General Petraeus told The Australian during a face-to-face interview at his Baghdad headquarters there had been a 75 per cent reduction in religious and ethnic killings since last year, a doubling in the seizure of insurgents’ weapons caches between January and August, a rise in the number of al-Qa’ida “kills and captures” and a fall in the number of coalition deaths from roadside bombings. “We say we have achieved progress, and we are obviously going to do everything we can to build on that progress and we believe al-Qa’ida is off balance at the very least,” he said…. He acknowledged there was still too much violence and that al-Qa’ida and militias with the “malign involvement” of Iran were still serious threats. But the surge strategy had turned the US forces into pursuers instead of defenders. “And that is a much better place to be than to be doing a deliberate attack into their defences, like we had to do in Ramadi,” he said. “Ramadi was like Stalingrad.” According to General Petraeus’s figures, which will be put to Congress, the number of ethnic- and religious-related deaths would be down to a quarter of what they were last December by the end of August. He said “ethno-sectarian deaths” were the most important measure of progress. “If you look at Baghdad, which is hugely important because it is the centre of everything in Iraq, you can see the density plot on ethno-sectarian deaths,” he said. “It’s a bit macabre but some areas were literally on fire with hundreds of bodies every week and a total of 2100 in the month of December ’06, Iraq-wide. “It is still much too high but we think in August in Baghdad it will be as little as one quarter of what it was.”