Mehdi? That's Soooo April...

More evidence that the campaign on the ground against the "Mehdi Army" - the catastrophe of the month for April, until "Abusegate" was ready for prime time - is winding down.

Something that seems to have slipped by Reuters, AP, et al. these past few weeks is that the U.S. Army has been steadily whittling away at Sadr's troops, to the point that today, an American military spokesman is estimating that Sadr is down below a thousand hard-core supporters in his home town.

The US military estimates less than 1,000 members of the Mehdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr are fighting from their Baghdad stronghold, using women and children as human shields.

"I don't think it's a thousand, it's probably not a hundred," Brigadier General Jeffrey Hammond, a deputy commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, told AFP about the size of the rebel cleric's army in the slum of Sadr City.

Hey, didn't the Mahdi Army have over 5,000 members just a month ago?...The Americans are winning without forcing the giant conflagration that almost everyone had predicted.

This same dynamic also explains why a Marine patrol was able to wander through the streets of Fallujah relatively unmolested today. . To quote the sage, "Heh".

Posted by Mitch at May 11, 2004 05:00 AM