Analysis: Iraq Insurgency Fights On

A funeral procession is held in the Shiite slum of Sadr City for two men, Ahmed Abdullah and Jassim Mohammed, who were killed Friday while marching to the Buratha mosque on the other side of the city to protest a suicide attack a week ago on the revered Shiite shrine there, in Baghdad, Iraq Saturday, June 24, 2006. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim) (Karim Kadim - AP)

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The new Iraqi government and its American patrons should have been basking in the glow of a two-week blitz of good news.

Violence had eased significantly in the Iraqi capital from a security crackdown that blanketed the chaotic city with 75,000 U.S.-backed Iraqi soldiers.

President Bush paid a surprise visit to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in a show of support for an Iraqi government that emerged from an agonizing six-month birth.

Most dramatically, al-Qaida in Iraq lost its leader when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi _ the brutal terrorism boss _ was killed by a U.S. air strike.

But insurgents have counterattacked, scuffing the sheen of progress.

By week's end al-Maliki's government was forced to declare a state of emergency and shoo its citizens off Baghdad's streets with two hours notice after the tenacious insurgency took the offensive Friday along Haifa Street, just blocks from Iraq's seat of government.

Two days earlier, one of the defense lawyers for Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants was kidnapped from his home by men wearing Interior Ministry uniforms and flashing genuine-looking credentials. He was found slain in Sadr City, Baghdad's Shiite Slum _ the third defense attorney to be murdered since the trial started.

On Tuesday, the bodies of two captured American soldiers were recovered _ beheaded and surrounded by booby traps. And al-Zarqawi's successor, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, said he conducted the brutal slayings.

At least 14 other U.S. soldiers or Marines died in combat or insurgent bombings in a particularly bloody week for the military.

Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Rand Corp., said the good news side of the balance sheet, when seen as a whole, is a "significant step forward, at least in the immediate sense."

"But the facts on the ground have not really changed one iota. It was just one brick in the wall. It (the al-Zarqawi killing) was decisive, but the rest of the machine (al-Qaida in Iraq) remains intact," he said in telephone interview.

In recent months, the Bush administration increasingly has acknowledged that it will be years before Iraq is a truly stable and democratic nation. But that goal, at present, appears to be receding even as progress is made against the Sunni-dominated insurgency that has killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers and thousands of Iraqis.