Operation Together Forward
The plan was announced on 14 June 2006 by the then-recently installed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, and intended to increase security conditions in Baghdad through instituting major new measures.Soon after taking up his command, General Chiarelli began ordering operations in Iraq designed to increase security as the new Iraqi government was forming in the face of a civil war.In March 2006, Operation Scales of Justice took place in Baghdad which significantly increased the number of security forces in the city and captured some 800 suspected insurgents in its first two months, but it did not reduce the overall violence.It seemed to many intelligence analysts that that was AQI's intention, a document seized in a raid near Yusifiyah by Task Force Knight revealed the terrorists determination to make the attacks on Baghdad a central role in its plans to undermine the new Iraqi government.On the morning of 9 July, masked Mahdi Army militants gathered in groups in Baghdad's Hay al Jihad neighborhood and setup their own checkpoints asking drivers and passers by for identification.By the end of the day, 36 bodies were brought into local hospitals, though the death toll maybe higher than 50; Sunni bombers carried out a double car-bomb attack on a Shia mosque in northern Baghdad, killing 19 and wounding 59.[8] By late July, hundreds of thousands of Baghdadis had fled to Jordan or Syria; US senior officers, concluding that the operation had failed were putting into action plans to launch a new security drive for the capital using a higher proportion of US troops.This scenario has been used dozens of times in Iraq to inflict maximum casualties, yet Iraqis continue to look for work in this manner - despite the obvious risk - due to the poor economic situation in the country.U.S. forces continue to suffer high casualties.On 22 January 2007, a suicide car bomber crashed into a market in the central neighborhood of Bab al-Sharqi, killing 88 people.This attack highlighted the complete inability of the United States or the Iraqi government to stop large-scale bombings in Baghdad more than six months after Operation Together Forward was announced.