TV war coverage down, data show

June 23, 2008  Baltimore Sun

Five years into the war in Iraq and nearly seven years into the war in Afghanistan, getting news of the conflicts onto television is harder than ever. According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. CBS Evening News has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s World News and 74 minutes on NBC Nightly News. (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.) CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 U.S. troops are deployed. Coverage of the war in Afghanistan has increased slightly this year, with 46 minutes of total coverage year-to-date compared with 83 minutes for all of 2007.

By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Roadside bomb attacks and fatalities in Iraq are down by almost 90% over the last year, according to Pentagon records and interviews with military leaders.

In May, 11 U.S. troops were killed by blasts from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) compared with 92 in May 2007, records show. That’s an 88% decrease.

Military leaders cite several factors for the drop in attacks and deaths. They include:

• New vehicles. Almost 7,000 heavily armored Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles have been rushed to Iraq in the last year. “They’ve taken hits, many, many hits that would have killed soldiers and marines in uparmored Humvees,” Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a recent interview.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates made obtaining at least 15,000 MRAPs his top priority last year.

• Iraqi assistance. Ad hoc local security forces, known as the Sons of Iraq, have provided on-the-ground intelligence to U.S. forces looking for IEDs, said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, who commanded a division in Baghdad from February 2007 until May.

Each member of the security forces earns about $8 per day. Lynch has hired about 36,000 of them to man checkpoints and provide intelligence on the insurgency. He said about 60% had been insurgents.

• Improved surveillance. Lynch said his troops used new security cameras that could see bomb builders up to 5 miles away. “If they’re out there planting an IED, we can go whack them before they finish,” he said.

Also, Lynch said, the 14-ton MRAPs have forced insurgents to build bigger bombs to knock out the vehicles. Those bombs take more time to build and hide, which gives U.S. forces a better chance of catching the insurgents in the act and then attacking them.

Among the new U.S. tactics, paying the Sons of Iraq is a particularly good investment, said Dakota Wood, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Whether the money is viewed as “buying off” insurgents is less important than the lull in violence it creates, Wood said. It’s almost impossible to rebuild infrastructure, foster commerce and set up elections when streets are unsafe, he said. “Any effort that creates a window of opportunity in which other stabilization actions can take root is a good thing.”

Iraqi insurgents, however, are changing their tactics. During a visit to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, Calif., Marines showed Mullen the latest trend in IEDs: Fake curbs fashioned from metal, filled with ball bearings and explosives. Virtually indistinguishable from concrete rubble, the new bombs require a trained eye to spot.

Insurgents are also using pressure-detonated IEDs, including those with 15 pounds of explosives that blow the tires off an MRAP and allow insurgents to attack it, Mullen said.

“The whole issue of IEDs — vehicle borne, suicide, you name it — is going to be the weapon of choice and I think it’s going to be around a long, long time,” he said.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The Pentagon’s upcoming report to Congress on the Iraq war is expected to highlight a decline in violence in 2008, according to two Pentagon officials with knowledge of the report’s contents.

A U.S. soldier patrols in Baghdad on Thursday as troops continued offensives targeting al Qaeda in Iraq.

“Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” which could be released as early as Monday, covers activity from mid-February to mid-May.

Attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and U.S. military and civilian casualties are lower than in previous periods, the officials said.

CNN reporting shows that 19 troops were killed in May, the lowest monthly total since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Eighteen U.S. troops have been killed in June.

The details were released Friday amid reports that coalition troops killed four militants in northern Iraq during a shootout with gunmen on rooftops.

The U.S. military said that near Balad, the gunmen ambushed coalition troops who were targeting a financial supporter of “a bombing network in the Tigris River Valley.”

The troops returned fire, killing four attackers, including one who was wanted and linked to weapons trafficking.

The attack came as troops targeting al Qaeda in Iraq detained 30 suspected terrorists in Baghdad and Mosul on Thursday and Friday, the military said.

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“These precision operations will continue until al Qaeda and other extremist organizations stop their indiscriminate violence against the Iraqi people,” said Maj. John Hall, a military spokesman.

