Back Towards The Locus

From New Scientist:

“US military officials may have taken credit where none is due for decreasing violence in Baghdad with their troop surge of February 2007, data from satellite imaging suggests.

By comparing the amount of light produced at night in different areas of the capital before, during and after the 30,000 extra troops had been deployed, researchers from UCLA were able to track the movements of the warring Sunni and Shiite factions.

…

“It seems that it was sectarian cleansing that has led to the decrease in violence as the Sunnis were ‘cleared out’,” study leader John Agnew, who researches ethnic conflict at the University of California, Los Angeles, told New Scientist.

“Unsurprisingly, many of the Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan are Sunnis from these neighbourhoods and when they left they turned off the lights.”"

I have little – well, no – expertise in the relatively exclusive field of satellite imagery, and therefore can’t comment too broadly on the validity of the findings. They do, however, corroborate this recent article from Patrick Cockburn*:

“This has happened because the war that was being waged against the American occupation by the Sunni community, the 20 per cent of Iraqis who were in control under Saddam Hussein, has largely ended. It did so because the Sunni were being defeated, not so much by the US army as by the Shia government and the Shia militias. Sunni insurgent leaders who were nationalists or Baathists realised that they had too many enemies. Not only was al-Qa’ida trying to take over from traditional tribal leaders, it was also killing Sunni who took minor jobs with the government. The Awakening, or al-Sahwa, movement of Sunni fighters was first formed in Anbar province at the end of 2006, but it was allied to the US, not the Iraqi government. This is why, despite pressure from General Petraeus, the government is so determined not to give the 99,000 al-Sahwa members significant jobs in the security forces when it takes control of – and supposedly begins to pay – these Sunni militiamen from 1 October.”

* Via Lenin’s twitter