By David Morgan WASHINGTON, March 11 (Reuters) - Iraq has seen an uptick in violence since January, including high-profile suicide and car bomb attacks, partly as a result of recent U.S.-led offensives against Islamist militants, the Pentagon said on Tuesday. Despite the uptick, Iraq continues to see a sharp overall decline in violence as a result of several factors including last year's build-up of U.S. forces, the U.S. Defense Department said in its latest quarterly report on the war. Since June, when the last combat brigade in President George W. Bush's so-called surge strategy arrived in Iraq, deaths from sectarian violence have fallen 94 percent, the report said. Total civilian deaths were down 72 percent over the same period. "Key indicators are at levels last seen consistently in mid-2005, with indirect fire attacks at levels not seen since early 2004," the report said. But the Pentagon also reported a rise in security incidents since January in Nineveh and Diyala provinces and other areas where al Qaeda in Iraq militants have flocked since being driven from former strongholds by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen. The report described the increased violence as a "short term" result of military operations against insurgents that began in January. Defense officials could not say how closely the violence sparked by the offensives was related to a rise in high-profile bombings, calculated to inflict mass casualties. "In January 2008, high-profile attacks rose for the first time in five months as a result of a slight increase in person-borne IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and a slight increase in vehicle-borne IED's," the report said. FRAGILE CALM Charts of attack data in the report showed the increase in high-profile bombings extending into February with a small rise in civilian deaths for the same period. No figures accompanied the charts. Attacks with Iranian-made armor-piercing roadside bombs doubled in January, compared with December, according to defense officials. The report said the rate of attacks with the explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, also remained above December levels in February. The release of the new report, which covers December through February, coincided with a surge of violence that killed 46 people across Iraq on Tuesday. The violence underscores the fragile nature of the relative calm that has taken hold across Iraq, as the Bush administration moves to withdraw its extra combat forces by mid-summer. There are now 162,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, but the number is expected to fall to about 140,000 by the end of July. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is widely expected to recommend a pause in the troop drawdowns when he testifies to Congress next month. U.S. officials say attacks have dropped more than 60 percent because of the U.S. force surge, the emergence of Sunnis allied with the United States against al Qaeda, improvements in the Iraqi army and a cease-fire declaration by radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. But on Tuesday, members of Sadr's militia fought U.S. special forces and Iraqi security forces backed by U.S. warplanes in clashes in which 14 people died. (Editing by Andrew Gray)
Protesters burn Danish and Dutch flags during a demonstration in Herat province March 8, 2008. About 15,000 people protested in Afghanistan on Saturday to condemn the reprinting of a cartoon of ...
