Situation in Iraq

At least two Iraq police officers were killed and 13 men were wounded a suicide car bomber detonated outside the home of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, Iraqi Interior Ministry officials said.

The attack was staged around 8:20 a.m. (12:20 a.m. ET) on al-Zaytoun Street, bordering the heavily fortified International Zone, as police were gathering for a shift change.

The suicide attacker was in a white Toyota Corolla car, which has been blown up into many small pieces. According to the Interior Ministry, three vehicles and a number of concrete blast barriers were destroyed.

A U.S. soldier is dead and two others are wounded in a suicide car bombing in a mostly Sunni area of Iraq north of Baghdad. Iraqi police say seven inmates were killed when mortar shells crashed into a prison at an Interior Ministry complex in the capital city. The U.S. military says five prisoners were killed and 25 wounded.

More than a year after infantryman Alejandro Albarran lost part of his right leg to a blast in Iraq, he still hasn’t decided whether he’ll stay in the Army.

“Right now, I’m leaning against it,” Albarran said, looking ahead with distaste to a possible desk job.

But whatever he decides, Spc. Albarran, 20, won’t be leaving Army life behind now that his wife enlisted to take his place among the ranks.

“After everything he’s gone through — and he loves the Army — he kind of inspired me,” Janay Albarran said. “I made him a promise that I would finish what he started.”

So, while he underwent five-day-a-week rehab to recover his balance and strength on a prosthetic leg at an Army rehabilitation facility here, she learned to shoot a rifle and stand in formation in boot camp at Fort Jackson, S.C.

Mrs. Albarran became Pvt. Albarran on Friday. The couple’s 2-year-old daughter is staying with a grandmother in Arizona.

Across the Army, roughly 24,000 soldiers, roughly 9 percent of the force, are married to other soldiers. There are no statistics on how many join after a spouse or family member is badly wounded in combat, but Maj. Anne Edgecomb, an Army spokeswoman, said she’s heard of siblings joining after the injury or death of a soldier and at least one woman who joined after her husband was killed in combat.

“The courage of our soldiers and their families is remarkable,” she said.

Janay Albarran, 19, wasn’t always thrilled with the prospect of Army life. She met her husband at a high school football game in Yuma, Ariz., near where they grew up.

She learned later from an online profile he already had signed up for the Army.

“I was like, ‘Well, I met somebody and he’s about to leave.’ I was a little upset,” Janay Albarran said. “I knew he was joining the Army and we’re at war.”

The couple married in February 2006, and he deployed to Iraq six months later.

He was in a Humvee escorting a unit that was sent to the scene of a detonated bomb in November 2006 when a second blast hit. The vehicle reared up and slammed to the ground. Alejandro Albarran only remembers flashes: a medic over him, the helicopter.

A 5 a.m. phone call told Janay Albarran her husband was hurt and she should have a bag packed.

She met him at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington several days later, and they traveled to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where some of the most severely wounded are treated.

It quickly became clear that efforts to save Alejandro Albarran’s lower right leg were failing. When the pain became too great, he told his wife to let the doctors amputate.

At first, Janay Albarran had to help her husband dress and get out his wheelchair.

“She had to be my memory. My short term memory is bad,” said Alejandro Albarran, who also suffered a head injury in the blast.

But as he got more mobile, the teen wife who was afraid of guns decided to take her husband’s place in the ranks.

Janay Albarran will not, strictly speaking, be replacing her husband in the Army. He was an infantryman, a position not open to women. (But he notes with chagrin that she outscored him on her basic training rifle test.)

She expects to get a human resources assignment, one less likely to lead to deployment in Iraq.

“It’s just another job,” Alejandro Albarran said, taking a break between weight lifting sets at the large amputee rehab facility here.

But a safe assignment isn’t guaranteed.

Janay Albarran said she worries about possible deployment when she thinks about their daughter, Iliana.

“That’s the only thing that scares me. He’s already been hurt,” she said. “If I do get deployed, I’m going to miss him so much. But it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

Please go to the World Blog to read more from NBC correspondents in Iraq and around the world.

The new blog will feature the best NBC correspondents and producers from the Mideast region and elsewhere, offering unique insights and analysis on breaking news and trends from Beijing to Beirut and beyond.

As Richard Engel, NBC News Middle East Correspondent and a frequent contributor to Blogging Baghdad explains, "Expanding Blogging Baghdad makes total sense and is completely appropriate. Just as the war in Iraq is expanding beyond the borders, I think the way we cover the war in Iraq must think beyond the confines of the borders of this country."

So, please bookmark the new link and continue to read and respond through comments to the new blog. The link to Blogging Baghdad will remain active as an archive of the blogs from the last year, but all future posts from Baghdad will appear in the World Blog.

Thanks, Petra Cahill, World Blog editor.

The dangers are repeatedly mentioned. Iraqis working for Western organizations here face extreme risk of being abducted and murdered. They also cope with the daily unpredictability of getting to work in a city rife with suicide bombings, roadside bombs, mortar fire, militia-run checkpoints and reprisal killings.

As I've learned more about the ordeals of our local staff members, I've at least been reassured by the fact that the decent, Western pay most earn has allowed many of them to get their families to safer places outside of Baghdad. But like most everything else here, even that small consolation is elusive.

Issues haunt abroad
One colleague who moved his wife and children to Syria explained the separation from his family has created a scenario similar to a divorced father with visitation rights.

When he sees his children, he's so overcome with guilt after long absences he can't refuse most of their demands, be it for a pricey new pair of shoes or to stay up past their usual bedtime. The children have learned to play one parent off the other, and his wife has turned into the full time disciplinarian.

He also explained that despite being outside of Iraq, his son has experienced sectarian problems he thought would be left behind once out of the country.

