Maliki has now personally left Mosul and headed back to the Green Zone. Now, what has he wrought in Mosul? There's a lot of fuzzy math being reported about the numbers of prisoners and deaths attributed to Operation Lion's Roar. Here's a sampling of the amounts of prisoners taken...

Gulfnews reports: "Over 1,000 Al Qaida suspects held in offensive in Iraq"

Reuters reports:

"They have arrested upward of about 1,250 individuals, of which about 100 are critical targets," Major-General Mark Hertling told Reuters in a telephone interview from Mosul.

Al Jazeera reports:

About 1,100 people have been arrested during the first four days of an Iraqi military operation in the country's main northern city of Mosul, the defence ministry says.

Wow, that's quite a spread... 1,000 to 1,250, so what is it? Then, when they parse the numbers you see some wildly fluctuating numbers on whom falls in what category. That is, who are members of AQI, the intended target of the operation, and, who are criminal elements they picked up along the way...

As the Reuters article points out, 100 "critical" militants were captured and...

"In the last several weeks, we have either captured or killed several AQI (al Qaeda in Iraq) emirs (commanders), some suicide cell leaders, some military cell leaders," he said, adding that some were from other groups with loose links to al Qaeda.

"Some of them are very senior. I'm talking about military emirs, battalion level commanders in al Qaeda," he said.

Many of the others arrested in the raids were criminals, Hertling said, but the operation had also yielded some al Qaeda fighters the government had not previously known about. Two hundred on a list of al Qaeda targets were still at large.

Many others...? Wow, that's really definitive number of criminals...

Al Jazeera reports a more definitive number of, I presume, AQI members, don't quote me tho...

Major-General Mohammed al-Askari, the ministry spokesman, said on Saturday there had been no clashes or killings during the mission, which is ongoing. The military said al-Qaeda operatives who had regrouped in the region were the target of the arrests. Al-Askari said 530 of those being held, three of them senior al-Qaeda members, were wanted by the authorities. He said security forces had recovered 1,400kg of explosives, 45 missiles, 263 mortar bombs and 175 assorted weapons.

Now, let's do the math... 1,000 - 100 = 900 'others'(criminals?)

1,250 - 530 = 720 'others'... You see a pattern? Now, how's about this little underreported nugget...

Al-Maliki spokesmen say that over 1,000 suspected insurgents have been arrested in Mosul and that the campaign is now extending to the villages surrounding the city, Iraq's second largest. But Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Usama Nujayfi, an MP from Ninevah province where Mosul is located, is saying that "al-Qaeda" elements fled the city before al-Maliki had it attacked. He said that many of the 1,000 Mosulis now in custody are innocent. He also complained that some had been tortured for information and that there were human rights abuses involved in the current Mosul campaign.

What? They wouldn't arrest innocent individuals would they?

The US is holding about 500 juveniles, mostly in Iraq, and has placed them in adult prisons. US civil liberties groups are protesting.

Naw, I didn't think so...!