Baghdad’s Rashid district has long been one of the city’s most violent quarters (see Jeff Emanuel’s report for THE DAILY STANDARD in May of this year for more background), but from my conversation this morning with Col. Ricky Gibbs, Commander, 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, it’s clear that the Army has made tremendous progress in this particular area of operations. The last time we spoke with Gibbs, it was about Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who was under Gibbs’s command at Forward Operating Base Falcon. But Beauchamp didn’t come up in today’s conversation, and in contrast to the picture Beauchamp painted of Falcon, Gibbs told of a dramatic improvement in security in the area, and high morale amongst his troops. Gibbs said “things have been going, and continue to be going, very very well.” His command had only seen one casualty in the last three months. They’d gone two and half months without out a single casualty he said, but just in the last two weeks he’d had one soldier killed in action and another suffer wounds from and IED blast. He described the incident as an “unfortunate, but lucky, stray round that killed one of our soldiers.” The decline in violence was attributed to a number of factors, but primarily the fact that, as Gibbs said, “we have defeated al Qaeda in Rashid, and what little that are here, are low level soldiers that are without leadership or supply.” He said they’d “taken out all of those leaders,” and that he’s “not worried about al Qaeda anymore.” On the other hand, Gibbs did say that Shia extremists groups were a serious concern. But he qualified that statement by saying even there the violence has been kept to a minimum:
The people are tired of the violence, and whenever it comes up, they very quickly, within 24-48 hours, tell us who did it, where they’re at, and we go in and get them.
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