Baquba

Almost half of the Jihadists got away:

Col. Steve Townsend told a group of journalists that his soldiers had wrested control over most of the area from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, deprived the insurgent group of its nominal capital and made headway in protecting the residents from reprisals by militants.

But he acknowledged that his forces had not killed or captured as many of the insurgents as he had hoped.

"We are on our way to securing the population of Baquba, which is what we came here to do," said the colonel, who commands the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the Second Infantry Division. "I am pretty satisfied, with the exception of my own goal to kill and capture as many as possible so we don't have to fight them somewhere else."

And so whack-a-mole continues.