Posted by
Katie Favazza on Wednesday, August 08, 2007 11:45:05 AM
Earlier, I posted that Gen. Petraeus said the surge is working. Here's more from that same interview...
COLMES: “Can the Iraqi security forces and police be trained? … Are you confident that the time will come when they will be able to take over security for their own country?”
PETRAEUS: “Well, they have actually taken over security in a number of different places, Alan. If you look at Samawa, Nasiriyah, Najaf, Karbala - we hardly have any forces in those locations at all. Occasionally they will ask the Special Forces team in the area for some assistance, and we are happy to bring in close air support if needed, if the militias get -- act up or something like that.
“There are other areas that have serious al Qaeda threats like Mosul, by the way, which has come back impressively, and which has army police and forces that have now proven quite resilient. In fact, just a few days ago, it was an Iraqi army element that killed the emir of Mosul, the al Qaeda emir of Mosul. That same day they found and cleared I think it was four car bombs.
“Certainly al Qaeda has the ability to continue to conduct car bomb attacks, suicide attacks that are trying reignite sectarian violence. But our soldiers and Marines and other forces have done enormous damage to them in recent months in particular, and especially in the past seven weeks of this surge of offenses that has been possible by the surge of forces. …
“And they are losing -- their losses are three times our losses in an average period. So they are definitely fighting and dying for their country. Again, they are uneven in quality, but there are dozens and dozens of very good units out there.
“And their high-end units are truly very fine elements.
Their commando battalions, their counterterrorist force, their national emergency response unit, their special tactics unit and so forth. These are truly legitimate high-end forces that rank with the best of the Special Forces in this region. …”
COLMES: “[W]hen the president says the same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September 11, and that’s why what happens in Iraq matters for security here at home, is that a nuanced enough understanding of exactly who the enemy is in Iraq? …”
PETRAEUS: “Well, the enemy in Iraq is very, very complex, and as I have mentioned, it is not just al Qaeda Iraq.
“We tend to see al Qaeda as public enemy number one. … [T]he attacks that have the most strategic significance, again the car-bombings, the suicide vest attacks and so forth that cause such significant damage to the psychological fabric of Iraqi society as well as just sheer physical damage, those are conducted by al Qaeda Iraq.
“And they are very clearly linked to the so-called AQSL, the al Qaeda senior leadership, located in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border tribal areas, without question. I mean, we -- you have seen released on a number of occasions communications between them. And I can assure you that that does go on.
“We have been able to damage very seriously the media operations of al Qaeda in Iraq and their communications ability. In fact, we even killed the three al Turki brothers, who were former -- in
Afghanistan area - al Qaeda who were sent over to al Qaeda Iraq to help shore up the situation in northern Iraq, which has been under particular pressure in the last several months.
“As we have cleared Baquba, taken al Qaeda out of most of Anbar province, pushed them out of neighborhoods in Baghdad and so forth. But again, there are also still some insurgent groups that are disconnected from al Qaeda. There are others that we call al Qaeda affiliates, if you will.”
You can listen to the full interview here.