Pat Dollard | Young Americans

And this from the Daily Times

Word is spreading of Victory throughout the MSM….

This is a MAJOR victory for Iraq.

* Crocker says elections delay likely in Iraq g 12, 500 women killed over ‘honour’ or committed suicide during 1991-2007 in Kurdistan
* 400 detained in Shia areas of Baghdad

BAGHDAD: A 10-day drive by Iraqi troops has dismantled Al Qaeda’s network in Iraq’s northern city of Mosul regarded by the United States as the militants’ last stronghold, the Interior Ministry said on Saturday.

“Operation Mother of Two Springs has enabled us to dismantle and weaken the Al Qaeda network in Nineveh province,” spokesman Abdel Karim Khalaf told AFP.

A total of 1,480 people have been detained since the operation began on May 14, Khalaf added. US Ambassador Ryan Crocker said Iraqi troops had displayed leadership in the Mosul operation and the Al Qaeda network was close to being completely defeated.

“I am not saying Al Qaeda is defeated but they have never been so close to being defeated,” Crocker said. “Iraqi forces are leading in Basra, Mosul and Sadr City.”

Elections: Crocker said he believed provincial elections, expected in October, might take place later because a lot of preparations remained incomplete. “It’s more important to get this right than get it quick,” he said.

He said a proposed Oct 1 election date was “aspirational” and a draft election law now being debated in parliament called on the government to set the election date 60 days in advance. The head of Iraq’s elections commission told Reuters on Friday no decision has been taken to delay it but said legislators must pass the elections law by July 1 if the vote was to take place on Oct. 1.

Violence against women: Meanwhile, medics in Iraqi Kurdistan said on Saturday that they had seen a surge in violence against women in May, with both so-called “honour” killings and female suicide on the increase.

“At least 14 women died in the first 10 days of May alone,” a doctor told AFP in the region’s second largest city of Sulaimaniyah.

Aso Kamal, a 42-year-old British Kurdish Iraqi campaigner, says that from 1991 to 2007, 12,500 women were murdered for reasons of “honour” or committed suicide in the three Kurdish provinces of Iraq.

400 detained: Iraqi police and US troops detained 400 people during search operations in two Shia neighbourhoods of southwest Baghdad over the weekend and also seized weapons, the US military said on Saturday.

A spokesman for the Shia Mehdi Army militant movement of rebel cleric Moqtada Al Sadr put the number of people held at more than 400. “The Iraqi and US forces raided a mosque in Al-Amal as well as a neighbouring market and rounded up dozens of people, some of them elderly men or teenagers,” Al-Amal resident Hazem Mohammed, 27, told AFP.

Sadrists: Supporters of Al Sadr warned the Iraqi government on Saturday that it was jeopardising a fragile truce, accusing security forces of attacking worshippers loyal to him in Baghdad and Basra.

“We consider this a new page in the targeting of Sadrists by the Iraqi government and the US forces,” Salah al-Ubaidi, spokesman for Al Sadr, said in the holy Shia city of Najaf.

Sadrists said the government was violating recently agreed peace deals to end weeks of fighting between Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia and US and Iraqi forces, in which hundreds have died. The truces negotiated in Basra and Baghdad have largely held and are partly credited by US forces for near record-low levels of violence countrywide in the past two weeks.

10,000 Iraqi troops backed by tanks to entered Sadr City, Al Sadr’s main stronghold in Baghdad, unopposed this week, to stamp the government’s authority over an area largely outside its control since coming to power in 2006.

Sadrists held a news conference on Saturday to protest against the security force action and also met Defence Minister Abdel Qader Jassim in Baghdad.

“We have seen a serious breach we didn’t witness even under the Baathist dictator,” Sadrist lawmaker Hassan al-Rubaie told the news conference, referring to Saddam Hussein, whose Sunni Arab-dominated government suppressed Shi’ites for decades.

An Interior Ministry official defended Friday’s raid in Baghdad, saying it had targeted Mehdi Army militiamen and that machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades had been seized. afp/ reuters