Upon phoning a new Iraqi friend he made in his second grade class in Damascus, the boy heard the friend's father shout "Is that the Sunni boy? Hang up the phone!" His daughters make faces and pinch their noses when referring to "those stinking Shiites."

Parents won’t leave
Meanwhile my co-worker says he's dealing with aging parents who refuse to leave their home in Baghdad. There was an attempt to settle them in Syria, but his father insisted on returning to Baghdad after several weeks. "In spite of what's going on here, it's too hard for them to start over again."

His parents' house has been searched by American forces, the windows recently shattered after a nearby explosion of a roadside bomb, and his father, who used to pray at his local mosque almost daily is now restricted to remaining at home.

As my friend explained, even with the option of escaping, his father would rather risk an early death than lose his connection to his country.

VIDEO: U.S. and Iraqi soldiers respond to President Bush's call for a surge of more troops in Iraq. NBC News' Richard Engel reports from Iraq.

Surge...escalation...plus-up... Whatever you call the "new way forward," when it comes to increasing U.S. troop levels and adjusting their mission, the Bush administration's new plan for Iraq takes a number of pages from an already familiar playbook. Are you ready for this? Afghanistan.

That's right, we have come full circle. The template didn't even begin to work in "the other war" until well into 2006 -- because it was so overshadowed by events in Iraq. Now the same ideas will be tried in an attempt to salvage a situation, in Iraq, that many analysts already see as unwinnable.

Successes in the ‘forgotten war’
Since April last year, U.S. forces in Eastern Afghanistan have made -- for the first time (and this is according to the foot soldiers) -- a big turn in tamping down violence and winning local hearts and minds. After almost five years of war -- and a chaotic situation in the south -- what happened in the east?

First of all, U.S. forces (some 22,000) were able to focus entirely on a limited area of operation, namely, the border with Pakistan, as NATO forces assumed control of the southern provinces. This, in effect, provided a "surge" of U.S. troops in the east.

U.S. forces over the summer and fall, in joint operations with the emerging Afghan Army, launched a series of large sweeps through districts and provinces where the Taliban and al-Qaida had taken refuge. But, rather than pulling out from what had been cleared, U.S. forces STAYED and BUILT.

They set up Afghan military bases in these remote areas and created Provincial Reconstruction Teams that paved dirt roads and rehabilitated destroyed schools. Most importantly, U.S. company and battalion commanders handed out what they call CERP money – from the Commander's Emergency Response Program. That purse was made up of hundred of thousands of dollars that commanders on the ground could dip into and give -- no strings attached -- to local villagers and tribal leaders who wanted to build a bridge or start a small business.

‘Clear-Hold-Build’ strategy
Fast forward to the "new way forward" in Iraq. Bush is expected to announce Wednesday that he will send 20,000 more troops to Iraq – that’s very close to the number of U.S. forces now in Afghanistan. A series of joint U.S.-Iraqi military operations will attempt to clear insurgents and militiamen from a number of flashpoints in Baghdad, and then (and this is new) HOLD those areas with a long-term U.S. and Iraqi presence, perhaps up to a year.

And, as in Afghanistan, the "economic'" component in Iraq is emerging as critical. CERP money will be an important weapon in U.S. commanders' arsenal in Baghdad, as it has become in the towns and villages of eastern Afghanistan.

There is a point where the Iraqi template stops cloning the Afghan one: U.S. forces in Afghanistan do NOT have to deal with the horror of sectarian violence in their theater. The fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban is not complicated by dozens of Sunni or Shiite bodies being tortured, murdered and dumped in the streets on a daily basis.

But it is striking that the new Bush plan for Iraq does seem to apply -- not only the lessons of previous failed operations in Baghdad (like Operation Together Forward) -- but also the lessons of counter-insurgency successes in the so-called "forgotten war" in Afghanistan. There, as in Iraq, the local populace had to have something to LOSE by siding with the insurgents. There, as in Iraq, the "enemy" had to be cleared out -- and KEPT out -- before any nation-building could begin.

Will it work?
No one knows if this strategy will work -- or whether it's already too late for any U.S.-imposed plan to succeed in Iraq. What can be said is that U.S. soldiers in eastern Afghanistan have told us they've seen a "tipping point," over the past six months, and believe that -- finally -- they are winning, at least in their sector.

The new crop of U.S. generals will soon be in place in Iraq who, it is said, "get" the "clear-hold-build" strategy and the need to fight equally on the economic and political front lines. But...will it work?

Jim Maceda an NBC News correspondent based in London who just returned from extended assignments in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fatin Abid Muslim stirs a lump of lamb stewing on the stove. What does she want most for herself and her family? "Aman," is her one word response, meaning "security."

It's a word you hear a lot here now. She says she can deal with the hardship, the lack of water, electricity, and the rising prices -- but she's constantly fearful about her husband and five sons.

Her husband is a driver for a Baghdad hotel, a job that puts him constantly in harm's way. Streets are often blocked by militia checkpoints, car bombs targeting police and military vehicles.

VIDEO: Will a troop surge solve the Iraq crisis? NBC's Ned Colt reports.

It's not much better for her four children who still attend school. She says she shudders every time she hears the pop of gunfire or the rumble of a bomb -- daily occurrences here.

Shalaan Abdul Zahra, her husband, dismisses more American troops as the answer. "There are already more than 130,000 American soldiers here. And bringing in more tells the terrorists you're weak."

He suggests ramping up the training of Iraqi forces, so they can assume all security needs -- and "kick out the foreign fighters." What if more Americans come? "It will cost them more in lives and money," he said.

That’s just one opinion from the Iraqi Shiite street. Security may be the goal, but the means of achieving it remain agonizingly elusive.