Check The Fourth Rail for a roundup of news on military operations in Iraq. Among the reports was news of a single airstrike on a safehouse at which there was a meeting of a number of leaders of al Qaida in Iraq. The strike killed five of them. The dead are named and their roles are described at the link. The coalition must be getting very good intelligence to be able to hit a meeting like this.
Also in the post was this account of the fate of several Libyan terrorists who came to Iraq to be martyred for Allah:
In Sadah, a Libyan terrorist and five others are killed after being trapped in the rubble of a not-so-safe house. He stated he had a suicide vest on and would detonate it, so the MArines of the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment obliged and detonated it for him. The Army Times reports others trapped in the house were Libyans as well: "At least two other men remained trapped in the rubble, shouting religious slogans. Like the apparent suicide bomber, he told the interpreter and Iraqi soldiers they were Libyan and had infiltrated through the Syrian border, which lies less than 10 miles west of Sadah." Three Marines were injured in the combat in Sadah.
Also noteworthy is this:
Elsewhere in Baghdad, two insurgents die in a "work accident" as their car bomb suffered from premature detonation. "Route Irish", the notorious road from Baghdad Airport to the city, has seen a marked decrease in attacks; "Between April and June, 14 car bombs went off along the airport road, called Route Irish by the military. There were 48 roadside bombs, officially known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, and 80 small-arms attacks. Sixteen people were killed. In the past two months, there have been no car bombs and nine IEDs. One Iraqi soldier has been killed." The success is chalked up to improving tactics and altering the operations along the route.
In Buhriz, insurgents attacked a Iraqi police checkpoint en masse, and are repelled. Six Iraqi police are killed and ten are wounded, but the insurgents failed to overrun their position. Long gone are the days when Iraqi forces flee the battle; today they stand and fight.
As long as the insurgents had only to worry about fighting Americans they could always hope that we would tire of the conflict and eventually leave. Their thinking probably was that all they had to do was outlast us and Iraq would be theirs. The emergence of effective Iraqi military and police, however, has changed the picture dramatically. Now the insurgents are in a race to get us out before the Iraqis become so proficient that they can no longer see a light at the end of the tunnel. As we have said before, Bush's policy may be too slow, and it may yet fail, but to proclaim that it actually is failing, as many of his critics do, is to mistake wishes for evidence.
