"One week after American forces mounted their assault on insurgent strongholds in western Baquba, at least half of the estimated 300 to 500 fighters who were there have escaped or are still at large, the colonel who is leading the attack said Monday", the June 26 New York Times reported.
On June 18, about 10,000 US troops using armoured attack vehicles and support from attack helicopters and F-16 fighter-bombers began a massive assault on the western neighbourhoods of the city of Baquba, 50 kilometres north-east of Baghdad. Baquba, with 280,000 residents, is the capital of Iraq's Diyala province.
Part of the US President George Bush's troop "surge" strategy, which has boosted the US occupation force in Iraq by 28,500 combat troops to a total of 156,000 military personnel, the Baquba offensive was presented by US commanders as aimed at killing or capturing the main group of "al Qaeda fighters" in Iraq, who had allegedly been driven out of Baghdad since the US troop surge began on February 14.
Summing up the results of the Baquba operation, US Army Colonel Steve Townsend told reporters on June 25: "I am pretty satisfied, with the exception of my own goal to kill and capture as many as possible so we don't have to fight them somewhere else."
Townsend said that US forces had killed 49 "al Qaeda fighters" and detained another 60 in the Baquba offensive. "When I came here I thought there were 300 to 500 fighters in there because that is what the intelligence told me", he said, adding: "Does that mean that half or more eluded us? I guess it does."
The NYT reported, "During the week of fighting, the insurgents made liberal use of their weapon of choice: concealed or buried bombs. They engaged in firefights and had roving teams armed with rocket-propelled grenades ... So far, they have resorted to a familiar tactic: tangling with the US troops only to leave or melt into the population when faced with overwhelming American firepower ... The ability of many of the insurgents to elude capture was reflected in the relatively small number of arms that the Americans seized."
On June 26, US commanders said they had found 25 arms caches and 62 roadside bombs in the Baquba operation. They also said they had killed 58 "al Qaeda fighters" and detained 61 others.
The June 26 Chicago Tribune reported that in a document issued two days earlier, Anthony Cordesman, the national security expert at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, had described the US military's claims of success for the Baquba operation as having "been tenuous to meaningless".
Cordesman wrote: "The US is having to expand its counterinsurgency operations broadly outside Baghdad in ways that can steadily disperse limited US and combat-capable Iraqi military forces. Baghdad is still only 30-40% secured, but the fighting not only is dispersing limited US forces into the Baghdad ring cities, but into a troubled zone of provinces ranging from Anbar to Diyala."
Cordesman went on to argue that it "really doesn't matter if insurgent casualties are much higher than our own unless such casualties include substantial cadres of leaders and experts that cannot be easily and rapidly replaced. The insurgents can simply disperse, stand down, and regroup.
"The domestic political realities in the US also make it clear that unless the US is successfully taking out cadres and insurgent infrastructure, the US is now so sensitive to American casualties that tactical victories can result in the same kind of political and strategic defeat that occurred in Vietnam."
This has been a growing concern among US media commentators and private military analysts as US public opinion has turned decisively against Washington's war in Iraq.
According to a May 30-June 3 poll conducted by the Washington-based Pew Research Centre, 56% of US residents think that US troops should be brought home as soon as possible, regardless of the security conditions in Iraq, up from 52% who held the same view in March. Fifty-eight per cent support a timetable being set for withdrawal from Iraq, up from 55% in March.
A Newsweek poll, released on June 21, found that Bush's approval rating had hit a record low — 26%. The only president in the last 35 years to score a lower approval rating than Bush was Richard Nixon, whose approval rating dropped to 23% in January 1974, seven months before his resignation over the botched Watergate Hotel break-in.
Newsweek reported: "The war in Iraq continues to drag Bush down. A record 73 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Bush has done handling Iraq. Despite 'the surge' in US forces into Baghdad and Iraq's western Anbar province, a record-low 23 percent of Americans approve of the president's actions in Iraq, down 5 points since the end of March."
By June 26, the Pentagon had reported that at least 90 US troops had been killed that month, most as a result of roadside bombs, of which about 100 are detonated every day by Iraqi guerrillas.
According to the ICasualties.org website, based on media reports, at least 1100 Iraqis, including 162 Iraqi government troops and police, had been killed in the first three weeks of June.
Commenting on the Pentagon's latest quarterly report to Congress on the Iraq war, Cordesman wrote on June 20: "The latest Department of Defense report on 'Measuring Stability in Iraq' attempts to put a bad situation in a favorable light. It does not disguise many of the problems involved, but it does attempt to defend the strategy presented by President Bush in January 2007 in ways that sometimes present serious problems. More broadly, it reveals that the president's strategy is not working in any critical dimension."
The Pentagon report, which was posted on its website on June 7, claimed that US forces had made "progress" in reducing insurgent activity in Anbar province, with attacks dropping to 26 per day in the three-month period to May 4, compared to 35 per day in the three months to February 9.
In Baghdad, the focus of a US "security" crackdown since mid-February, insurgent attacks had been staged at a daily average rate of 50 in the February 13-May 4 period, up from 45 a day in the previous reporting period.
Across Iraq as a whole, the total number of insurgent attacks had only increased by 2% on the previous reporting period — to an average of some 1150 a week, with 70% directed against the US-led occupation forces and 20% against Iraqi government security forces.
The lethality of the attacks on US troops however had surged by 37% — in the first quarter of 2007, US troops were being killed at an average of 2.7 per day, but in the second quarter the fatality rate jumped to 3.7 per day.
In 2006, Baghdad and Anbar accounted for 70% of all US troop fatalities in Iraq. In the first five months of 2007, they have accounted for 63%.
Fatalities among the 126,000 private military contractors who work for the US government in Iraq — of whom 30,000 are directly involved in security duties — are also reported to have increased since Bush's troop surge began.
The June 16 Washington Post reported that "private security companies, funded by billions of dollars in US military and State Department contracts, are fighting insurgents on a widening scale in Iraq, enduring daily attacks, returning fire and taking hundreds of casualties that have been underreported and sometimes concealed, according to US and Iraqi officials and company representatives."
The Post reported that the US-owned ArmorGroup security company, "which started in Iraq with 20 employees and a handful of SUVs, has grown to a force of 1200 — the equivalent of nearly two battalions — with 240 armored trucks... ArmorGroup ran 1184 convoys in Iraq in 2006; it reported 450 hostile actions, mostly roadside bombs, small-arms fire and mortar attacks. The company was attacked 293 times in the first four months of 2007, according to ArmorGroup statistics."
The May 18 New York Times reported that, according to insurance claims filed with the US Labor Department, 146 US private contract workers were killed in Iraq in the first three months of this year. During the same period, 244 US soldiers were killed.