BAGHDAD, 13 July 2005 — Iraqi troops are ready to take control of selected cities in provinces unaffected by the insurgency as a first step toward sending American and other foreign soldiers home, Iraq’s Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari said yesterday. But he rejected any timetable for a pullout until Iraqi forces are ready. As a sign of the ongoing security crisis, gunmen stormed a house in western Baghdad yesterday and killed four Iraqi human rights activists, and a car bomb killed at least three people and wounded 15 in ethnically tense Kirkuk.
An American soldier died of injuries suffered in a land mine explosion south of the capital, the US military said — one of a series of scattered clashes across insurgency hotbeds. Speaking to reporters alongside US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, Prime Minister Jaafari warned against setting a timetable for foreign troops to leave “at a time when we are not ready” to confront the insurgents.
But he said security in many of Iraq’s 18 provinces — notably in the Shiite south and the Kurdish-controlled north — has improved so that Iraqi forces could assume the burden of maintaining order in cities there.
“We can begin with the process of withdrawing multinational forces from these cities to outside the city as a first step that encourages setting a timetable for the withdrawal process,” Jaafari said. “We don’t want to be surprised by a decision to withdraw at a time when we are not ready.”
Jaafari’s comments were aimed in part at defusing growing calls by Sunnis and others for the Americans to set a date for them to leave Iraq. Jaafari, a Shiite, told Parliament yesterday that he wants any withdrawal plan to be “an Iraqi decision with an Iraqi timetable — not with a terror timetable.”
He did not specify which cities could be turned over to the Iraqis. The insurgency is focused in Baghdad and the Sunni heartland of central and northern Iraq. Wide areas of the Shiite south and Kurdish north are relatively peaceful.
Most of the 135,000 American troops are based in insurgent-infested areas deemed too dangerous to hand over to the Iraqis soon. Zoellick said Washington was committed to supporting the new Iraqi leadership and that US troop strength “will be based on the conditions by which the Iraqi forces are able to meet the effort to deal with the counterinsurgency.”
However, the Defense Department wants to pull some of its troops out of Iraq next year, partly because the commitment is stretching the Army and Marine Corps perilously thin as casualties mount. US commanders believe the presence of a large US force is generating tacit support for anti-American violence.
Last weekend, The Mail on Sunday newspaper of London published a leaked British government memorandum showing that Britain is considering scaling back its troop presence from 8,500 to 3,000 by the middle of next year.
The memo, marked “Secret — UK Eyes Only,” and signed by Britain’s Defense Secretary John Reid, also spoke of a “strong US military desire for significant force reductions” after a new Iraqi government is elected in December.
