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Petraeus Cites Improvements In Iraq's Security

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By STEPHEN FARRELL and SOLOMON MOORE, The New York Times

Published: December 30, 2007

BAGHDAD - The top U.S. military commander in Iraq said Saturday that violent attacks in the country had fallen by 60 percent since June, but cautioned that security gains are "tenuous" and "fragile," requiring political and economic progress to cement them.

Gen. David Petraeus said the "principal threat" to security remains al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, the homegrown insurgent group that U.S. intelligence officials say is foreign led.

Speaking to reporters in an end-of-the-year briefing at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Petraeus said coalition-force casualties were down "substantially" and civilian casualties had fallen "dramatically," particularly in the past three months.

"The level of attacks for about the last 11 weeks or so has been one not seen consistently since the late spring and summer of 2005," he said. "The number of high-profile attacks, that is car bombs, suicide car bombs and suicide vest attacks, is also down, also roughly 60 percent since its height in March."

The data were based on statistics tracked by the U.S. military.

However, he conceded that although attacks were down in the rest of the country, they had not fallen in the northern province of Nineveh, which includes Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city with a population of 1.7 million.

He said al-Qaida in Mesopotamia remains active in northern Iraq, where it has been pushed since major offensive operations began earlier this year in Baghdad and Anbar province, and that the rate of attacks in Nineveh "has just been variable and probably slightly up."

One reason, he said, was that the area remains "very important" to al-Qaida in Mesopotamia because it is crossed by the routes into Iraq from Syria and Turkey.

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