The Iraqi army will not be able to ensure the country’s security until 2020 and the US should keep troops in Iraq until then, Britain’s Daily Telegraph quoted Iraq’s most senior officer as saying.
Lieutenant General Babakir Zebari told a defense conference in Baghdad that the Iraqi army would be unable to cope without backing from US forces, the newspaper reported yesterday.
Under US President Barak Obama’s plans, US forces — now numbering 64,000 — are due to start withdrawing from Iraq at the end of this month, apart from 50,000 troops who will support and train Iraqi forces before leaving the country by the end of next year.
PHOTO: REUTERS/THE WHITE HOUSE
“At this point, the withdrawal is going well, because they are still here,” Zebari was quoted as saying. “But the problem will start after 2011 — the politicians must find other ways to fill the void after 2011.”
“If I were asked about the withdrawal, I would say to politicians: the US Army must stay until the Iraqi army is fully ready in 2020,” he said.
His remarks came after eight of his soldiers were killed in a brazen attack that exposed Iraq’s still massive security problem as it struggles to install a government five months after a general election.
Meanwhile, the US stuck to its drawdown schedule on Wednesday and suggested just “dozens” of US embassy troops might remain in Baghdad after next year.
“We’re on target by the end of the month to end our combat mission,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told a press briefing, as Obama huddled with his national security team on Iraq.
A White House advisor fanned the flames by suggesting the US military presence in Iraq after the main pullout next year could be limited to “dozens” or “hundreds” of troops under the embassy’s authority.
“We’ll be doing in Iraq what we do in many countries around the world with which we have a security relationship that involves selling American equipment or training their forces, that is establishing some connecting tissue,” said Anthony Blinken, national security advisor to US Vice President Joe Biden.
“This is something that’s common to many embassies around the world, under the authority of the chief of mission, the ambassador, and typically it involves some small numbers of military personnel,” he said. “But when I say small, I’m not talking thousands, I’m talking dozens or maybe hundreds, that’s typically how much we would see.”
Blinken downplayed the notion a US withdrawal would usher in a security void.
“There are many remaining issues that Iraqis need to resolve, but in terms of the danger that some people were concerned about, about a vacuum developing in Iraq in the absence of a government formation, we haven’t seen that,” he said.
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