Col. Gibbs: Al Qaeda Defeated in Rashid

Baghdad's Rashid district has long been one of the city's most violent quarters (see Jeff Emanuel's report for THE DAILY STANDARD in May of this year for more background), but from my conversation this morning with Col. Ricky Gibbs, Commander, 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, it's clear that the Army has made tremendous progress in this particular area of operations.

The last time we spoke with Gibbs, it was about Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who was under Gibbs's command at Forward Operating Base Falcon. But Beauchamp didn't come up in today's conversation, and in contrast to the picture Beauchamp painted of Falcon, Gibbs told of a dramatic improvement in security in the area, and high morale amongst his troops.

Gibbs said "things have been going, and continue to be going, very very well." His command had only seen one casualty in the last three months. They'd gone two and half months without out a single casualty he said, but just in the last two weeks he'd had one soldier killed in action and another suffer wounds from and IED blast. He described the incident as an "unfortunate, but lucky, stray round that killed one of our soldiers."

The decline in violence was attributed to a number of factors, but primarily the fact that, as Gibbs said, "we have defeated al Qaeda in Rashid, and what little that are here, are low level soldiers that are without leadership or supply." He said they'd "taken out all of those leaders," and that he's "not worried about al Qaeda anymore." On the other hand, Gibbs did say that Shia extremists groups were a serious concern. But he qualified that statement by saying even there the violence has been kept to a minimum:

The people are tired of the violence, and whenever it comes up, they very quickly, within 24-48 hours, tell us who did it, where they're at, and we go in and get them.

These tips are a major contributor to the reduction in violence, he said, but he was quick to point out that just as important was the Coalition's targeting of senior insurgent leaders.

Other "really good news for us," Gibbs said, was that the people of Rashid have "embraced reconciliation." I asked him how he would respond to the charge that any reduction in violence might be attributed to massive ethnic cleansing, which has segregated Baghdad's neighborhoods. His response:

I dispute that claim that ethnic cleansing is already done. We have lots of mixed areas, we do have some Sunni only areas--and when I say Sunni only I mean 80 percent Sunni, the rest is Shia and others--but we're not seeing any violence in those mixed neighborhoods. And that's attributable to the reconciliation efforts we have ongoing here.

Another theory I bounced off him, which was put forward in a recent issue of Newsweek, was that the Iraqis are merely getting better at hiding the bodies (Iraq's Marlo Stansfields as FP Passport put it). Gibbs's response:

We have pretty good techniques for finding bodies--and again, dead bodies equal violence, and the people are telling us about the violence when it happens, and we're getting in there very quickly to confirm or deny those reports.

Gibbs also described a "great decline in IED events," though they did have one soldiers seriously wounded last week. But when he first got to Iraq in Feb. 07 (for his third tour), he said his men were hitting two, three, and sometimes four or more IEDs a day. Now he says the frequency is about once every two weeks.

More after the jump...

Gibbs also said his men had received 42 MRAPs so far this year, and that the soldiers are very pleased with them. Only one has been hit with an IED, he said, on Thanksgiving Day, but the vehicle sustained only limited damage, and the soldier thanked him for the vehicle, though as he said, "I had nothing to with getting them, but I'm very happy to have them." We've been fairly critical of MRAP here--or at least the excessive politicization of the program. When asked whether MRAP presented any problems from a counterinsurgency perspective--whether the vehicles, owing to their size, might intimidate the local population. His response: