Word: baghdad
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Suicide bombers in Iraq have staged a deadly surge of their own, striking three targets on Monday - including the highly fortified Mansour Hotel in central Baghdad. Early reports put the combined death toll at 50, and climbing. But how are militant groups sneaking their bombs and bombers past the giant security dragnet around Baghdad? There are over 70,000 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi policemen spread across the city, conducting house-to-house searches and street patrols, walling off entire neighborhoods and setting up hundreds of checkpoints...
...Later that day, Thabit expressed frustration over the episode to Ferris, whose compound adjoins the police headquarters. The forces from Baghdad were difficult to control, Thabit said. They had weak officers and undisciplined rank-and-file men. And Thabit feared that the incident would only worsen the image problem already troubling the predominantly Shi'ite national police in Samarra, an overwhelmingly Sunni city where the outsiders are widely suspected of ties to the Mahdi Army of militant Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al Sadr...
...Previously fighters would move through the streets of Samarra in twos and threes. These days groups as large as a dozen or more gather to stage attacks, sometimes driving pickup gun-trucks. U.S. commanders fear that the arrival of the security forces from Baghdad could lead to even more violence in the city, as sectarianism takes root alongside increasing insurgent activity. The weeks ahead could be pivotal. On June 16, Sadr urged Shi'ites to join an annual Shi'ite pilgrimage to Samarra the first week of July. Since then rumors that Sadr himself may appear in Samarra have circulated...
...news from the battle was good. That was no surprise: in a guerrilla war like Iraq, every engagement that can be described as a "battle" is inevitably won by the superior force, which is part of the frustration. Baquba, the capital of Diyala province just northeast of Baghdad, had been infiltrated by al-Qaeda over the past year-between 400 and 500 al-Qaeda fighters were estimated to be in the city when the U.S. forces attacked on Monday, and now those who remain are surrounded, in a slowly tightening cordon. These sorts of operations have taken place multiple times...
...Odierno later told me similar anti-al-Qaeda rebellions were happening throughout the country, including some neighborhoods of Baghdad. "Iraqis notice things. They noticed what happened when we began to support the Sunni tribes against al-Qaeda in al-Anbar. And al-Qaeda seems to have overplayed its hand...