Abou al-Farouq, a Syrian who financed and coordinated groups working for Iraq’s most wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was captured Monday.

Acting on a tip from residents, members of the Interior Ministry’s Wolf Brigade captured al-Farouq with five other followers of al-Zarqawi near Bakr, about 100 miles west of Baghdad, the ministry officer said.

What’s most interesting to me is the absense of American troops in this capture. “Residents” gave al-Farouq up and Iraq’s Wolf Brigade brought al-Farouq and five followers to justice in a raid.

If that isn’t enough positive news, here’s more:

“That crisis is over,” U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad declared. “I think the country came to the brink of a civil war, but the Iraqis decided that they didn’t want to go down that path, and came together,” the ambassador told CNN. “Clearly the terrorists who plotted that attack wanted to provoke a civil war. It looked quite dangerous in the initial 48 hours, but I believe that the Iraqis decided to come together.”

This was the closest that Iraqis have come to letting a civil war get started and it didn’t happen. Let’s hope that Amb. Khalilzad is right in saying that Iraqis never want to go down that path and that they have come together after this. The positive thing that I took from this weekend were the goodwill gestures by the Sunni and Shi’ite clerics towards each others and their urging calm for their followers.

Without their calling for calm and without them condemning “the blowing up of the Shiite mausoleum of Samarra as much as the acts of sabotage against the houses of God”, this could’ve escalated into a much worse situtation.

I think that the initial response to the destruction of the Golden Mosque was purely visceral but the susequent responses were logical, intelligent responses. It would have been preferable to not have that initial response but at least we got the more rational response later.

Cross-post at LetFreedomRing