VOA's Dan Robinson reports from Capitol Hill. A few days before General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker appear before House and Senate committees to deliver their latest update on Iraq, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi makes clear what she hopes they will not say. In a news conference together with the chairmen of the House committees on Armed Services and Foreign Affairs, she refers to the recent...

U.S. officials say a new U.S. intelligence report on Iraq shows that conditions there are improving and that progress is being made toward healing political rifts. U.S. media cited government officials as saying the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq provides a more upbeat analysis of conditions than the last assessment made in August. However, the officials said the classified document did not include the recent deadly fighting between Iraqi forces and Shi'ite militias. The report, a collaboration by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, has been released to top administration staffers as well as members of the U.S. Congress. Some of...

WE TUMBLED OUT of two Black Hawks onto a shrub-dusted mountainside. It was a windy, cold October evening. A half-moon illuminated the tall pines and peaks. Through night-vision goggles the soldiers and landscape glowed in a blurry green-and-white static. Just across the valley, lights flickered from a few homes nestled in the terraced farmlands of Yaka China, a notorious village in the Korengal River valley in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunar. Yaka China was just a few villages south and around a bend in the river from the Americans’ small mountain outposts, but the area’s reputation among the soldiers was...

Attacks by insurgents and rival sectarian militias have fallen up to 80 percent in Baghdad and concrete blast walls that divide the capital could soon be removed, a senior Iraqi military official said on Saturday. Lieutenant-General Abboud Qanbar said the success of a year-long clampdown named "Operation Imposing Law" had reined in the savage violence between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs dominant under Saddam Hussein. "In a time when you could hear nothing but explosions, gunfire and the screams of mothers and fathers and sons, and see bodies that were burned and dismembered, the people of Baghdad were awaiting...

Iraq's parliament adopted legislation Saturday on the reinstatement of thousands of former Baath party supporters to government jobs, a key benchmark sought by the United States as a step toward national reconciliation. The bill was approved by a unanimous show of hands on each of the law's 30 clauses. Titled the Accountability and Justice law, it seeks to relax restrictions on the rights of members of Saddam Hussein's now-dissolved Baath party to fill government posts. It is also designed to reinstate thousands of Baathists in government jobs from which they had been dismissed because of their ties to the party....

hristmas Eve, late afternoon, and U.S. soldiers from 4th Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment piled into their Stryker armored vehicles for a patrol out on the streets of Baghdad. This is the fifth Christmas that U.S. troops have been out in Iraq, and commanders say the best way to keep morale up is to keep moving. There are special dinners, packages from home, religious services and decorations around camp, but no let-up in patrols. "My personal goal would be to try to go ahead and keep the mission constant," said Ray Ramsey, who has spent 23 years in the army and...

FALLUJAH, IRAQ – “You're probably safer here than you are in New York City,” said Marine First Lieutenant Barry Edwards when I arrived in Fallujah. I raised my eyebrows at him skeptically. “How many people got shot at last night in New York City?” he said. “Probably somebody,” I said. “Yeah, probably somebody did,” he said. “Somewhere.” Nobody was shot last night in Fallujah. No American has been shot anywhere in Fallujah since the 3rd Battalion 5th Marine Regiment rotated into the city two months ago. There have been no rocket or mortar attacks since the summer. Not a single...

As violence declines in Baghdad, the leading Democratic presidential candidates are undertaking a new and challenging balancing act on Iraq: acknowledging that success, trying to shift the focus to the lack of political progress there, and highlighting more domestic concerns like health care and the economy.

QARGHULIA, Iraq — Despite persistent sectarian tensions in the Iraqi government, war-weary Sunnis and Shiites are joining hands at the local level to protect their communities from militants on both sides, U.S. military officials say. In the last two months, a U.S.-backed policing movement called Concerned Citizens, launched last year in Sunni-dominated Anbar province under the banner of the Awakening movement, has spread rapidly into the mixed Iraqi heartland. ... "What you find is these people have lived together for decades with no problem until the terrorists arrived and tried to instigate the problem," ..."So they are perfectly willing to...

Violence is down 55 percent in Iraq since a U.S.-Iraqi security operation began this summer, U.S. officials said today, even as at least 15 Iraqis were reported killed in bombings and shootings. The dead included three children who were killed as they gathered around American troops who were handing out toys and sports equipment. The officials cautioned it was too early to credit Tehran with the recent lull in overall violence, despite recent optimism that Iran was stemming its support for Shiite militia fighters. "It's unclear to us what role the Iranians might have had in these developments, if any,"...

The British commander in southern Iraq confirmed yesterday that UK officials have been holding talks with supporters of the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army in the hope they would be drawn into the political process. Major General Graham Binns said the security situation in Basra province - to be handed over to Iraqi forces next month - was improving and attacks against British and Iraqi forces had fallen by 90% since British troops withdrew from their last base in the centre of the city in September. Confirming the talks with the Mahdi army, first reported in the Guardian, Binns...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With an intensifying White House race drawing attention to his legacy, President George W. Bush could leave office without the baggage of complete failure in Iraq some analysts say. American success at quelling sectarian and insurgent violence has raised hopes that the relatively calmer conditions of the past few months in Iraq might last into early 2009, when the next U.S. president takes over. "The overall prediction has to be that George Bush will escape this without an obviously visible abject failure. It may become that again over time. But right now, it looks like Bush will...

BAGHDAD - An armed Sunni group has ended Al-Qaeda’s tight two-year grip on north Baghdad’s volatile Adhamiyah neighbourhood and is now in control, an AFP correspondent witnessed on Friday. A local militia calling itself the “revolutionaries of Adhamiyah” took over the Sunni district on the east bank of the Tigris on November 10 in a swift and audacious raid that sent Al-Qaeda fleeing from its last stronghold in Baghdad. On Friday, members of the “revolutionaries of Adhamiyah” controlled main roads into the neighbourhood as well the square housing the famous Abu Hanifa mosque where Saddam Hussein made his last public...

House Democrats pushed through a $50 billion bill for the Iraq war Wednesday night that would require President Bush to start bringing troops home in coming weeks with a goal of ending combat by December 2008. The legislation, passed 218-203, was largely a symbolic jab at Bush, who already has begun reducing force levels but opposes a congressionally mandated timetable on the war. And while the measure was unlikely to pass in the Senate — let alone overcome a presidential veto — Democrats said they wanted voters to know they weren't giving up. "The fact is, we can no longer...

BAGHDAD — Taking advantage of a dramatic drop in car bombings and sectarian murders, Baghdad residents are once again venturing out to local markets and restaurants after dark in many parts of the city. They're celebrating weddings and birthdays in public places and eating grilled carp on the Tigris River late into the night. A local television station has begun a feature called "Baghdad Nights," showing the capital's residents shopping, eating and socializing after the sun has set— a sight that until recently was unheard of in most neighborhoods. In Mansour, in central Baghdad , eight young brides, dripping in...

More active members of the military died during two years of peacetime in the early 1980s than died during a two-year period of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a government report. The Congressional Research Service, which compiled war casualty statistics from the Revolutionary War to present day conflicts, reported that 4,699 members of the U.S. military died in 1981 and '82 — a period when the U.S. had only limited troop deployments to conflicts in the Mideast. That number of deaths is nearly 900 more than the 3,800 deaths during 2005 and '06, when the U.S. was fully...