Iraq update October 12, 2007

You'll probably notice these updates are changing somewhat. It's not that I'm doing anything different, it's just that the news on Iraq is changing over from military operations to neighborhood reconciliations. You'll see more news on the various Awakenings than you will on operations, with the exception of Al Qaeda's suicide bombing campaign.

So, with that said, Al Qaeda earlier in the week went after the head of the Salahadin Awakening and the senior leaders of the Iraqi police in Salahadin province. The Awakening leader and the police targets were wounded, but survived. Today, AQ attacked a group of children with a box of toys with a bomb in it. It appears that Al Qaeda is still going the route of murder and intimidation, even though that has actually driven the population to rebel on them.

Ed Morrissey over at Captains Quarters reports on a couple more Awakenings. The first is Another Sunni Success Story

• Now that the Democrats have decided to give up on forcing a surrender in Iraq, more stories about progress in Iraq have started hitting the wires. The AP focuses on another Sunni tribal chief who has decided to throw in his lot with the Americans, and the area of Youssifiyah has put violence aside:

I think I disagree with Ed on the point that the Democrats have given up on forcing a surrender in Iraq. I'll cover that in a later post, possibly tonight.

The second is The Shi'ite Turn which is about locals turning on Mookies boys.

• One of the big success stories of the surge came from the disaffection between the Sunnis in western Iraq and the foreign terrorists of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Anbar Awakening started as a tribal alliance against AQI and blossomed into a widespread movement to bring the Sunnis stability and engagement with the rest of the nation. Now it looks like the Shi'ites have tired of their sectarian militia headed by the onetime kingmaker, Moqtada al-Sadr: