LTG Odierno launched a major Corps-level offensive this week, Operation Phantom Phoenix. The aim is to drive al Qaeda from its remote sanctuaries and to prevent the organization from reconstituting. Roggio has been covering events as they happen over at the Long War Journal, and the story blew up in the media yesterday with reports that the Air Force dropped 40,000 pounds of ordnance on insurgents in the outskirts of Baghdad as part of the ongoing effort (see Noonan's excellent post on this below).

The Institute for the Study of War also has some good background on the operations that led up to Phantom Phoenix, including a recent piece on the reconnaissance operations in Muqdadiyah (in Diyala province) that led to the current offensive. It's worth going over to the site and just poking around though. There's a lot of material there you won't find anywhere else, including an interactive map that allows you to click on any province in Iraq, and even the individual neighborhoods in Baghdad, for analysis of the current military situation based on interviews with the commanders on the ground.