Baghdad deaths ebb

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, March 14, 2007

BAGHDAD, Iraq – U.S. and Iraqi officials said Wednesday that the month-old Baghdad security plan has reduced the level of violence in the capital, but they cautioned that the security situation in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq remains unstable.

Meanwhile, a Pentagon report released Wednesday in Washington used for the first time the term “civil war” to describe some of the violence in Iraq.

The top U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said the number of sectarian killings has dropped since the operation began in mid-February, but noted that a record number of bombs exploded in Baghdad last month.

“By the indicators that the government of Iraq has, it has been extremely positive,” Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said. “But I would again caution everybody about patience, about diligence. This is going to take many months, not weeks.”

In a separate briefing, Brig. Qassim al-Mousawi, an Iraqi military spokesman, said the number of bombs detonated in the capital had decreased from 163 to 102 during the first four weeks of the security plan compared with the previous four weeks.

The number of car bombs also dropped, from 56 to 36 during that time, the spokesman said.

He said 94 militants had been killed and 713 had been detained since the operation began.

He also said more than 2,000 families displaced by sectarian violence had been able to return home. He also said 59 Iraqi service members had been killed.

While Baghdad has seen a relative drop in violence, some of its surrounding provinces have experienced an increase. More U.S. soldiers are being deployed to Diyala province, north of the capital, a Sunni insurgent stronghold.

Three U.S. troops died Wednesday in Diyala, the military said in a statement, two “as a result of injuries sustained from explosions near their vehicles in separate attacks,” and the third from small-arms fire.

At least 39 Iraqis were killed or found dead nationwide Wednesday. But some Iraqis found a reason to celebrate: President Jalal Talabani returned to the country from 17 days of medical treatment in Jordan after he collapsed and fell unconscious. Doctors said he suffered from exhaustion and dehydration caused by lung and sinus infections.

In its bleakest assessment of the war to date, the Pentagon in a quarterly report said that last October through December was the most violent three-month period since 2003. Attacks and casualties suffered by coalition and Iraqi forces and civilians were higher than any other similar time span, said the report.

Members of the Bush administration have been loath to say that the U.S. military is struggling to quell a civil war, and the report agreed that the term does not capture the complex situation there.

But it added, “Some elements of the situation in Iraq are properly descriptive of a ‘civil war,’ including the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities and mobilization, the changing character of the violence and population displacements.”