Al-Qaeda Driven from Baghdad

In more stunning good news from Iraq, a United States commander has said that the al-Qaeda terrorist group known as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia has been routed out of the capital Baghdad. Major General Joseph Fil, commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, made the statements yesterday, declaring the city to be 87% cleared and the terrorist group's operations there to be all but eliminated.

Fil's comments come on the heels of a U.S. commander's prediction that troops in Anbar Province could soon begin reducing their presence in that formally troubled part of the country. The news about Baghdad is the second bit of surprisingly positive news on the results of the U.S. troop surge in the country in as many days and could have an impact on the war debate in Washington.

Despite his upbeat assessment, Fill conceded that there is much work yet to do in Baghdad. He said that the vast Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City has remained largely untouched, and that other areas of the city remain under the control of Shiite militia groups. Fil also said that while some displaced families are returning to their former homes, many remain too frightened to go back to their old neighborhoods because the areas may have been segregated along sectarian lines.

Fil said that the greatest threats to the city now come from Shiite militias, like radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, and from unemployment. He stressed that it will take time for the city to return to its former state, and implored political leaders to begin making the steps towards national reconciliation that will hasten that transformation. But that is not stopping the U.S. military from moving surge forces out of the city and pursuing al-Qaeda in the farmlands surrounding the capital. "Already we are at a point where we'll see that as the surge forces depart the city, we'll see a natural decline in numbers, and I'm very comfortable where that comes to," he said.

The troop surge began earlier this year with the twin goals of stabilizing Baghdad and driving insurgent groups from their strongholds in Anbar Province and the Baghdad environs. Now, U.S. commanders are comfortable that those goals have largely been met, or at least that the underlying conditions for change in those areas have been established. It is long past time for the Iraqi government to solidify those gains by fostering reconciliation among the people of these areas and giving wayward sects a stake in the national government's survival. The goals in Iraq are no longer military but political. The sooner the Iraqi government moves to meet those goals, the sooner U.S. troops can begin to come home.