Militants Said to Flee Before U.S. Offensive

Iraqi soldiers handed out food and water to residents of Baquba Friday in a humanitarian mission organized by the United States Army

In an otherwise upbeat assessment, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking American commander in Iraq, told reporters that leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had been alerted to the Baquba offensive by widespread public discussion of the American plan to clear the city before the attack began. He portrayed the Qaeda leaders’ escape as cowardice, saying that “when the fight comes, they leave,” abandoning “midlevel” Qaeda leaders and fighters to face the might of American troops — just, he said, as they did in Falluja.

Some American officers in Baquba have placed blame for the Qaeda leaders’ flight on public remarks about the offensive in the days before it began by top American commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the overall commander in Iraq. But General Odierno cast the issue in broader terms, saying Qaeda leaders were bound to know an attack was coming in light of President Bush’s decision to pour nearly 30,000 additional troops into the fight in a bid to secure Baghdad and areas around the capital that have been insurgent strongholds. That included Baquba, which lies 40 miles north.

“Frankly, I think they knew an operation was coming in Baquba,” General Odierno said in a teleconference briefing with Pentagon reporters from the American military headquarters in Baghdad. “They watched the news. They understood we had a surge. They understood Baquba was designated as a problem area. So they knew we were going to come sooner or later.”

Still, he implied American commanders may have played a part by flagging the offensive in advance. “I think they were tipped off by us talking about the surge, the fact that we have a problem in Diyala Province,” he said.

In his news conference, General Odierno offered the broadest assessment yet of the multipronged American offensive around Baghdad that got under way this week, using the additional troops sent to Iraq as part of Mr. Bush’s troop buildup. Despite the flight of the Qaeda leaders from Baquba — a pattern that appears to have been replicated in other areas included in the new offensive, including Qaeda strongholds along the Tigris River south of Baghdad — he adopted an upbeat tone, saying the offensive held “a good potential” for reducing the Qaeda threat to the point that American force levels in Iraq could be reduced by next spring.

First, he said, American and Iraqi troops would need to sustain their crackdown long enough for Iraqi forces to move into neighborhoods cleared of Qaeda fighters and hold them. This is a pattern American commanders have tried unsuccessfully before, as in a failed attempt to secure wide areas of Baghdad last summer. But General Odierno said Iraqi forces were “getting better,” “staying and fighting,” “taking casualties” and adding an additional 7,500 soldiers to their overall strength every five weeks.

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