General Touts ‘Great Success’

A recently concluded offensive in northwestern Iraq has denied insurgents a safe base and shows that Americans are winning the war against an important element of the insurgency, a U.S. general said Thursday.

Though Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch estimated that 1,500 suspected fighters had been killed or captured, insurgents in the capital offered a violent counterpoint. They killed 28 people in four car bombings and other attacks Thursday, bringing the 48-hour tally to 169 Iraqis killed in Baghdad, one of the bloodiest two-day periods since the war began in March 2003.

A roadside bomb also exploded near a Shiite mosque in the northern city of Mosul, killing a cleric and injuring three other people, a hospital official said. And there were reports of renewed fighting in the volatile western province of Al Anbar.

“We believe we are experiencing great success against the most crucial element of the insurgency, which is the terrorists and foreign fighters,” Lynch told reporters. “We’re not allowing them any safe haven.”

In a separate appearance, Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi vowed that “there will not be one meter in Iraq” where insurgents can set foot. “I believe what we are seeing is the last breath of terrorism,” he said.

Tall Afar, the city near the Syrian border that has recently been the epicenter of U.S.-Iraqi efforts against insurgents, appears to have paid a heavy price.

Thousands of residents who are to begin returning home from tent camps spread along the 60-mile road to Mosul will find swaths of Tall Afar in ruins. The U.S. and Iraqi governments have pledged $53 million to the city’s reconstruction.

“It’s exciting to me and it’s exciting to the people of Tall Afar that soon they will return to their homes,” Lynch said.

Though Iraqi security forces established checkpoints at the two main entrances to the city, officials acknowledged that the many dirt roads leading into it were open.

Residents said Wednesday that the joint military push had worsened sectarian tensions in Tall Afar, a city of 200,000 that is a mix of Shiite and Sunni members of Iraq’s Turkmen minority.

“Here in Tall Afar there used to be good relations between the Sunnis and Shiites,” said Waji Mohammed Ali, a 58-year-old Sunni who was among the few who stayed behind. “But we have reached our limits. Our children are going to be raised with hatred inside their hearts toward others.”

Salah Ahmad, a 25-year-old Sunni resident of the eastern Tall Afar neighborhood of Salam, said the operation had been inspired by sectarian prejudices. “Our brothers, the Shiites, have done this to us because of political gains and material benefits,” he said.

Lynch said Sunni as well as Shiite leaders in the city had petitioned the government for the offensive in order to ferret out insurgents.

Rising tensions between the country’s Shiite and Sunni Muslims have led to a spate of sectarian violence nationwide.

U.S. and Iraqi officials hope a referendum next month on Iraq’s draft constitution will draw Sunnis, who made up the bulk of former President Saddam Hussein’s government and security forces, into the political fold.

But Sunni parts of the country -- in the west and north as well as in Baghdad -- have erupted in violence and chaos.

On Thursday, three car bombings targeting Iraqi police struck Dora, a mostly Sunni neighborhood of Baghdad, two of them almost simultaneously. U.S. helicopters and Humvees rushed to the scene.

Fighting also broke out in the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadiya, where gunmen attacked police with automatic weapons, killing one officer and wounding two.

In Ramadi, one of several cities in Al Anbar province where fighting was reported, clerics used mosque loudspeakers to call for calm, seek donations of blood and demand that American troops retreat to the town’s outskirts, witnesses said.

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A special correspondent in Tall Afar and Mosul contributed to this report.