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Big things afoot around Baghdad.

U.S. troops backed by helicopters and Bradley Fighting Vehicles launched a major offensive Tuesday to clear the Sunni extremist group al-Qaeda in Iraq from its new stronghold in Diyala Province north of the capital, the U.S. military said in a statement.
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The Diyala offensive involves about 10,000 U.S. soldiers, making it one of the largest military operations since the Iraq war began more than four years ago. The operation, code-named Arrowhead Ripper, is focused in the area around Baqouba, the capital of Diyala, a mixed Shiite-Sunni area that in recent months has become one of the most violent regions in Iraq.

The offensive began under cover of darkness "with a quick-strike nighttime air assault" by the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, the military statement said. "By daylight, attack helicopters and ground forces had engaged and killed 22 anti-Iraqi forces in and around Baqouba," it said.

There were no reports of U.S. casualties.

The statement said that the operation was "a large scale effort to eliminate al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorists operating in Baqouba and its surrounding areas."
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In recent months, it has been put on the run in Anbar province west of Baghdad, a vast desert and Sunni area that was the organization's stronghold. But it alienated Sunni tribesmen, who turned against al-Qaeda and helped U.S. and Iraqi forces drive the group east into Diyala.

At the same time, the addition of a 28,500-soldier troop build-up in Baghdad, which was competed last week, also helped push al-Qaeda north out of the capital. The U.S. military strategy now seems aimed at keeping the group in the Diyala area while troops attack the organization's safe houses, bomb factories, prisons and other outposts.

The U.S. military is also strengthening its operations in the suburban belt south of Baghdad, where U.S. officials say that Sunni insurgents have established car bomb factories that fuel the daily bloodshed in the capital. The U.S. military reported Monday that fighter jets on Saturday dropped four "precision-guided bombs" in the Arab Jubour area south of the capital while 1,200 soldiers maneuvered to prevent insurgents from entering Baghdad.

Read the rest, and also check out Roggio and Elliot's succinct report, appropriately dubbing the operation "The Battle of the Belts."

Also see Michael Yon's dispatch:

This campaign is actually a series of carefully orchestrated battalion and brigade sized battles. Collectively, it is probably the largest battle since "major hostilities" ended more than four years ago. Even the media here on the ground do not seem to have sensed its scale.
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In the short time since Petraeus took charge here, Anbar Province - "Anbar the Impossible" - seems to have made a remarkable turnaround. I just spent about a month out there and saw no combat. I have never gone that long in Iraq without seeing combat. Clearly, some areas of Anbar remain dangerous - there is fighting in Fallujah today - but there is also something in Anbar today that hasn't been seen in recent memory: possibilities.There are also larger realities lurking up on the Turkish borders, but the reality today is that the patient called Iraq will die and become a home for Al Qaeda if we leave now.

But now the AQ cancer is spreading into Diyala Province, straight along the Diyala River into Baghdad and other places. "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" (AQM) apparently now a subgroup of ISI (the Islamic State of Iraq), has staked Baquba as the capital of their Caliphate. Whatever the nom de jour of their nom de guerre, Baquba has been claimed for their capital.

Read the rest.

Posted by Bill at June 19, 2007 09:25 AM | TrackBack (0)