Thirty days before the deadline to withdraw U.S. combat forces from Iraq’s urban areas, it is still unknown how many troops will remain in cities as commanders determine their new roles, a U.S. general said Sunday.
Recommended Stories
The U.S. military has repeatedly said it will abide by the requirements of an U.S.-Iraqi security agreement, but has released little publicly about how it will meet the June 30 deadline or what the new distribution of its forces in Iraq will look like.
“It remains to be seen what the numbers will be,” Army Brig. Gen. Keith Walker, commander of the Iraqi Assistance Group, told reporters during a briefing in Baghdad.
Under the security pact, American troops who train and advise Iraq’s security forces will stay in the cities. Walker said commanders were working to determine the number of additional forces, including some combat troops, that would be added to training teams working in Iraq’s urban areas.
Walker dismissed any suggestion the U.S. military was just renaming its combat units as trainers to get around the pact.
“It’s truly not a shell game,” he said.
The security agreement also calls for all U.S. troops to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. President Barack Obama has announced plans to withdraw American combat forces from Iraq by Aug. 31, 2010, leaving 30,000 to 50,000 U.S. troops in advising and training roles until the end of 2011.
U.S. troops have been training Iraqi forces since 2003, a slow process that has produced mixed results. But the training has taken on new urgency with a timetable for the U.S. withdrawal.
With the clock ticking, it also remains unclear how and when American troops will leave cities where insurgents continue to battle U.S. and Iraqi forces.
American combat troops remain “fully engaged” in Mosul, considered the last urban stronghold of al-Qaida in Iraq, Walker said. They also continue to battle insurgents in and around the city of Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad.
“All combat troops will be out of the cities unless there is a specific invitation from the government of Iraq,” he added. The Iraqi government has several times said the deadline was not extendable.
Violence has dropped off dramatically in Iraq since the troop surge of 2007, when the number of attacks in Iraq averaged 900 a week.
“For 22 of the last 26 weeks, we’ve seen less than 100 attacks per week,” Walker said.
But sporadic high-profile attacks with large casualty counts continue to raise concerns about whether Iraqi security forces will be able to adequately take over from the withdrawing U.S. forces.
In recent months, hundreds of Iraqi civilians have been killed in bombings, and U.S. and Iraqi forces remain a target of insurgents.
“You often hear that security remains fragile,” Walker said. “There remain extremist groups who are capable of conducting large, high-profile attacks. They can kill a large number of people.”
But he also said Iraq’s security did not rest solely on the abilities of Iraqi forces, saying much of the country’s stability depended on its ability to improve its economy as well as provide jobs and essential services, such as water and power.
Walker’s comments came the same day he announced the closing of the Iraqi Assistance Group — the American command that led the effort to develop Iraq’s security forces.
“Things have changed, and it no longer makes sense to have two organizations doing the same thing,” he said.
The work of the Iraqi Assistance Group will be taken over by the Multi-National Security Transition Command headed up by Lt. Gen. Frank Helmick.
Also Sunday, two American soldiers died from non-combat related injuries in separate incidents in Iraq, the U.S. military said.
The deaths raise to 24 the number of American troops killed in Iraq in May, making it the deadliest month since last September when 25 were killed.
At least 4,306 members of the U.S. military have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
