Summaries here and here and here.

One toe forward, ten steps back.

The overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim military force at the forefront of U.S. and Iraqi plans to secure one of the nation’s most fractious provinces is accused of arresting hundreds of Sunni men on little or no evidence, threatening to rape a suspect’s wife to coerce a confession, and intimidating its commander’s critics, according to interviews with Iraqi and U.S. officials.

Backed by U.S. troops, the Iraqi Army’s 5th Division on Saturday launched a new offensive to rout suspected al-Qaida-allied terrorists from Baquba, the capital of a province infested with Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, warring tribes and criminal gangs.

While a U.S. military statement said the weekend operation shows the “commitment of Iraqi army officers and soldiers to protect and secure the people,” local residents and Sunni leaders point to the Iraqi division’s track record as one of the chief problems plaguing the restive Diyala province north of Baghdad. Article

Two stories centering on Ramadi which give almost diametrically opposed perspectives.

#1:

With their heads wrapped in checkered Arab scarves and warm jackets pulled tight over their blue shirts — their sole vestige of an official uniform — Ramadi’s police look very much like the insurgents they are fighting.

In fact, many of them used to be insurgents.

“Some of my guys were bad people, but they’ve now chosen our side,” said Major Rafaa, the deputy police chief at a newly established station in the restive western Iraqi city.

“They sure know a lot about the insurgents, though.”

[snip]

“Some of them are former insurgents — they were shooting at us just three months ago,” admitted Lechner, who still wears the insignia patch of the 3rd Ranger Battalion he served with in the 1993 Mogadishu operation immortalized in the film “Blackhawk Down.”

“They may not like Americans, but they hate al-Qaeda,” he said. Article

#2:

About 2,200 Marines left their ships in the Persian Gulf two weeks ago for the dangerous city of Ramadi and other locales around Anbar province, where entrenched and well-financed insurgents use roadside bombs, rocket and mortar attacks, ambushes and snipers to kill American troops at rates approaching one per day.

Two battalions from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit have been assigned to this city of mansions with towering, gilded columns and crescent-shaped windows, the capital of a Sunni Arab province that stretches west from Baghdad to the Iraqi borders with
Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

[snip]

A city of 300,000, Ramadi is an insurgent stronghold that has featured some of the bloodiest combat of the war as Marines and soldiers fought their way from neighborhood to neighborhood. Some areas have been reduced to burned-out rubble, and it’s hard to find a high-rise here not pockmarked with bullet holes or scarred from the impact of a rocket or mortar.

“Things here are pretty tough, you’ve still got guys who are getting shot everyday,” said Lance Cpl. Brian Kleinkopf, a 19-year-old from Yreka, Calif.

The unit has spent its early days in Iraq conducting raids and house-by-house searches of insurgent strongholds around Ramadi. It was expecting to see heavy combat this weekend, teaming up with an Army Task Force to sweep an area in the southeastern part of the city rife with disaffected former officers in Saddam’s army who have taken up arms against the American troops. Article

Oy.

A pro-PKK website on Thursday claimed that five tons of C-4 explosives were stolen from the warehouses of Iraqi Defense Ministry. It was not certain by whom or when the plastic explosives in the warehouse were stolen. Article