BAGHDAD: US President Barack Obama will withdraw forces from Iraq sooner than the three-year deadline agreed by ex-president George W. Bush, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki said yesterday.
Under a pact agreed with the previous US administration, the US troops that invaded Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein have until the end of 2011 to leave.
But Obama pledged during his election campaign to pull out combat troops within 16 months. US defense officials say that 16-month timeline is one of the options on the drawing board.
The pace of withdrawals “will be accelerated and occur before the date set in the agreement,” Al-Maliki told a crowd of supporters in the southern Iraqi city of Babel during a campaign rally ahead of Jan. 31 provincial elections.
“As a result, we must boost the determination of our brothers in the ministries of defense and interior to complete the building up of our military and security forces to take on fully the task of providing and preserving growing security.”
The sectarian slaughter and insurgency unleashed by the US-led invasion and in which tens of thousands of Iraqis and more than 4,000 American soldiers died has begun to ease.
Suicide and car bomb attacks remain common, but growing security as Iraqi police and army units become increasingly proficient has allowed a semblance of normal life to return to many parts of the country.
The US ambassador to Iraq has warned that a precipitous departure by US troops would be dangerous, but he also said that was unlikely under Obama, who has spoken of handing Iraq back to its people “responsibly.”
What exactly that means is still being determined in Washington, US officials say. Iraq’s Defense Minister Abdel Qader Jassim said last week that the Iraqi military was “prepared for the worst” if Obama ordered a swift withdrawal.
In another development, Al-Maliki and the president of its autonomous Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, exchanged barbs on Sunday in the run-up to the elections.
The two have been at odds over Al-Maliki’s plans to amend the constitution to clear the way for a stronger central government in Baghdad at the expense of the powers of Barzani’s administration based in the northern city of Arbil.
In a speech to students in the Kurdish town of Dohuk, Barzani did not refer to the premier by name, but his allusion was fairly plain.
“We know that there is someone who wants to restore dictatorship in Iraq through control of the army and police,” the Kurdish leader said.
“If amendments to the constitution are aimed at improving things, then there’s no problem. But we will never accept them if the aim is to place restrictions on Kurdish interests.”
