WASHINGTON - After a postelection respite, the pace of insurgent attacks in Iraq has increased in recent weeks to approach last year's levels, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.
"Where they are right now is where they were almost a year ago, and it's nowhere near the peak," Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news conference.
That's about 400 attacks a week of all kinds: bombings, shootings, rocket and mortar attacks, Pentagon officials said. About half cause significant damage or injure or kill someone.
Though they vary daily, those figures are close to the rate of attacks that took place through much of last year, except for spasms of violence in Najaf, Fallujah and elsewhere. In pre-election violence in January, the number spiked to twice the usual rate.
The frequency of attacks is one measure of the strength of the insurgency in Iraq, and the success of the U.S.-led coalition in fighting it.
But Myers and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disputed a suggestion that the figure demonstrates a lack of progress in Iraq. Rumsfeld said the focus of U.S. forces has been training Iraqi security forces rather than directing counterinsurgency operations.
"The United States and the coalition forces, in my personal view, will not be the thing that will defeat the insurgency," he said. "The people that are going to defeat that insurgency are going to be the Iraqis. And the Iraqis will do it not through military means solely, but by progress on the political side and giving the Iraqi people a sense that they have a stake in that country."
Myers pointed to the creation of new government institutions. "I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time," he said. "If you look at where we are, we've had elections. They're about ready to form a government, albeit slower than perhaps some would have hoped, forming the Cabinet and so forth."
The Associated Press, quoting a U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity, reported that postinvasion attacks in Iraq were at lower levels - 150 to 200 per week - until April 2004, when uprisings occurred in Najaf and Anbar province. The first pictures of tortured prisoners from the Abu Ghraib prison were also made public that month.
Afterward, the rate of attacks doubled, to around 400 or more per week, the official said. The number spiked during U.S. offensives in Najaf in August and Fallujah in November.
In January, as Iraq prepared to hold its elections, the numbers increased to as high as 825 attacks in one week, the AP reported, quoting the unnamed official. Afterward, the number dropped again to 400 per week in February and 350 in March.
About 60 people - Iraqis, Americans and others - are injured or killed daily in attacks, the defense official said. Except for the spikes, that rate has remained roughly consistent since April 2004, the official said.
Officials: Cabinet deal is near
BAGHDAD - Iraq's new Kurdish and Shiite Arab political leaders agreed to a Cabinet split Tuesday, giving six posts to the holdout Sunni Arab minority, top politicians involved in the negotiations said.
Who those Sunnis would be remained publicly unresolved, as did other final elements of the agreement itself.
Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni negotiators said early today that the sessions brought a breakthrough on how the 30-plus seat Cabinet would be divided among factions but that selection of individual appointees was continuing. The day ended with another pledge from party leaders that an announcement on makeup of Iraq's new government was imminent, nearly three months after national elections.
U.S.: Laptop aided militant arrests
WASHINGTON - The recovery of a laptop computer in Iraq by U.S. forces in February has helped in the capture of several associates of the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.
The laptop was found in a vehicle used by Zarqawi as he fled to avoid imminent capture by U.S. troops near the city of Ramadi on Feb. 20, the officials said. Using leads found on the computer, troops have detained several suspected associates of Zarqawi in the past two months, the New York Times reported, quoting an unnamed Defense Department official.
