Iraq: Iraqi and US officials claimed yesterday that they were close to breaking the back of al-Qaeda in Iraq, after hundreds of raids in recent days yielded a trove of information about the group's movements, bases and tactics, as well as more than 700 captives.
Documents and computer equipment retrieved from the rubble where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi died last Wednesday indicated that the group was struggling to get new recruits and losing both members and weaponry to regular US raids.
Mowafaq al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser, said a memory stick, laptop and other documents had been found in the rubble of the house near Baquba after the US airstrike on Zarqawi, yielding "a huge treasure of information" about the terror network. One document suggested that the group's best tactic to ease the pressure would be to foment war between the US and Iran.
"We believe this is the beginning of the end of al-Qaeda in Iraq," Mr Rubaie told a news conference in Baghdad. "We feel we know their locations, the names of their leaders, their whereabouts, their movements, through the documents we found during the last few days."
More than 450 subsequent raids on suspected militant hideouts across Iraq have resulted in 104 insurgents being killed and 759 "anti-Iraqi elements" being captured, according to Maj Gen William Caldwell, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Iraq. He added that the raids, a third of which were carried out by Iraqi forces working on their own, had turned up 28 significant arms caches.
A senior US military official in Iraq said US forces were now in possession of some of the best intelligence about the workings of the insurgency since the invasion in 2003. The finds included mobile phones, computer files, flash disks, letters and policy documents.
"We are still studying the documents and items found since the killing of Zarqawi," said Barham Salih, Iraq's deputy prime minister. "They reveal much about the scope of al-Qaeda in Iraq and its network of relations."
One document released publicly purported to shed light on the "broad policy guidelines" of al-Qaeda in Iraq. It suggested it had sought to drive a wedge between the US and its Shia allies and to draw the US into a war with Iran.
The documents, the authenticity of which has not been independently verified, indicated that Zarqawi's network had changed tactics amid concerns that US and Iraqi operations against it had taken their toll. The group had also failed to swell its ranks with new recruits. "We mean to escalate the tension between America and Iran, and Americans and the Shia in Iraq," the documents said.
Iraqi and US officials have said a number of times before that the insurgency was in terminal decline, only to be confounded by fresh waves of bombings, kidnappings and sectarian violence. Violent deaths in Baghdad alone are running at about 1,400 per month. Although US troop losses have slowed in recent months, the Pentagon yesterday confirmed that it had recorded the 2,500th death since the start of the war. - (Guardian service)