Civilian deaths and car bombs have fallen sharply in Baghdad since a US-backed crackdown began a month ago, but attacks outside the capital were rising as militants change tactics, Iraqi officials said Wednesday.

In an upbeat assessment of the first 30 days of the security plan, Iraqi military spokesman Brigadier Qassim Moussawi said the number of Iraqis killed by violence in Baghdad since February 14 was 265, down from 1,440 killed in the previous month.

The number of car bombings, a favorite weapon used by suspected Sunni Arab militants fighting the Shi'ite-led government, was down to 36 from 56, Moussawi told reporters.
 
But as thousands of US and Iraqi troops flow into the capital, attacks in the area surrounding Baghdad have increased, he said, without providing specific figures.

US commanders had predicted the plan, regarded as the last chance to avert an all-out civil war, would bring a temporary dip in violence in Baghdad. They also had anticipated that insurgents would be driven out into areas such as Anbar and northeastern Diyala province.

There are about 100,000 Iraqi and US forces deployed in Baghdad under a plan to sweep neighborhoods and rid streets of Sunni Arab militants and Shi'ite militias.

US President George W. Bush is sending an additional 26,000 US troops, mostly to boost the Baghdad plan.

The US military says the Mehdi Army Shi'ite militia is the greatest threat to security in Iraq and has conducted sweeps in the Shi'ite militia stronghold of Sadr City.

So far Shi'ite militias have been lying low and many of their leading figures are believed to have fled the capital, a development that has coincided with a decline in execution-style killings.

But violence has been on the rise elsewhere, including in western Anbar province, a Sunni militant stronghold where Al-Qaida and local tribes are engaged in a power struggle, and in Diyala, a religiously mixed area northeast of the capital.

The US military has sent a battalion of 700 troops with Stryker armored vehicles to Diyala, which has witnessed some of the worst violence between majority Shi'ites and Sunnis.

A bomb exploded Wednesday in a market south of the northern city of Kirkuk, killing two people and wounding 10, police said.

The commander of the Baghdad security plan, Lieutenant General Abboud Qanbar, warned militants Wednesday they had a choice between abandoning their fight or being crushed.
 
Those "terrorists" who do not want the Baghdad security plan to succeed should think again before it is too late, he said.

"Otherwise the feet of Mesopotamia's honorable soldiers will crush them and throw them into the garbage of history," Qanbar said.

(China Daily via agencies March 15, 2007)