Mosul is the capital of Nineveh province, where U.S. and Iraqi troops last month launched an offensive — called Mother of Two Springs — against al Qaeda in Iraq.

Also, in western Baghdad on Friday, at least three people were killed and 10 injured when a bomb in a parked car detonated near a restaurant. The bombing happened shortly before 9 p.m. in a commercial area in al-Harthiya neighborhood, according to an Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman

In Mosul, a suicide car bomb in the eastern section of the city detonated near a checkpoint Friday, wounding at least five policemen.

And in Diyala province, a coalition soldier was killed and five were wounded Friday in three roadside bomb attacks on coalition patrols, the U.S. military said.

In southern Iraq, Iraqi-led troops were continuing a push against militants in the southeastern Shiite

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Iraq’s Anbar province — once dominated by Sunni insurgents but now a bastion of tribal opposition against the militants — will soon be run by the Iraqi military.

Iraqi soldiers will soon be responsible for running the once militant-riven province of Anbar.

The U.S. military said it would transfer security responsibility for Anbar this week to the Iraqi military, a bellwether event that illustrates what Iraq and the United States describe as a profound stride in their efforts to foster stability.

Anbar is the 10th of the 18 provinces where Iraqi forces have taken charge of security control since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and the first largely Sunni Arab province to do so. The other provinces to take charge are in the Shiite south and the Kurdish north.

“We have seen a dramatic increase in security there,” said Rear Adm. Patrick Driscoll, Multi-National Forces spokesman, speaking to reporters in Baghdad on Sunday.

“I think that the trend now in Anbar is to move from the violent kinetic to the rebuilding process,” he said.

Anbar province — west of Baghdad — is a vast territory where Iraq shares borders with Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

Much of the region is desert, and most of the people there live in in the towns and cities — such as Falluja and Ramadi — along the Euphrates River.

Sunni Arabs, such as those in Anbar, became politically marginalized when the Shiites and Kurds took over the new Iraqi government from the toppled Hussein regime, which had been dominated by and was most amenable to Sunnis.

Many Sunni Arabs in Anbar became active in the insurgency, and foreign fighters made their way into Anbar via Syria.

As a result, the Euphrates River valley region was a hotbed of insurgent activity in the early years of the Iraq war.

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U.S. Marines launched several offensives against the militants, including a large-scale push in late 2004 in Falluja. Al Qaeda in Iraq and other militants eventually developed a strong foothold in many towns.

Major changes occurred in Anbar over the last two years, however, with the emergence of the awakening, the grass-roots tribal movement that opposes al Qaeda in Iraq.

That movement aided efforts by the U.S. military and Iraqi security forces to fight al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and violence there has dropped dramatically in the last two years.

While Sunni tribes in Iraq were natural allies for the insurgency when it started in 2003, many locals eventually became disenchanted with what it regarded as al Qaeda in Iraq’s brutality, corruption and hard-line enforcement of sharia law.

The tribal movement in Anbar has developed into a political force and has helped spawn another development: U.S.-backed Iraqi militias — such as Sons of Iraq and Awakening Councils — formed in the Sunni regions of Iraq over the last couple of years.

The Pentagon’s June report to Congress on developments in Iraq said that in Anbar, the “average number of security incidents remained at five incidents per day over a 90-day period, accounting for less than 4 percent of the attacks in all of Iraq.”

“This represents a 10-fold reduction compared to the summer of 2006 and is half of the rate of the last few months of 2007.”

AQI “continues efforts to regain footholds” in the valley, the report said.

But the Sons of Iraq and U.S. and Iraqi troops “continue to hinder AQI’s ability to obtain resources or operate effectively in population centers, forcing AQI to operate and conduct attacks from remote locations in the province.”

At present, the other provinces that have transitioned to Iraqi security control are Duhuk, Irbil and Sulaimaniya in the Kurdish region, and Karbala, Najaf, Muthanna, Thiqar, Basra, and Maysan in the Shiite south.

The other province to change over to Iraqi security control this year is Qadisiya in the south.

Newsday.com

A Commentary by Michael Barone