The commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, said the “principal threat” to security remained Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown insurgent group that American intelligence officials say is foreign led.
Speaking to reporters in an end-of-year briefing at the American Embassy in Baghdad, General Petraeus said that coalition-force casualties were down “substantially,” and that civilian casualties had fallen “dramatically.”
“The level of attacks for about the last 11 weeks or so has been one not seen consistently since the late spring and summer of 2005,” he said. “The number of high-profile attacks, that is car bombs, suicide car bombs and suicide vest attacks, is also down, also roughly 60 percent” since their height in March.
During his 100-minute briefing, General Petraeus used a series of charts showing trends in overall weekly and monthly attacks, car and suicide bombs, weapons-cache finds and Iraqi civilian deaths.
Although the data showed a sharp fall in civilian deaths from their peak between mid-2006 and mid-2007, the rate of decline appeared to level off in the past two months.
The figures were based on American military statistics, but included some joint Iraqi-coalition data.
However, he conceded that while attacks were down in the rest of the country, they had not fallen in the northern province of Nineveh, which includes Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, with a population of 1.7 million.
He said that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia remained active in northern Iraq, where it was pushed after offensive operations in Baghdad and Anbar Province, and that the rate of attacks in Nineveh “has just been variable and probably slightly up.”
One reason for the continuing violence, he said, was that the area remained “very important” to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia because it is crossed by the routes into Iraq from Syria and Turkey.
