The clearing of al-Qaeda and the Islamo Fascists from Baquoba is nearly complete, which is much quicker than I think anyone expected:

U.S. forces believe the initial combat phase of a major offensive to clear al Qaeda from the Iraqi city of Baquba is nearly complete and any militants left could be confronted in the next 24 hours.

The operation in and around Baquba, capital of volatile Diyala province, is a major part of one of the biggest combined offensives by U.S. and Iraqi forces against the Sunni Islamist group in Iraq since the invasion of the country in 2003.

“We will either make enemy contact quickly, or we won’t,” Colonel Steve Townsend, commander of the 3rd Stryker Brigade, told Reuters and another news agency late on Saturday.
“My company commanders’ gut feel is that there won’t be a big fight here,” he said after a briefing late on Saturday with combat captains in the bombed-out remains of a building, once used by al Qaeda as a clinic, on Baquba’s outskirts.

Townsend said latest intelligence indicated some fighters were still inside an American cordon, which has been steadily tightened since the operation was launched on Tuesday, cutting off options for the militants to escape.

“They don’t have any choice but to fight … or put down their weapons and melt into the population,” Townsend said.

“The fight so far has gone a little easier than I expected. That does not mean there isn’t any fight left in them.”

It is possible al-Qaeda has melted back into the population or more were able to skulk out of the battle (maybe dressed as woman, as one or two have been know to do). But it is now clear al-Qaeda has lost its second declared capitol city of its modern caliphate. While the SurrenderMedia will ignore the importance of this, the PR damage to al-Qaeda in the Muslim world is clear. Two bravely proclaimed centers of the modern uprising of Islam’s take over of the world now lost to forces of the democratic Iraq government. How many people will be willing to die for a lost cause?

The truth is the tides turned on al-Qaeda because the Muslim street turned on al-Qaeda:

Two months ago, a dozen Sunni insurgents — haggard, hungry and in handcuffs — stepped tentatively into a U.S.-Iraqi combat outpost near Baqouba and asked to speak to the commander: “We’re out of ammunition, but we want to help you fight al-Qaida.”

Now hundreds of fighters from the 1920s Revolution Brigades, a Sunni insurgent group, work as scouts and gather intelligence for the 10,000-strong American force in the fifth day of its mission to remove al-Qaida gunmen and bomb makers from the Diyala provincial capital.

…

Each U.S. Army company in Baqouba, an hour’s drive northeast of Baghdad, has a scout from the Brigades, others have become a ragtag intelligence network and still others fight, said Capt. Ricardo Ortega, a 34-year-old Puerto Rico native of the 2nd Infantry Division.

The Army has given some of the one-time insurgents special clothing, a football-style jersey with a number on the chest, to mark them as American allies.

American commanders say help from the Brigades operatives was key to planning and executing a Baqouba operation, one of a quartet of U.S. offensives against al-Qaida on the flanks of the Iraqi capital.

The informants have given the American troops exact coordinates of suspected al-Qaida safe houses, with details down to the color of the gate out front, said Lt. Col. Avanulas Smiley, 40, commander of the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment and a Takoma, Washington native.

Most of the Brigades members, whom U.S. officials call “concerned local nationals,” hail from eastern Baqouba, while the bulk of the fighting has so far raged in western Baqouba.

But with contacts among fellow Sunni fighters on the city’s west side, they have fed American soldiers critical information about al-Qaida positions.

This is why the operation in Baquoba is going so quickly. The foreign fighters, with their bottomless brutalities, have become the enemy and the Iraqis are working to purge them. And that brutality was al-Qaeda’s undoing:

In the Anbar region, al-Qaeda’s former stronghold and the place where the “Islamic State of Iraq” was founded under the leadership of this organization, gunmen started to apply the Islamic Law as they understood it. The number of foreigners increased and so did the competition for booties. Clashes between those people and other organizations were inevitable. As for the Islamic Army, it is upheld by clans whose leaders, opposed to the “UN State”, were killed and whose children’s influence diminished, especially when al-Qaeda demonstrated that it is not fighting the Americans, but targeting Iraqis belonging to other sects, and that it allows the killing of anyone opposed to its orientations, even if he is against the occupation.

Amid this chaos, the US army found its goal. It established contact with the fallen victim clans of al-Qaeda, held meetings with the Islamic Army, and ordered the Maliki government to arm them. It was the Anbar Salvation Council that took the responsibility of cleansing the Anbar region of al-Qaeda. It started to repeat this experience in the remaining regions, especially in Diyala, where it has been engaged in ferocious battles for days. Battles will soon move to Kirkuk, where one of the clans demanded to “join the awakening and strengthen the spirit of cooperation with security services in order to eliminate takfiris’ hotbeds in the region”. The call was on “all the clan’s divisions.”

It seems the Sunnis needed to take a trip into the darkness to see the light. They allied with al-Qaeda, based on their promise of a new Islamic age, and found themselves the victims of the Islamo Fascists. The realization of the Sunni’s mistaken reliance on al-Qaeda is interesting to see in how the Iraqi forces are greeted as they stand side-by-side with the Americans in removing the darkness from central Iraq:

Lt. Qusai had his doubts when he took his men into an insurgent haven in the western part of this city for the first time this week.

“Honestly, I thought this operation would never be successful because I had information that Al Qaeda had big guns and RPGs,” said the Iraqi army commander who provided only one name. “We thought that all the people here are terrorists and everyone is bad, even the women and children.”

To his surprise, many of the Sunni Arab locals welcomed the Iraqis who trailed behind U.S. infantrymen through their dusty, bomb-scarred streets, which shimmered in the blazing heat. One man offered them a tray full of glasses of water, and a woman wept at the sight of them.

“It was worst part of the city,” said the stocky, no-nonsense officer in camouflage and leather gloves. “But I found … that not all the people here are bad.”

The only thing missing in all this is the TV media beaming these stories into our living rooms every night as we see the true situation in Iraq. Al-Qaeda’s influence in Iraq has collapsed. It will not go to zero. Neither wiill the violence. But it is rapdily being deflated to a level normal for that region of the world. I refer back to the previous link for a vision of what is to come:

The US awakening in Iraq came late. However, it will create an entity or “province” for clans in the center. This region alone is the only remaining obstacle on the road toward a sectarian federation.

If this is true then the Surge will have done what it was designed to do. The Surge wass directed at the areas on people causing 80% of the problems in Iraq. And this time the threats were going to be removed for good, not simply chased away to take up operations someplace new. We will now see if there is any upswelling of extremism to try and pick up where al-Qaeda failed. But my feelng is the Iraqis have had enough of this nonsense and are ready to take over for themselves.