Al Reuters:A US-IRAQI campaign to stabilise Baghdad will begin soon and the offensive against militants will be on a scale never seen during four years of war, American officers said today.
Briefing a small group of foreign reporters, three American colonels who are senior advisers to the Iraqi army and police in Baghdad said a command centre overseeing the crackdown would be activated tomorrow.
"The expectation is the plan will be implemented soon thereafter," Colonel Doug Heckman, senior adviser to the 9th Iraqi Army division, said at a US military base in Baghdad.
"It's going to be an operation unlike anything this city has seen. It's a multiple order magnitude of difference, not just a 30 per cent, I mean a couple hundred per cent," he added, referring to previous offensives that failed to stem bloodshed. Er, two hundred percent is less than one order of magnitude (factor of 10).
The plan will involve US and Iraqi forces sweeping the capital's neighbourhoods for militants and illegal weapons and then holding cleared areas. But some analysts fear that as in previous crackdowns, militants will simply melt away and wait them out, or strike in areas where they are not deployed.
Some of these analysts are aware that terrorists read the newspapers.
All three officers sought to talk up the ability of Iraq's forces to perform better than in previous crackdowns.
Their comments came a day after a suicide truck bomb killed 135 people in a mainly Shiite area of Baghdad, the single biggest bombing since the US-led invasion in 2003. Which has no bearing on the viability of the planned offensive, but Al Reuters wanted to throw it in just for the hell of it.
And overnight, an Islamist website posted a video of an attack on a US Apache helicopter in the Taji region north of the Iraqi capital that was claimed by the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda.
The US military revealed today that four US helicopters which crashed in the past two weeks, killing a total of 20 troops and private security guards, had been shot down by insurgents.
One of these was privately owned, but they are all "US" if you want to invite a particular inference. My source in Baghdad tells me that the new weapon is rumored to be a batch of 20mm Oerlikon guns imported from Iran and that one of these was captured in the orchard battle last week.
On the video which runs for more than three minutes, two helicopters are seen flying low over a wooded area while militants on the ground handle explosives, then one of the aircraft is hit.
It's pretty obvious they didn't reach up and plant a bomb on it. There is no missile in the video so heavy gunfire is the likely culprit.
The video shows the Apache catching fire and crashing near a hillside.
The images are accompanied by verses from the Koran, religious chants and calls for jihad, or holy war, in the name of Sheikh Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the head of a Sunni group linked to al-Qaeda.
An Internet statement posted on Friday in the name of the al-Qaeda front organisation boasted: "The soldiers of the Islamic emirate have found new methods to take on your aircraft."
The planned security crackdown is seen as a last-ditch effort to halt all-out civil war between minority Sunni Arabs and politically dominant majority Shiites.
US President George W. Bush is sending 21,500 reinforcements, most earmarked for the Baghdad offensive.
Critics of Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said an offensive last summer failed because the Iraqi army committed too few troops and because he was reluctant to confront the Mehdi Army of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
The firebrand cleric is a key political ally of Mr Maliki.
Asked if the Mehdi Army's stronghold in Sadr City would be cleaned out, Col Heckman acknowledged the political sensitivity but said all options were open.
"If we feel we need to clear Sadr City to bring stability, we will do that. Are there restrictions that will not allow us to do that? Right now there are not," Col Heckman said.
Mr Maliki has vowed the crackdown will tackle militants across the sectarian divide. The Pentagon has said the Mehdi Army poses a greater threat to peace in Iraq than Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda.
The Baghdad command centre that will begin operations tomorrow will be headed by an Iraqi general. However, US troops will not take orders from Iraqi officers.
Colonel Chip Lewis, senior adviser to a police division in Baghdad, said the Iraqi security forces were more confident than they were before the last offensive. At that time, some Iraqi units did not show up.
Col Heckman said the offensive would gradually build up.
There was anecdotal evidence some militias had sought to melt away ahead of the campaign, the officers added.
"The end of the summer is when we should see some concrete results and be able to say is this working or not," Col Heckman said. That would be around September.
One problem that bedevilled last summer's offensive was the reluctance of Iraqi soldiers in the regionally recruited army to be deployed in the capital, far from their homes and families.
This time soldiers will get pay bonuses to come to Baghdad and will be given a finite tour of duty, so they know their deployment will not be open-ended, the American officers said.
Another difference would be the establishment of what the officers called joint security stations, which will be set up in nine Baghdad districts and where Iraqi and American troops will live and patrol side-by-side.
Within living memory, revealing information like this would have gotten the three colonels put against a wall and shot. Today it is routine, since commanders are painfully aware that disloyal media will reveal all they know anyway.
It could be disinformation, with the main blow to fall elsewhere. At least I hope it is, but in the past such tactical leaks have turned out to be all too accurate, giving terror cells plenty of time to flee the coming wrath and dig in their cannon-fodder and human shields for a media-friendly fight to the death.
Damn good thing these terrorists don't read Al Reuters.
Oh wait a minute.
It's really a Good Thing it wasn't like this in 1944:
"Allied amphibious forces will land on the coast of Europe within as little as 48 hours, according to three US officers who briefed reporters today. Preparations have reached a fever pitch as General Eisenhower's headquarters mulls the latest weather forecast. The landings will be accompanied by a mass parachute drop and will probably be along the coast of Normandy rather than at the Pas de Calais as long rumored."
"Wake the Fuhrer! Wake the Fuhrer!"