America's troop buildup in Iraq has sharply reduced sectarian killings and roadside bombings and lowered al-Qaida's influence, the top U.S. general in the country said in an interview published Friday.
"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-Qaida is off balance at the very least," The Australian newspaper quoted Gen. David Petraeus as saying.
Petraeus said there had been a 75 percent drop in ethnic and religious killings since last year, a doubling in the number of seizures of insurgent weapons caches between January and August, a drop in the number of coalition deaths from roadside bombs, and an increase in the killing and capture of al-Qaida fighters, the newspaper said.
The rise in al-Qaida "kills and captures" had caused the group to lose influence with Sunni Muslims, he said.
Petraeus said the buildup, in which an additional 20,000 troops were deployed in Iraq, would continue for several more months and the troop level would then be phased down. He said the U.S.-led coalition would try to hold onto all the gains that had been made.
Petraeus is to testify on the troop buildup to Congress during the week of Sept. 10, and President Bush is to deliver his own progress report by Sept. 15. The reports are seen as key elements in the debate in Washington over how the war should be fought — and whether U.S. troops should be brought home.
A draft report by the independent Government Accountability Office, circulated this past week, concluded that Iraq has made little political progress in recent months despite the influx of U.S. troops.
A separate independent commission established by Congress to study Iraq's security forces is expected to recommend scrapping the 25,000-member national police force and starting over because it is so corrupt and influenced by sectarianism.
The Australian said it interviewed Petraeus at his headquarters in Baghdad after he briefed visiting Australian Defense Minister Brendan Nelson on the situation in Iraq. Australia participated in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and still has about 1,600 troops in and around the country, 550 of them in combat roles.
Petraeus said the buildup strategy had turned U.S. forces into pursuers instead of defenders, "and that is a much better place to be."
He said religious and ethnic killings, or "ethno-sectarian deaths," were the most important measure of progress and that the number of people killed on religious and ethnic grounds in the capital was going down.
"If you look at Baghdad, which is hugely important because it is the center of everything in Iraq, you can see the density plot on ethno-sectarian deaths," the newspaper quoted him as saying.
"It's a bit macabre but some areas were literally on fire with hundreds of bodies every week and a total of 2,100 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," it quoted Petraeus as saying.