Sneeze Alert: Al Qaeda Fleeing Baghdad

If you read your Saturday’s Detroit News in a hurry, you may have missed this 72-word paragraph in the Nation/World Briefs:

Iraq premier: Al-Qaida is on the run

BAGHDAD -- Iraq's prime minister said Friday that U.S. and Iraqi troops have chased al-Qaida in Iraq out of Baghdad in the year since a security crackdown began, and he promised to pursue insurgents who have fled northward. Underscoring the rising violence in northern Iraq, a double suicide bombing targeted Shiite worshippers as they left weekly prayer services in the city of Tal Afar, killing at least four people and wounding 17, officials said.

I like the way this notice saves its “underscoring” not for the ongoing and unheralded success of coalition forces in Iraq, but for the “rising violence in northern Iraq"--which is only rising because a routed AQ has no place left to go.